The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  “Let’s go have a look.”

  * * *

  Three blocks from the agora, a two-story complex of workers’ dorms and transient quarters, aka guest suites, had been drilled out and finished in the early phases of the building of Athens. Cash had lived on the first floor in a unit an architect had designated as Basic Single.

  Wesley Doughan, Navigation Exec for now and for the first burns that would take Kybele out of Earth orbit, walked the lonely street ahead of Severo and Helt. Doughan had the slightly toed-in gait of a Texas cowboy, which, in fact, he had once been. Severo and Helt caught up with him very near Cash’s quarters. Doughan had the alert, aware gaze of an aging shuttle pilot, and he was that, too. “I went around the block and there’s nobody out here,” Doughan said. “No curiosity seekers. The techs are inside.”

  Ryan’s unit didn’t front on the street. It was in the back, beyond a courtyard. An olive tree sheltered a gurgling fountain in the center of the space. Cash’s quarters were on the far side of the complex; walled at the back by solid rock.

  Helt went in with Severo and Doughan. Every light in the place was on and set to noon daylight. Cameras on wheeled tripods stood in corners. A tech in coveralls with a Biosystems logo brought gloves for the newcomers. After Doughan put them on, he wrapped his arms around his chest and just stood there for a while, as if afraid to touch anything, even with gloves on.

  “Was there a suicide note?” Severo asked one of the workers, a woman with an NSS logo on her coveralls.

  “Not that we’ve found.” She had the look of a sturdy Midwestern housewife, faded maple-colored hair, plenty of muscle, broad shoulders, and broad hips. Evans, her nametag read. “No sign of a scuffle, or anything like that, not that we could recognize.”

  Doughan turned to look at the window that faced the courtyard. Its drapes were closed and a set of shelves stood directly in front of it.

  “Liked his privacy,” Severo said. “Loner.”

  Socks and shirts littered the living room floor. A desk faced the blocked front window. A keyboard and a monitor were placed dead center on it. Sofa, chair, side tables, ottoman.

  The techs had opened the lid of the ottoman, but there seemed to be nothing inside. They were turning up the sofa cushions to take samples of whatever might be under there. Doughan had still not touched anything, and Helt realized that he and Severo had followed suit.

  “Look, Severo, you’re the cop. I’ll follow your lead,” Doughan said.

  “And I’ll follow a protocol I just read,” Severo Mares said. “Not like any of us do this every damned day, you know. Protocol says to video everything in here before it’s moved. I gave that job to one of the guys and it’s already done. But I want to see what’s here, protocol or not.”

  Helt followed Severo and Doughan to the kitchen doorway. They didn’t go in; it was a small space. The cabinets were open and showed a few pouches of precooked food. A gloved tech put juice and beer from the fridge into a cooler, to be hauled away and tested.

  One at a time, Severo first, they peered into the bathroom. The cabinet over the sink held combs, razors, the usual grooming stuff, and some OTC medicines, none of them remarkable. The sink was coated with a layer of whiskers trapped in translucent soap scum. Its impressive thickness might be used to trace its age, a timing device, like tree rings.

  Ryan’s bedroom was that of a monk. Loner indeed. If loneliness had pheromones, Helt was sure he smelled them in the air. The blanket on the bed, which must have been the same one supplied to bachelor quarters when Cash moved in three years ago, was stretched tight and tucked in. It was an example of military order, with precise diagonal folds at the corners. There were no pictures, even projected behind the bedroom window, no personal artifacts at all in the room where Cash had slept. None.

  “Somewhere he learned how to make up a bunk and hide clutter before inspection,” Doughan said. “Then there’s the mess everywhere else. Some clowns just never get it right.”

  Severo opened the bamboo closet doors. The closet light was on. A few shirts, a few pairs of slacks hung there. Modest stacks of shorts and socks and two pairs of well-worn boots looked lonely on the almost-empty shelves. Severo tapped the black rock of the closet wall. “Not likely to be a safe bored into that, or a secret passage, do you think? We’ll check, anyway.”

