The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  Elena shut off the gurgling drains. She and Calloway pulled a sheet over the gutted corpse and Martin helped them lift the body onto the gurney and roll it to the morgue. Helt shut down the screens and caught up with them as they slid the body into a waiting box in the wall.

  “We’re done,” Calloway said.

  “What did you find?” Helt asked. “I didn’t watch all the time.”

  “The chest wound. You saw that. A fracture in the right hand. Cause of death is stab wound to the left thorax and subsequent exsanguination,” Calloway said, “unless something shows up on the tissue slides or chemistries.”

  Elena looked tired and sad.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m still on duty. Want some coffee?” Calloway asked.

  “Martin has offered me some already. No. No thank you,” Helt said.

  He followed Elena out into the dim hallway. She turned to look at him full on. Her pupils were large in her large eyes, gray in this light, and Helt wanted to see her eyes in different lights, to see how the color changed. He was sure it would. She was beautiful, and she was a woman who could do an autopsy on someone who had been her lover. She was terrifying. Helt shivered and tried to stop the shiver with a deep breath.

  “It’s not easy,” Elena said. “I would advise a stiff drink before bedtime.”

  He knew he would have to know who she was and what she was, and he knew it was hard, right now, even to stand this close to her. He kept his voice as neutral and friendly as he could manage to make it. “I would have one if you would join me,” Helt told her. He wanted to run away. “But Navigation Security has my time for a few hours.”

  “Rain check, then.”

  “Of course.”

  Helt watched her walk down the dark corridor and wondered if her calm steps, her straight shoulders, her poise, were honesty or total lies.

  4

  A Lonely Man

  Old habits ruled; Helt scouted the dark street because urban plus late hour still told him to act as if he were walking a city. No sense in it, really. No gangs, no traffic, no people at all. The area surrounding the Athens agora was not residential but devoted to biz, and only the yellow glow of sconces marked storefronts. If anyone was working tonight they were behind office doors.

  Overtime pay was good on Kybele. Flexible schedules were the norm, though. Helt liked a 24/7 work environment, and he liked flexible as a concept.

  Kybele had and would have a capitalist economy, because no other economic system channeled greed as well, and greed wasn’t going away. Incomes were and would be taxed. Kybele’s survival would forever depend on a healthy, well-fed population who had somewhere to sleep at night, and the safety nets to ensure that happened were paid for with tax dollars. Public projects had to be funded, new constructions, pure research, had to continue. The balance between runaway wealth and social entitlements was and would be tricky, and subject to continual debate, which wasn’t going away, either.

  Helt was working flexible time right now, on his way to assess the status of two tech workers who had just seen the corpse of a man who had died a violent death. He didn’t know Jerry’s and Nadia’s prior exposure to raw life, or to death, natural or otherwise. His knowledge of their lives did not include how and when they came to Kybele or why Archer Pelham, Systems Support exec, had picked them from the clamoring throng of the wishful.

  He didn’t even know which offices they used in SysSu. Helt’s office was within easy reach of Archer Pelham. He’d nested there. When he sat down to work, his hands knew where to reach for what; his coffee cup was familiar to his lip, and his start-up delay was minimal. By and large the rest of the geek crew moved from one office to another, in migration patterns that might be worth study, someday. For now, Helt just enjoyed the seeming randomness of where people decided to claim territory while they worked.

  Under his feet, Kybele’s bedrock, its original surface glass-slick, lasered out of solid asteroid, had been slightly roughened for traction. Chestnut and beech trees rustled their leaves in courtyards. Quarter-moon light came from above, from a sky that was a ceiling carved out of a slab of nickel iron. It separated Level One, where the cities (well, little towns at this time, so early in this new world’s history) were, from the hollow Center of the world. The stars projected on the black rock sky of Athens, four stories overhead, were arrayed as they had been seen over the Acropolis in 400 BC on a clear night in October, a factoid Helt knew because he had heard opposing viewpoints voiced about contemporary versus historic skyscapes. Athens was a college town.

