Unidentified Funny Objects 3

by Alex Shvartsman (Ed. )

  The magic of the sacrifice surged over us.

  Martha was right. This was a sacrifice whose costliness would pay for everything we needed. And yet faces were shocked. No one had wanted such a thing. To enslave a creature, perhaps, thinking that it was only for a few years. But to deprive another being of life is a great and painful injustice.

  Martha was looking at the lake god. “You are obliged to take this sacrifice.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes reluctant. His gaze met mine as I stepped up.

  Following his stare, Martha turned to face me. Her expression was confused at first. “He can’t harm me.”

  She fingered the amulet of protection at her throat. It was true. The god could not harm her.

  But she had forgotten that I was once a goddess of justice. And when someone tips themselves towards injustice, they become mine.

  “We will need a replacement for…” I hesitated. Old habits die hard. “Rumplestiltskin.”

  At my touch, she shrank back, at first looking as though she were falling into herself, then dwindling, dwindling further still, until a stooped creature, the size of the body at its feet, hunched there.

  ###

  Things have returned to normal at Villa Encantada. Mostly.

  They still want me to serve on the board. Martha does a good job, particularly with Glumpf to help her.

  We’re all still getting used to not speaking her name.

  ***

  Cat Rambo writes a lot of stories. Her “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain” was a 2012 Nebula Award finalist. She was the fiction editor of Fantasy Magazine as well as Lightspeed Magazine’s Women Destroying Fantasy issue. You can find links to her online fiction and more information about her at kittywumpus.net.

  Infinite Drive

  Jody Lynn Nye

  Detective Sergeant Dena Malone studied the panel in the plush elevator as it bore her and Detective Sergeant Mario Ramos toward the Castana Tower’s 300th floor penthouse.

  “Tell another joke, Ramos!” A voice came from the platinum circle around Dena’s wrist.

  Anyone unfamiliar with the design of the bracelet might have assumed it was a phone of some kind, connected with a human being somewhere on Earth or the Moon colony. Those who recognized it as a proprietary device of the Alien Relations Department might automatically assume that the bulge in the petite brunette’s abdomen was the pink, meter-long Salosian extraterrestrial symbiote whose voice emerged from the silvery bangle. They would both be wrong.

  The Salosian in question, Dr. K’t’ank, did occupy a portion of her peritoneum, but he was becoming dwarfed by the increasing size of Dena’s pregnancy. On the other hand, he was a lot more of a pain in the butt than her baby. At least the kid wasn’t having conversations with people from her midsection.

  “Okay,” Ramos said, always glad for a fresh audience. “What do you call the twin you have that only runs in the far end of the red shift?”

  “I am at a loss,” K’t’ank confessed, after a moment.

  “A dopplerganger.”

  Ramos always laughed heartily at his own jokes. K’t’ank joined in, as well as beating his tail against Dena’s internal organs.

  “That is funny! I will send that joke to my Salosian friends! They appreciate your wit, Ramos.”

  “Knock that off!” Dena snapped. “God, you two! I deserve hazard pay for having to listen to these awful jokes.” The doors before her let out a melodious BONG! and slid open. “Thank heavens. Come on.”

  A knot of men and women wearing bathing suits and short, silky robes sat uncomfortably on sun lounges against the wall of the penthouse garden. A young woman with a black pony tail and wearing tight white shorts and a midriff blouse straightened up from serving a drink from a tray to a lantern-jawed man with a sweep of silver hair. He rose as Dena and Ramos approached, his expression bland, then frowned at Dena, his glance traveling downward from her razor-cut hair to her burgeoning abdomen.

  “You are… the police? I don’t want to be offensive, but are you capable of handling this case?”

  “I don’t detect with my belly, sir,” Dena said. “Well, not much. Detective Sergeant Malone. This is Detective Ramos.” She swept her credentials from her pocket and held them up at eye level for the man to examine. The holographic image showed her at full length, then a portrait, then a profile, and cycled back again. Ramos followed suit. She shifted to ease her back, which ached a little almost all the time these days, between the combined weight of her baby and her often unwelcome guest.