  Helt followed Severo and Doughan back to the living room.

  “We’re almost finished here,” Evans said. A little line of vials holding colored fluids had been added to Cash’s desk. She swabbed the border of the monitor stand, stuck the swab in a vial, and screwed the cap tight. “We’ll haul this over to SysSu when we’re done.”

  “I’ll carry it,” Helt said. “I’m going back there.”

  “You’ll need to sign off for it. Chain of evidence.”

  With the entire procedure on video. Okay. Backup is good. At least what Evans handed him was a tablet recorder and a stylus, not tree paper and a quill pen.

  Helt told his inner self to behave. Rule of Law. However exasperating it is, it’s what we have. When it works.

  He accepted the canvas bag Evans gave him. It weighed about half a kilo.

  * * *

  Doughan left them at the train station and headed for bed. Severo went back to the NSS office for, he said, one more check.

  “On what?” Helt asked.

  “I’m gonna clear out everybody who should be asleep, and then I’ll clear out, myself.”

  Helt carried the bag into SysSu offices. The lobby felt chilly. By contrast, Nadia’s office held the warmth of intent concentration. Jerry, in heads-up display goggles, leaned back in his chair. His bare feet on the table kept him balanced so that the rollers on the chair’s legs didn’t roll him elsewhere. He worked a keyboard ball with his hands. Archer worked beside Nadia. The Koosh was in his lap. Helt pushed the deflated soccer ball out of the way and put the sack down on the table.

  Archer tilted his head forward and looked at it from beneath the shelter of his bushy eyebrows. “We’ve been all through that thing and there isn’t much in there. Just a cruiser and playback; that’s all anyone has at home these days.”

  “No self-written eulogy? No good-byes?” Helt asked.

  “If there were, we could call this a suicide and go to bed,” Archer said. “Quite frankly, we don’t need a murder now. It would foul up your Get Out Now list.”

  “You have that straight.”

  The population of Kybele was small now and partially dependent on imported food. Limits on the food supply were sort of true, and sort of a lie. The ecology of Center was set for semi-arid, and her food crops were small and varied, constantly rotated in and out of test beds in the gardens below Center on Level One. Kybele had plenty of water, an excess, and she could triple the food production right now, even with no additional cropland. In addition, she planned to vandalize one of the rings of Saturn, roll her way through enough water ice to make her, truly, a snowball in hell. But she planned to be a very water-rich snowball. Specs said that Kybele’s ecology could support a quarter million humans, once more of her four kilometers of solid shell were tunneled out into dwellings and farms. That would happen generations from now, if her residents wanted that much population density. For now, thirty thousand was the limit.

  The last shuttle would lessen the population burden by a few souls and it would also hold some of the unwanted. Let’s not talk too much about that, everyone didn’t say to each other. But everyone on Kybele knew it.

  The procedures for sending someone back to Earth were written, and defensible, and uncomfortable as hell.

  Culling people who weren’t going to work out here was a job that the execs and the psych staff did, and Helt was involved in it more than he liked in these last days before departure, this brief time when getting people back to Earth was easy and expected. Culling Kybele’s population had been an ongoing process, one that began in her earliest days. Shuttles had called at six-month intervals since the beginning of her history. T
he problem of what to do with outright psychotics and overt criminals, the ones whose liabilities were obvious and disturbing to the people who were building the ship, had been solved in a very simple way. The unwanted had been sent back to Earth on those shuttles, and sent with plenty of money for their ongoing care.

  A lot of people had come and gone as contract workers who had never hoped to stay on the ship forever. Some of them had been invited to stay and were extremely happy about it. Others, people who knew they were on board only for three- or ten-year contracts, had been hauled off Kybele to one station or another over the years, fifty at a time, where they transferred to the regularly scheduled big transports that shuttled in and out of Earth’s gravity well. The last of that group would fill thirty of the passenger slots on the last shuttle going to China Station. Most of them had jobs waiting in near space, or had plans for careers Earthside. A stint on Kybele had embellished their CVs quite nicely.