  Severo Mares, in high contrast and black shadow beneath a sconce, leaned against the wall at the corner of the agora, arms folded, head down, braced as if to sleep there all night.

  “Hey,” Helt said, softly.

  “Saw you.” Severo stretched and yawned.

  On the south side of the agora, lights marked the windows of Systems Support, and farther down the row, of Navigation’s Level One office. The complex where the real police work got done, Navigation Security Services, with its vehicles and offices and its few lockup cells, was a block away from the center of Athens. The clinic was on the same street. Those facilities were close at hand, but placed out of sight of the calm facade of the University.

  Severo and Helt paced side by side, not hurried, not slow, as if they were in charge of the night.

  Helt stopped at the door of SysSu. “What’s your boss up to? What’s Doughan doing?”

  “Don’t know. He wants to go with me to the guy’s quarters, but he said fifteen minutes.”

  “Severo. You’re in charge of the investigation on this death. You’ll be reporting to Doughan.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be feeding you everything SysSu or Biosystems comes up with that might be of help. I’ll take the results of your work to the division chiefs. I’m the interdepartmental Incident Analyst, and that’s my job. I don’t want a turf battle with you. I don’t want to step on your toes.”

  “But you’re gonna breathe down my neck, or Doughan will.”

  “Not as much as the media hounds will,” Helt said. “This incident, if we may call it that for the moment, is going to get a lot of scrutiny. Doughan and I won’t be the only ones watching every move that’s made about it. You’re going to be seeing your face everywhere.”

  “I hate that,” Severo said.

  Helt hated that, too. He was aware, perhaps less than he should be, of how he looked in public. It was part of his job. But he liked to keep private things private.

  “Come on in, Severo.”

  Helt, with Severo following, walked into SysSu and threaded his way through the lobby. Its wall plantings were dark; its tables and displays were dimmed for the evening. A screen here and there was live, one with international news from the world spinning below them, on mute. Another showed constantly changing readouts of internal temperatures of residences in Petra, of soils in wilderness areas and in the fields of Center. The next was an animation, completely inexplicable; Bach’s Prelude in C Major, played softly on a xylophone by some horse-headed creature using all ten fingers and a tail? Helt turned his head toward it. The animation played a wrong note and stopped. Helt looked away. It played the phrase again, correctly. Probably it was just up for the night.

  SysSu didn’t have a receptionist and it didn’t have a waiting room. It did have guest chairs in some of the offices, including Helt’s.

  “I want to come along with you, Severo, after I check—” Helt smelled fresh coffee. He aimed for the sound of clicking keyboards, at least two of them, and an open door three doors down a hallway.

  “That you, Helt? Come in,” Jerry said.

  Jerry and Nadia sat across from each other at a narrow table, almost nose to nose, and neither of them looked up. Since cameras were on his mind, Helt noticed that in profile, intent on their work, they looked like Central Casting might have picked them to play young, bright technocrats. Jerry carried broad shoulders on an athlete’s body, ripped s
o that the veins stood out on his forearms as he worked. Nadia’s flawless skin looked like old ivory. Her delicate hands seemed to require a fan, one painted with multicolored, perfect flowers. Both of them had dark hair, Jerry’s the brown-black of Europe, clubbed to stay out of his eyes, Nadia’s the shining black waterfall of the East. Loose down her back, it seemed too heavy for her to carry.

  Elena’s hair was a different dark, with the red color of some exotic wood in it. He didn’t want to think about that now.

  Jerry and Nadia really were beautiful. Maybe that’s why Archer had signed them on.

  Three monitors on Jerry’s side and four for Nadia. The artifacts on the table seemed female to Helt, although he could not have said why the sheaf of wheat tied with twine or the purple Koosh ball, a soft, spiky rubber anemone of sorts that became a new toy every ten years or so, made him think this was Nadia’s place. He watched Severo scan the clutter and the coffee cups on the table and give a respectful glance at the scuffed and sadly deflated soccer ball resting on Jerry’s side of the table. Two bedrolls occupied a corner of the office, standard equipment, marked with the SysSu logo, probably hauled to Center tonight and back to the office again.