  “I’m James Longmore,” the silver-haired man said. “This is my wife, Anita, and our friends, Margan and Obed Amini. We’re staying in the Castana Tower during the ANCHOR conference.”

  Dena nodded. ANCHOR was a think-tank populated by inventors, philosophers, journalists, and influential men and women, which was to say, rich people. The two couples present certainly fit into the last category.

  “We heard that a car crashed up here?” Ramos asked, putting his badge away.

  Longmore pointed to the polished black stone floor. On it, Dena could just see the dull trace of two wide streaks of black polymer. They ran all the way from the elevator to an area with a rougher texture, then vanished. Beyond it was a wide, glittering swath, so clear that the buildings outside were visible through it.

  “Who drives inside a hotel?” Ramos asked.

  “A puzzle! Accident followed by vanishment,” K’t’ank said, gleefully. Longmore and his guests seemed startled, then their eyes went to Dena’s wrist. They didn’t need further explanation.

  “May I inquire as to your name, sir or madam?” Longmore asked, politely.

  “Dr. K’t’ank of Salos am I,” the Salosian replied. “Malone is my residence.”

  “We are honored to meet you, sir.”

  Dena gave him mental points for knowing the gender details of Salosian nomenclature. Up until having one implanted in her belly, she hadn’t a clue herself.

  “I am also pleased,” K’t’ank said. “To meet further humans is part of my purpose on this world. I would like to ask…”

  “May we get back to the case?” Dena asked, interrupting him smoothly. “Where’s the car now?”

  “Still in there,” Mr. Longmore said, pointing to the smooth expanse of the pool behind him. “The elevator signal sounded, the door opened, and a black four-passenger ground vehicle raced past us and hurtled in with one godalmighty splash. A moment sooner, and he would have hit my wife. She had just climbed out of the water.” For evidence, he indicated the wet robe that the plump redhead had wrapped around her.

  “He?” Ramos asked. “You could see the driver?”

  “See him?” Longmore countered. “We knew him.”

  Dena raised her memo recorder. “His name? And your relationship with him?”

  “Noble Sesman,” Longmore said. “He was a… colleague.”

  “I know her,” K’t’ank exclaimed suddenly.

  “Him.” Dena corrected him automatically. Unlike her, K’t’ank had not absorbed any lessons on how to tell female humans from male. In his defense, all Salosians looked alike to her, skinny pink worms with huge dark eyes. He could probably argue the same about her species. “How did you know him?”

  “This Sesman was involved in bringing funding to my associates’ research,” K’t’ank said. “A large grant has been offered to us for our research into common elements of cognitive processes.”

  “So you are familiar with ANCHOR, sir?” Amini inquired, politely. Dena knew how disorienting it could be to speak to someone who was not visible but obviously cognizant of what was going on. K’t’ank was far from Big Brother, but he involved himself in Dena’s activities—personal or not—and had a loud and irrepressible opinion on all of them. “I thought I recognized your name.”

  “Indeed, I have familiarity. ANCHOR studies our studies. Though my judgment is that those who control the funding are not necessarily intelligent enough to comprehend why our work is vital…�
��

  “That’s not important right now,” Dena said, interrupting him. Longmore’s complexion had gone from pale with shock at the recent accident to scarlet with provocation. K’t’ank had some good insights into past cases she had worked on since he had been implanted in her abdomen, but he was amazingly high-handed for someone who had no hands. “Mr. Longmore, if you’ll just tell us what happened?”

  “That’s all we know. Ding, swoosh, splash! I am sure you will get more information from the hotel employees and the security department.”

  It was a clear dismissal. Dena and Ramos exchanged glances.

  “We will need details of any interaction you had with Mr. Sesman,” Ramos said, brandishing his skinnypad. Both he and Dena had already been recording the conversation for future analysis.

  Longmore tilted his head back, the better to look down his patrician nose at them. “Are we being accused of something, officer?”