  Filling the other twenty seats on the last shuttle was the IA’s problem. Helt’s GON list was subject to review by the executive trio, but it was his list to make.

  In nine days, the list had to be final. This death was going to be changing some names, one way or another.

  “This guy Ryan. He’s a little too standard,” Jerry said. “What we’ve found in that little box you’re carrying is that while he was on Kybele he was Joe Average Engineer. He watched an average amount of heterosexual porn, did an average amount of sports ogling. Even the mix is standard: football, American football, tennis. He went to poetry archives sometimes. Seemed to be cyclic about it. Would hit on the sites for a week or two, and then not again for months.”

  “What average amount of porn?” Archer asked.

  “Average amount for his demographic.” Jerry’s voice was the voice of someone who was multitracking. His attention was on something in his goggles, and his fingers kept tapping the keyboard ball.

  “The physical object Helt has hauled in here exists, however.” Archer frowned at the sack.

  “And will need to be locked up somewhere. Chain of evidence,” Helt said.

  “Do we have a safe?” Archer asked.

  No one knew.

  “Does your desk have a locking drawer in it?” Nadia asked. “It’s an executive desk, and it’s so big. Let me find the schematic…”

  “I’ll go look,” Archer said.

  Helt picked up the bundle and followed him.

  “Does Mena know about this?” Helt asked. Mena Kanakaredes, the Biosystems exec, worked hard and long but she said she didn’t sleep well, or much. She would probably still be awake, even this late.

  “I talked to her,” Archer said. “She’s coming over here in the morning.”

  A face-time meeting of the execs would be expected. Some sort of announcement would be expected.

  The lower right-hand drawer of Archer’s desk was large and it did, in fact, have a keyhole near the top. There was a key in the keyhole.

  “Fancy that,” Archer said.

  The drawer was empty. Helt put the sack in it.

  5

  Night Work

  Jerry and Nadia looked up as Archer and Helt reached the door to Nadia’s office.

  “Good night,” Archer said. “I’m going to bed.”

  Helt watched him walk away, shuffling a little in his slippers, slightly stoop-shouldered from a lifetime’s obsession with monitors and keyboards. Archer reminded his staff about sleep from time to time, but he would never have told anyone in SysSu to close down.

  Odd work hours were the norm. SysSu was occupied most of the time, day and night. Helt and Archer pretty much kept to a nine-to-five day, but that was because Biosystems and Navigation followed a day-night business schedule and Earth seemed to expect some sort of standard times for communications. Helt sat down in the chair Archer had brought into Nadia’s office. “What about we get this whole mess cleaned up in two hours?” he asked.

  “Good plan,” Jerry said.

  Jerry was still working on Cash Ryan’s activity over the past three years, dates, places, times, work résumés, paychecks, grocery bills. Ryan didn’t spend much time in the bars. Video captures were slim, sightings at train stations and, in the past, the brief interface captures Jerry had wormed out of a coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Is this all there is to him?”

  “Yeah. So far,” Jerry said.

  “Let’s bring in what NSS has,” Helt said. “Wait. Let’s bring in whoever’s working the night shift at NSS. I want to try not to step on toes here.” He brought up the station contact site and Severo looked up from his desk. “You said you were going to chase people out and go home,” Helt said.

  “I lied. I’m the chief and I’ll go home when I want to. I don’t want to, so I told Evans to take a nap. I’ll wake her up when I feel sleepy.”

  “I take it you’re still working Ryan’s death. Wanna work screen with us, or would you like live company?”

  “I’ll come over there. If anyone needs Evans, they’ll call us or buzz the door. If they don’t, maybe she can sleep until morning.” Severo lifted himself from his chair. “Be there in a minute.”

  “It’s time to pull files and set up some algorithms,” Helt said. He crossed his hands behind his head, leaned back, closed his eyes, and spoke to the ceiling. “Let’s game it for suicide. I don’t know what we need to nail that, but we need to find something definitive.”

  “Accident?” Nadia asked. “Isn’t that a possibility?”