  “Hi, Severo. Helt,” Jerry said.

  Nadia leaned back in her rolling chair and pushed her hair away from her face with both hands to smile at them. “We’re looking for every trace of him. We’re looking everywhere. I’ve found some things in Earthside archives and we’re pulling what we can from those.”

  “Cash Ryan doesn’t have a very interesting bio,” Jerry said. “He has left a sparse record. I can’t call it laundered, but it’s—it’s stingy. School, work record, addresses, credit ratings; they’re all dull. He’s one of the engineers working grunt under David Luo II in Navigation.”

  “Did he ever come see us?” Severo asked.

  “NSS? Not that I know of. I’ve found Cash Ryan in random captures on the trains, going back and forth to work. Street cameras show him going in and out of his quarters. He hasn’t done anything to leave a record in NSS, so if he acts out, it isn’t physical, Severo.”

  “And he’s never been in the same camera view with Elena Maury, not since he’s been on Kybele,” Nadia said. “Caveat. We haven’t covered all three years yet. Do you wonder if they were lovers, Helt? Because of the poetry?”

  Ouch. “I wonder,” Helt said. “But I know you’ll tell me when you know.” Oh, he did wonder. He was spending a lot of emotional energy on the past of a woman he didn’t know, had met briefly, had thought, briefly, about getting to know better. This was a hell of a way to do that. This was biz, only biz, and he was an idiot.

  “Wait a minute,” Severo said. “Here’s the deal, everybody. We have a missing hour to explain. It looks like the guy offed himself, but until we know that for sure, everyone who knew about that hour, including you two, are going to need to be cleared for that time. Jerry, Nadia, Helt, were you on camera anywhere? For that matter, was I?”

  “Uh, maybe,” Jerry said. “I’ll look.”

  “What about you, Helt?”

  “You found me here, in SysSu. There should be time and date stamps on what I was doing.” Helt felt like squirming. He felt accused, and then he felt defensive. A lot of people were going to feel that way, very soon.

  “I’ll get them,” Nadia said.

  “Meanwhile, Helt, you clear me. I’d better talk to Sonia anyway; I haven’t checked in to tell her how late I’m going to be.” Severo opened his pocket interface and made the call. “I’ll catch hell.… Hello, mi corazón. Yeah, I know it’s late. This dead guy is gonna keep me gone for a few more hours. Will you talk to Helt, at SysSu?” Severo passed the interface over to Helt, who listened, and explained, and asked questions for the record. He passed the interface back to Severo, who walked into the hall to say goodnight to his lady.

  “Your desk unit was active during that hour, here in SysSu,” Nadia told Helt.

  “To be paranoid about it, I could have set up a program for my desktop to talk to itself,” Helt said.

  Jerry nodded. “I tried that once with my mom when I wanted to clear a few night hours.”

  “Did it work?” Nadia asked.

  “The program worked fine. But with Mom? Hah. She knew. Like I said, ‘once.’”

  “I’ll talk to David II,” Severo said when he came back into the room. “He’ll know something about him. You guys alibied now? Safe to work with?”

  “Yeah. We’re on camera at the Frontier Diner for some of that hour,” Jerry said. “Helt was here in his office.” Jerry turned to face Helt and grabbed large handfuls of air. “How it is, is that I can’t get a feel for this Cash Ryan. He’s not … not in there, somehow.”

  “And now he won’t be,” Nadia whispered. The expression on her lovely face was concern, for Jerry, for his needs. She’s a caregiver, a soother, Helt realized. And I came here to see if she needed something, to see if she, or Jerry, needed a father figure. Maybe that’s not my job tonight.

  “No,” Jerry said. “I guess not.”

  Nadia looked up at Helt, at Severo. “We went back up to Center,” Nadia said. “We jogged the path from the tower to where we found Cash Ryan. The ropes are still there. We sat for a while. It’s quiet again. There’s just moonlight, and the creek, and a little wind in the pines, as if nothing’s happened there, ever.

  “We want to work for a while, Helt. Severo. It seems like the right thing to do.”