  “Not at all,” Dena said, with a sly summing up of her host. “This is for your protection as well as our investigation. If one of your mutual acquaintances wanted to annoy, or worse yet, implicate you in anything, I know you would like to be informed of that connection. It could have been a prank that went disastrously wrong. It may have been something more dire. What if the vehicle was aimed at you, but missed? Since we can’t speak to Mr. Sesman at the moment, we need to ask you. Did Sesman dislike you enough to pilot a vehicle at you?”

  A palpable hit, to judge by the dimming of Longmore’s complexion back to ashen pale.

  “I should hope not! He’s, I mean, he was capable of pranks, but not fatal ones. We’ll cooperate in any way we can, Sergeant. I am sorry if I implied anything to the contrary. We of ANCHOR are always eager to assist law enforcement.”

  Ding!

  The elevator doors slid open again. Dena jumped aside, in case any more vehicles came roaring through to take a fatal dip. Instead, the elevator disgorged a trio of individuals. One man, lanky and wiry, in a deliberately nondescript dark brown bodysuit, bore all the earmarks of a head of security. The second was a broad-hipped woman with dark green hair, wearing an elaborate earpiece that complemented her expensive cream-colored suit. Publicity director was Dena’s guess. The last was a fussy-looking, pot-bellied man in a smartly-cut suit accessorized with a look of perpetual grievance.

  “Officer… ?”

  “Detective Sergeant,” Dena corrected him. “Malone. This is Detective Sergeant Ramos. And you are… ?”

  “Morgan Thompason. I am the president of this hotel and general manager. Ms. Coller is my head of public relations. Dr. Dorian Tamm is our chief security officer.”

  “Doctor?” Dena asked. “What’s a physician doing running security?”

  Tamm held up his hands. “PhD, not MD, Sergeant.”

  Thompason waved his own hands for attention.

  “Why didn’t you stop in my office first?”

  Dena moaned inwardly. All she needed was a bureaucrat who stood on useless ceremony.

  “The sooner we examine an accident scene the better,” Ramos said. “Once we can figure out what went wrong, the quicker we’ll be out of here.”

  Thompason looked pained. “We would greatly prefer it if you wouldn’t refer to our luxury presidential opulent palace penthouse abode as an ‘accident scene’!”

  “The write-ups won’t mention that, Chief,” the woman said, tapping her earpiece twice. “We are trending toward ‘incident,’ instead.”

  “Good. See to it, Coller. How could this happen?”

  “Mr. Sesman drove his personal vehicle up here,” Tamm said. “He had the codes for the private elevator. There was no reason for the garage robots to stop him.”

  “Well, where is he?”

  Everyone else pointed toward the pool.

  “That’s inappropriate! Get him out of there!” Thompason demanded.

  “How?” Longmore inquired. “We can’t even see him.”

  “Is he concealed in some way?” Thompason asked.

  “Not concealed,” K’t’ank interjected. “He has become one with the infinity of this pleasure water.”

  Thompason didn’t seem to register that one of the voices in the room wasn’t coming from any of the visible mouths. His entire attention focused on scanning the clear pool.

  “Is he behind it? Below it? Between the glass walls?”

  “No glass,” K’t’ank scolded him. “Do not think in such pedestrian terms, Thompason.”

  “You’ve got a nerve referring to pedestrians when I do all your walking for you,” Dena said.

  K’t’ank ignored her jibe.

  “Glass does not hold up the water.”

  “What does?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Very highly concentrated nothing. A forcefield generates pressure against the body of water. The calculations used to hold it in place are precise. It is a work of genius,” he added, “although not completely equal to my own.”

  “Which means he’s dead,” Ramos said.

  “Most likely,” K’t’ank agreed. “Humans do not appear to accept compression well. It is a primary difference between our species.”

  Thompason shuddered. “Please do not use ‘dead’ when referring to a guest of this establishment,” he said, plaintively, waving his hands as if to delete the word. “The Castana has a reputation as being a destination for luxury living.”

