by Sage Walker
“You’re telling me you are willing to give that up, to stay here as a flunky welding steel rods to keep tunnels from collapsing, for the rest of your life. Why?”
“I’m in love,” Copani said. “She’s in Biosystems, a colonist. She doesn’t want to leave.”
Oh. “I see.” Elena’s name was a version of Helen, and a Helen in a time long past had launched a thousand ships and a war. Helt was screwing up his courage to go to war with himself, his old fears, his new ones, over the Helen he had met last night. Love, the possibility of love, counted, damn it.
“That’s an honest reason to want to stay,” Helt said. “In that case, why don’t you order some dinner and we’ll figure out a narrative I can use to bring you to David II’s attention. That would be the place for you to start.”
Helt signaled the waiter.
* * *
Back in his office, Helt promised himself he would only work one more hour and then go home.
Because linear information, lists, two-dimensional graphs got too visually busy too fast for him, Helt looked at the humans on Kybele as bubbles of information. He liked Venn diagrams, spherical ones. His programs rendered facts and factoids about a particular individual into colors, shapes, and varying degrees of opacity. In the past ten years, some of the bubbles had acquired accumulations of biography, work history, friendships, frictions. Over time, as events, likes, and dislikes pushed and pulled, aggregates formed. Attractive traits drew other bubbles closer. Givers and team players attracted other souls; takers and users were often, but not always, repelled.
Sometimes he displayed the ever-shifting groups as a coalescence of wrinkled balloons, sometimes as clusters of spiky morningstars, ferocious weapons. Over time, they had formed ameboid blobs that corresponded pretty well with the three working departments on Kybele, Navigation, Systems Support, Biosystems.
Take thirty thousand people and create a framework of habitats, interactions, and work that will let their descendants survive and reproduce for two hundred years, while keeping the skills needed to live on a new world. The population will live in isolation. No one gets to go outside and play. There will be no visitors.
It was a prison or a paradise, depending on your philosophy. The people in Helt’s new world, his fellow passengers, were prisoners of nothing but their own hopes and dreams. They had chosen to live in this enclosure, a hollow asteroid on a one-way journey to a relatively nearby star. They knew the risks.
They knew the risks of staying on Earth as well. Wars were continuous, but entire civilizations sustained themselves on arable land at the poles. The population was down to three billion and might have stabilized there. It would be centuries before the planet’s oceans, her basic life-cycle drivers, recovered from the acid the Anthropocene era had dumped in them. Maybe old Gaia could heal herself. Maybe not.
Odds were, this worldlet named Kybele would get where it was going. It would reach a new world, a full-sized one, a planet with liquid water and all the building blocks of life. That the new planet would sustain human life was not a given. Even so, a lot of people were willing to take the gamble.
Odds were, the only thing that could make Kybele herself uninhabitable were the people inside it.
The hollow rock that was Kybele, once thrown toward its new star, would get where it was going, but by design and necessity, its air and water and food supplies would fail without the constant input of skilled human hands and human minds. That reality, hopefully, imposed a social contract of mutual tolerance that would survive the stresses and conflicts humans make for themselves. Maybe. If everyone worked at it.
Helt was daydreaming himself into the what and how of scenarios he could not, on his own, control. The broad-spectrum lights on the west wall of his office had gone dark so the greenery could rest. A bot searched for leaves on the floor. Helt searched for a pear in yellowing leaves, but all of his were gone. He got out of his chair, walked out into the hall, stretched out his arms, remembered a plaid shirt worn by a beautiful woman, and went back to his desk.
A lot of people weren’t entered in his State of Kybele construct. Only the ones who had been players in interdepartmental disagreements of one flavor or another interacted in Helt’s spheres of data. The three divisions on Kybele handled their own internal affairs when they could, and those interactions didn’t usually come to Helt’s attention.
Yves Copani wasn’t in there.
Only one more hour’s work, Helt had told himself, but he really wanted to find an excuse to let Yves Copani stay on Kybele. He liked the man.