  Help him. Help them. So much altruistic energy is called up by a violent death, or the unexpected injuries of fire, flood, riot, war. So, this pair of innocent bystanders had found their own way to try to understand a violent death, to repair the knowledge of how and why it happened, to put it into place in their lives. To do what they could.

  Fire, flood, riot, war. Navigation had emergency plans for all of those. There were schemes for defending life support systems, succession trees for leadership, security barricades on power plants, on water sources, of course there were.

  War, by all measures ever known, was a human necessity. If it weren’t, the species would have figured out some other way to get that particular set of jollies long, long ago. That, in time, Kybele’s population would make up reasons for war was a fairly certain bet to Helt, and a certainty to Severo’s boss, to Doughan. Doughan actually seemed to enjoy calling life support drills. Maybe it was the sirens.

  Setting up parameters to keep a viable population, a viable knowledge base intact through a war, or to find a way around battle tropes, was a problem Kybele would face whenever she faced it. Theories abounded. They were only theories.

  This was only a single death, nothing more. It wouldn’t wreck the ship. Helt would not let it wreck the ship.

  “Another thing,” Nadia said. “There’s not much interest in Cash Ryan’s death, at least not in the Security Bulletin announcement of it. Hits from the EMTs and their families, and that’s about it. So far.”

  At the sound of shuffling in the hall, Severo moved away from the doorway and turned to face it. SysSu’s boss, Archer Pelham, arrived, dressed in a baby blue cardigan, sweatpants, and bedroom slippers. His pale gray eyes were icy, as always, and he looked ready to disapprove of what he saw, as always. He carried a dignity that overshadowed the spiky disarray of his white hair.

  Archer pushed some clutter aside and sat on the table. The purple Koosh ball fell overboard. Nadia picked it up and gave it a squeeze.

  “Tell me about the SM hour,” Archer said.

  Nadia turned her attention to one of the screens. “Guiren and Akua were on duty.”

  Their full names were on the screen, Guiren Le and Akua Mirin, quiet guys who gamed a lot. That meant nothing. The whole department gamed a lot, as far as Helt knew.

  “They timed the elevator cameras to add some intermittent floor-level views with a heads-up if there’s rapid movement on the floor. Not that the sonic barriers aren’t supposed to keep animals out of the area round the elevators; they’ve worked so far. But Men
a wanted the extra coverage, so if anything tries to scurry out of Center, it will set off an alarm. It was routine. No blips, but the techs took the cameras out of service for that hour.”

  “Where are they now?” Severo asked.

  “Home in bed,” Jerry said. “Their interfaces are live. Should we wake them?”

  “No,” Severo said.

  “Who checked in to see when the SM would be happening?”

  Nadia sent a list of names to the wall screen, black and white, scrolling slowly, like a list of movie credits.

  “I could use a chair.” Archer got off the table and went into the hall to find one.

  Helt looked over Jerry’s shoulder as the names went by. David II had looked at the list; several others in Navigation, the duty officer at NSS. But none of the execs, and not Helt.

  The execs of the three divisions on Kybele got notifications of when and where things were going to be shut down. Helt was on the notification list as well. A lot of people were.

  Systems Maintenance was irregularly scheduled. The SM outages were announced a day in advance, if possible, to give critical personnel a chance to ask for a reschedule if something was going on that shouldn’t be interrupted. Like the timing of a blast in the ever-lengthening maze of tunnels on Level Three, for instance.

  Information flows about the status and operation of the ship were not classified on Kybele. The system was designed for transparency. It was a deliberate decision to accept what’s inevitable anyway, for all information leaks in time. No state secrets.

  If Cash Ryan had seen the list, he could have decided to off himself in the dark. If someone had pushed him off Athens tower, there were a lot of someones who could have done the pushing.

  Severo, who had focused on Archer since the old man appeared, muttered something to his interface and looked up at Helt. “Doughan says he’s on his way over to Ryan’s quarters.”

  Helt nodded. Some of his ducks were in a row in here, Archer on guard, all of them busy for a time.