  “We’ll make sure no reference to mortality is made in the press,” Coller said, tapping her earpiece again.

  “Sorry to be crude, Mr. Thompason,” Dena said. “I’m just getting details. What about body displacement, K’t’ank? Does that mean that anyone else who dives into the pool is in danger of being swallowed up by the wall?”

  The four occupants of the suite huddled close together as if afraid that the pool would reach out and suck them in. Dena couldn’t blame them. K’t’ank assumed a professorial tone.

  “Excellent question. A certain balance is factored into forcefields of this type. It would take an enormous difference in pressure one way or the other for a man to vanish.”

  “But it happened. What is the weight-bearing load of this pool?”

  “Seventy tons,” the manager said. Dena lifted an eyebrow. She found it suspicious that he had facts like that at his fingertips when the incident had just occurred. He shifted nervously under her gaze. “I oversaw the purchase and installation. More than sixty people can swim in it at one time. I mean, if there was room.”

  “Then one single vehicle should not have disappeared into the workings,” Dena said. “What could it have weighed? Five hundred kilos?”

  “A thousand,” Longmore said indigantly, with an upward tilt of his patrician nose. “Mr. Sesman had a luxury vehicle. Of course. A Circo XIII.”

  “Of course,” Dena echoed, making a note.

  “Still should not have caused this collapse of field integrity,” K’t’ank said. “If it is made to permit sixty in a space that would comfortably contain only twenty of your kind without crowding, then a person even inside a vehicle would not be in danger.”

  “Fudge factor,” said the security man.

  Dena could sense the pause while K’t’ank looked up ‘fudge.’

  “It would have to be a very large container of confectionary.”

  Ramos snickered. Dena sensed another joke under construction.

  “So if it isn’t there,” she asked, “where did it transport to?”

  K’t’ank’s tail beat impatiently against the inside of her ribs.

  “Transport? Not transport, Malone. It is still there.”

  “Where? I can’t see it.”

  “It is there, incorporated into the wall of force,” K’t’ank said.

  Dena felt her insides roil, and not because either the alien or her baby were kicking them.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any hope that the man is still alive, is there?” she asked.

  “None. The compression would have been instantaneous and comprehensive.”

&
nbsp; Dena felt her insides give one instantaneous and comprehensive heave.

  “Eww.”

  “This is outrageous, Thompason!” Longmore raged.”We and ANCHOR pay you ridiculously well for this luxury suite. We don’t want to have to use a swimming pool with a dead body in it! Have it removed at once!”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t do that,” Dena said, cutting off the manager’s apologies. “As we said, it’s an active investigation scene.”

  “Absurd! All you have to do is turn off the field generator.”

  “Then all our evidence will drop, along with several thousand gallons of water, onto the heads of the people on the street.”

  “What about it?” Amini said, lifting his own eyebrows high on his broad forehead. “ANCHOR’s purpose is to improve life for the billions of human beings on Earth and other worlds. The inconvenience of a few for our sake is not our concern.”

  “Talk about your ivory towers,” Ramos groaned.

  “What was that?” Longmore demanded, rounding on him.

  “We’ll be working on this every hour,” Ramos said, brightly, brandishing his skinnypad. “I’ll just take quick statements from you and leave you to your day.”

  Dena took the arm of the hotel manager. “In the meantime, Mr. Thompason, I need to talk to you and anyone who had access to the inner workings of the infinity pool, plus, I would like to get a look at the manifests for the pool itself. If your garagebots collected stats on Sesman’s vehicle, I want to see those, too. I’d like to know how it went out of control like that.”

  Under her hand, the manager was twitching. He was hiding something, but wasn’t going to spill it in front of so many others. She had to get him alone.

  “I need data, Malone,” K’t’ank said, his voice resounding through the bracelet on her wrist. “In no fashion could this have been accidental. Give me data!”

  “What do you think happened?” Dena whispered.

  “I suspect unpleasant activity.”

  “You mean foul play? What do you need?”