Yves Copani was trained as an architect, but he’d hired on as a welder. He loved his quarters in Petra, and music, and his buddies, and hard work, and his girl. Oh, he loved his girl. She worked in Stonehenge and her name was Susanna, not Elena. Yes, he checked, and felt a little embarrassed about it.
In short, Yves loved everything he saw or touched or ate, unless he hated it, and if he hated something he wanted to make it beautiful so he could love it. He wanted the stars, and he wanted to stay with his true love.
True loves seldom lasted, but Helt liked the simplicity of the man’s outlook. He liked it, but he wouldn’t let it change the multiple factors in his off-list protocol, the one designed to sort out who went back to Earth and who stayed aboard.
The protocol was used to sort through nets of relationships and interactions if the three division chiefs disagreed about who should go and who should stay, and no one was disagreeing about Yves Copani. He was just a contract worker who had never come to their attention or given them a problem. But Helt was sifting the files all the same.
Yves had worked some off-shift hours in the vineyards in Center. Helt wondered if that’s how he’d met his true love, or if he worked there to please her. Yves’s grandfather had worked for Ferrari, certainly not a sound reason to want to keep him aboard.
Helt was admiring a Ferrari in one corner of his screen when Severo Mares’s face took over the other. The chief of Navigation Security Services, Kybele’s euphemism for cops, was in uniform, well past time to be off-shift.
“Why do you look so happy?” Severo asked.
“Because you reminded me it’s time for me to go home three hours ago.”
“It’s about a man in a tree,” Severo said.
“Tell me.”
“At twenty forty-four we got a call from a couple who were out, uh, hiking. They saw something in a tree, and it scared them. We went up and found a man in a tree, and blood everywhere. We just got him down. He’s dead.”
Location coordinates flashed across the screen. The tree, and the EMTs who surrounded it, were half a kilometer spinward from the base of Athens tower, in wilderness. “We think he jumped. There are broken limbs on some of the trees around. He must have tried to glide down.”
“What the hell? Did he hallucinate a hang glider or something?”
Hang gliding in Kybele’s half-g and strong Corolis force was fun, the survivors of the sport had said—before Navigation started giving stiff fines for trying it.
“Damned if I know,” Severo said.
3
An Autopsy
“A dead man,” Helt said. Oh, damn. He kept his voice calm, a reflex learned in years of practice at dealing with people under stress, but a sea change in his blood readied him for storm conditions, heavy weathers, struggles.
“What’s his name?”
“Charles Ryan. Navigation,” Severo said.
A quick glance at the records showed that Charles Ryan was a contract worker, a three-year man, not a colonist. A suicide?
“Do you know him?” Helt asked.
“I don’t. You?”
“No.” There were a lot of people in this world of thirty thousand souls whom Helt didn’t know, and some he would probably never meet.
“I’ve blocked off the area where he came down and sealed his quarters. It’s what a good chief of police does.”
“We haven’t had a suicide in years,” Helt said.
>
“I know. I hate this sort of thing. I’m chief of a little police force that serves three little villages, and if there’s funny business about this, there ain’t no FBI here to call in. All I can do is follow protocols and pretend I know what I’m doing.”
“Where’s your boss?”
“He’s at home. He’ll come over to the station in a little while.”
Wesley Doughan, the Navigation Executive, would finish his dinner first, Helt predicted. Because, in fact, it would take time for the rescuers, the three EMTs on call for night emergencies in the Athens area, to haul a body cross-country out of wilderness and get it downstairs.
“You’re going to ask me why this is your problem,” Severo said.
“It’s my problem because if it’s a suicide, Navigation will say it’s a Biosystems problem. Biosystems will say the guy never reported being depressed, so it must be a homicide. If it’s a homicide, my boss will say the safety protocols are in need of revision or it couldn’t have happened, but Systems Support is working on something else until we reach the rings of Saturn, so the problem belongs to the Incident Analyst.
“That’s me. I’m coming up there,” Helt said.
“Here are the coordinates,” Severo said.