  “Maybe,” Helt said. “But I think the first thing we’ll end up doing is ruling that out. I made the trip up Athens tower about a year ago, just to look around. You might take a look at the specs for the observation platform. It’s designed to make accidents unlikely.”

  Nadia did, and she and Jerry perused them while Helt concentrated on the phosphenes behind his eyelids, clusters of tiny blue and green spheres moving from lower left to upper right across his visual cortex. Jerry and Nadia would be looking at the walls around the circular deck on the observation platform, and the ledge outside the walls. Kybele’s planners hadn’t enclosed the space. Wind could come through it, and rain.

  “Look at that,” Jerry said. “Why haven’t we been there, Nadia?”

  “Because the last time we thought about it, it was summer and it was too hot up there,” Nadia said. “So we went swimming instead.”

  “The guard walls are one point four meters high,” Jerry said. “A child couldn’t fall off by accident, but any full-sized determined idiot could climb over.”

  “There’s a three-meter walk outside the wall before you get to the edge,” Helt said. He kept his eyes closed.

  “Another example of built-in risk factors?” Jerry asked.

  “Done by design,” Helt said. “The concept is that, over time, boredom will be a worse risk for us than some kinds of individual danger.” You could climb a cliff and fall. You could drown in a lake. You could climb up the walls of Petra canyon and fall far enough to die. You turn off your interface and get lost in Center. You could hide in camera-free areas. You could fucking kill yourself.

  But it would be difficult, very difficult, to damage air supplies, water supplies, or the power systems that made them happen. Redundancy, security, and limited access procedures were obtrusive and thorough when it came to safeguarding vital systems. Would the safeguards stay safe? For how long? Who watches the watchers?

  Helt opened his eyes. “If I may paraphrase. The physical space and the regulations—the laws—of this group endeavor—this ship—hope to give people room to be themselves. The social conventions we follow are based on current beliefs about what’s pleasant. There’s no guarantee that they work.”

  “I observe that this suicide is making you depressed,” Jerry said.

  “You got that right,” Helt said. The easy camaraderie between Jerry and Nadia was making him wish for a trek in Center with his imagined version of Elena Maury beside him. The woman who had attracted him so before he got scared of her.
He wanted to be up there for the first snowfall this year, wanted to see Elena among the pines and the deer. He wanted to know if she loved some of the things he loved, ripples on still water, frost at the edges of lakes, wanted to find out if those things were as entrancing to her as they were to him. He wanted to learn what particular wonders were beautiful to her, to see if creature tracks in fresh snow delighted her, if ferns and grasses pushing through duff in the chill of spring made her catch her breath, as he did, every spring, in amazement at the resurrection of the world.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Even if Ryan’s death were proved to be a suicide, tonight, the voyages of exploration he was imagining could never be as innocent as Jerry and Nadia’s had been when they discovered each other. The axiom is that every suicide is a murder of more than one person. A murder makes the number go exponential. Cash Ryan had killed a part of whatever Helt and Elena might become.

  Severo walked in. He carried a sack and it smelled good. Helt cleared a space on the worktable next to Jerry.

  “Food,” Severo said. He put the sack down on the table. Nadia got up and moved the sack to a stand in a corner of the room. It held a coffeepot, microwave, and fridge. The stand hadn’t been there earlier in the evening. Jerry scooted a monitor and keyboard into the vacated space on the worktable.

  “Food break?” Nadia asked.

  “Not for me. I finished a sandwich just before you checked in,” Severo said. “I’ll just have a little coffee now, but you guys go ahead if you want.” He located a mug and filled it. “So, what do we need to declare this a suicide?”

  “Been watching us, have you?” Helt asked. “We need lab work that isn’t done yet, and witnesses who saw something beforehand that looked like suicidal behavior,” Helt said. Had Ryan been in therapy here? He checked psych records. No.

  Helt ran an imaginary scenario where he wakened Jim Tulloch, Kybele’s chief psychiatrist, told him he wanted proof of suicide on a person who had no record of ever having seen a shrink, thought about the response he’d get, and thought better of it.