* * *
Helt took the elevator to the base of Athens tower. When the door opened, he smelled a Rocky Mountain forest after a rain. The illusion was a pleasant one, built of forest loam, young Ponderosa, and the mineral scent of irregular outcrops of raw stone left by the world’s builders. He crossed the roughened stone of the floor near the Athens tower elevator and traveled in a rapid half-g lope. The path that led to Severo followed a line of permanent shadow cast by Athens tower.
Three people had died so far in Kybele’s thirty-year history—four, if you counted the rumors of the ghost in the third level of Stonehenge. One suicide. Two construction accidents. There was another death, a woman with a cardiac defect that would have been fixable in childhood, but she had been poor then. The woman had worked hard, and her extended family had chipped in for a lottery ticket, and she’d been lucky enough to win a shuttle seat, a chance to get off-planet. Her prosthetics failed under the g stress of liftoff, so technically it wasn’t a death on Kybele. At least her genome was here, some of her cells, frozen, awaiting a possible genetic reawakening in a distant future.
Helt zigged around a stand of young aspen whose leaves pattered in the night wind. Aspens in the wind always sounded like rain, but tonight’s air was dry. He was far enough from Athens tower to see past the edge of the “moon,” the shuttered sun. He looked for the lights of Stonehenge, high above him, a third of the way up the curve of the world. They were obscured by swirls of mist. His breathing dulled the sound of water from the little creek that ran on the right side of the path.
Helt wondered if he would have heard a scream, a crash, if he had been outside when the man jumped. He wondered if he could have talked him out of it.
Close now. Around the foot of a cliff, seen through interlaced pine branches, lights hung from branches and illuminated a square of white ropes. Chief Severo Mares sat on the ground nearby, his back against a pine tree.
“Not bad time for a geezer,” Severo said.
I am forty-eight, Helt told himself, but I don’t look like a Buddha, and you do. The air was thick with the vanilla scent of crushed Ponderosa needles.
“Thank you, my friend. What was my time?” Helt asked.
“Eight minutes from the tower.”
“And yours?”
“I didn’t time it,” Severo said. “But I didn’t run, anyway. Full stomach. Big dinner. Here’s where he landed. Right here.” Mares raised his arm toward a Ponderosa in the center of the rope square.
Helt crouched beside Severo and looked up. Bent and broken branches marked a slanted path through pine needles. Beyond, above, the trajectory intersected the balcony of the observation platform high on Athens tower.
Helt got up. “What else did you find?” He walked over to the ropes and stared down at scuffed-up pine needles, scattered twigs, and pinecones both crushed and not. He didn’t see blood anywhere on the ground, or any clear footprints left by the rescue team. The ground was dry, rainfall kept within the near-desert limits specified by the climate people in Biosystems and fine-tuned by Navigation engineers.
Severo got to his feet with a groan that surely must have been exaggerated. “We had to cut him down.” He pointed up to the white scar of a wrist-thick branch cut off near the trunk of the young tree. “And next, we go view his autopsy,” Severo said. “But there ain’t no question about what killed him. Speared by a pine tree.”
On the way back to the elevator, Severo fell back a few steps. Helt glanced over his shoulder and saw him stop to vomit into a stand of scrub oak beside the path. Helt kept walking. Hadn’t noticed a thing. Nope.
“You’ll want to go to the NSS office and debrief the crew that came out here,” Helt said. “What to say, what not to say, to the curious. To his friends. When I’ve finished at the hospital, would you wait for me? I’d like to look at the guy’s quarters when you go over there.”
“Sure,” Severo said.
* * *
Helt went into the Athens clinic through the waiting room, which was empty. Its chairs had only a forest of potted plants to keep them company.
“Dr. Calloway is on duty,” the screen at the empty desk told him. “Touch screen for assistance.” Not much business was expected on a Wednesday night early in the fall semester, and the night tech would be busy in the back. The space allocated for the hospital in the rock of Athens would permit two hundred beds, but only twenty patient beds were outfitted as yet. Two surgical suites and a delivery room were stocked and in occasional use. Helt pushed through the double doors and walked into the corridor beyond them.
The door from radiology opened. Calloway and a night tech rolled a loaded gurney across the corridor and into the smaller OR, the day surgery room. The body was wrapped in a sheet, anonymous.
Calloway was a big guy with big hands, young, trained in general surgery and orthopedics. He took his turns as clinic doc in rotation with a couple of other MDs who had different sets of specialties. Helt had brought the occasional Support tech to see Calloway. The usual complaint was stomach pain; the usual cause was too much coffee and not enough sleep.
An autopsy table was up and ready for use, stainless steel mesh over a metal box fitted with hoses and drains. A wall display near the head of the table showed X-rays and numbers, information already gathered about Charles Ryan, usually known as “Cash,” an engineer scheduled for departure on the final shuttle back to Earth.
Elena was in the OR, dressed in white cotton scrubs. Helt knew who it was even before she turned to pick up the transparent face mask that would guide her through the procedure. So this was her day job. Oh my God.
“Everybody know each other?” Calloway asked.
The tech, thin, tall, blond, and around twenty-five, if that, shook his head.
“Helt Borresen, SysSu honcho and the only Incident Analyst we have,” Calloway said. “Martin Kumar, flunky, physician’s assistant, and second-year medical student,” Calloway said. Helt and Martin exchanged nods. “Dr. Elena Maury, Biosystems, tonight’s visiting pathologist,” Calloway said.
“We’ve met,” Elena said. “Good evening, Helt Borresen.” She smiled, a smile that told him yes, she had searched his full name since they talked, a smile that held a touch of sympathy.
Calloway and the tech positioned themselves at the ends of the gurney. Elena went to the left side of the gurney and reached for the sheet beneath the body. Helt was on the left side, and he moved closer.
“One,” Calloway said. “I see you’re already on the job, Helt. Lift part of that sheet there, okay?” Calloway pointed to the right side of the man’s body, near the waist. “But don’t start heaving until three.”
“Two.” The tech added his voice. “Three.”
They slid the body from t
he gurney to the table. Martin rolled a stand covered with sharp stainless steel things close to the autopsy table and left the room. Elena pulled on a set of head-up display goggles.
Helt stood there in his civilian clothes, and although he had seen a corpse or two, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be this close to slicing one up. Elena pulled the sheet away, exposing a naked male body, early forties, a man with the sort of symmetry in face and body that humans call beauty. A calm face, opened hands, as if asleep, but death is not sleep and doesn’t look like it. The man had curly brown hair and a triangle of brown curls on his chest that thinned into a line arrowing down his belly to the pelvic thatch, the limp genitals. His only injury seemed to be a wound high on the left side of the chest, a curved flap of skin like a love bite with a little line of black clotted blood at its edges.
“Are you staying, Helt?” Elena asked.
Her nipples were taut against the OR’s chill, faintly outlined beneath thin white fabric. Dark nipples.
“It’s okay with me,” Calloway said. “But no fainting.”
“I’ve never seen a forensic post,” Helt said. “I should watch.” But he wasn’t sure he could.
Elena looked at Calloway and frowned. “Forensic protocols?”
“That’s what Severo asked for,” Calloway said.
“It was a traumatic death, so I see the sense of it,” Elena said. “Helt, you’ll get the same overlays we’ll be seeing through the goggles, along with a better view, from one of the monitors. If you concentrate on the procedure rather than what we’re doing, it might help.” Her hair was tied low at the back of her head in a shape that looked like a butterfly. Helt heard, again, those little hesitations of breath before she voiced some of the words.
“Yes. Good idea. Okay,” Helt said.
He went out to the waiting room of the clinic, dimly lit and still deserted, and pulled the view of the autopsy room to one of its wall screens. Theater, he told himself. It’s theater. Observe it through Elena Maury’s eyes. He settled himself on a couch in the waiting room and watched Elena stuff the sheet under Cash’s back and roll the body up to look for injuries, lesions.
