by Sage Walker
The mist finished its cycle and sighed. He took a deep breath and called Elena Maury. She was in her lab, at a table barricaded by machines and glass, working with a camel’s-hair brush and what looked like a miniature guillotine.
“Good morning, Helt Borresen.”
“Good morning. Please pardon the interruption.”
“Urrgh,” Elena said. She flicked a flake of something or other away from the end of her brush. “I’m doing paraffin sections and you just made me ruin one.”
“I’m sorry,” Helt said. Mena had said it would take days to sort this out, and he was sorry about that, too. He wondered what part of Cash Ryan Elena was slicing up so carefully this morning.
Elena put her brush down and looked up at her view of Helt’s face. “I knew you would call.”
“How did you know that?”
“Mena. She said I’m the only recorded suspect NSS has so far.”
Mena had gone to Elena with the news, then, as soon as she got back to Stonehenge. Maybe Mena had even told her a few things about Helt Borresen, and he had to wonder what she’d said. Elena might have been the person who last saw Cash Ryan alive, and she’d lived with him, probably slept with him, and those things made Helt angry at Mena, and at Elena. He tried to keep the anger out of his voice and away from his face.
“I would like to meet you and talk. This evening,” Helt said.
“I’ve given a report to Severo.”
“I know. But there are other things I need to know. I need your help.” He would make it an order if he had to. “Eighteen hundred? Athens, if you don’t mind making the trip.”
“I don’t,” Elena said. “Eighteen hundred is good. That gives me time to finish … not finish. Make that stop work, get some food, and get to Athens.”
He liked her cheekbones, although the balloon-shaped gauze bonnet that covered her hair looked like a bowl cover from his mother’s kitchen, and was not flattering. She didn’t seem nervous, and that scared him. She should be frightened.
“Okay,” Helt said.
Elena picked up her brush again and nodded. Helt blinked her away from his screen and went to Jerry Beauchene, who had signaled him three times since 0900.
He got a view of the sole side of a set of bare toes. Jerry pushed back from the table in Nadia’s office so he could put his feet on the floor and roll his chair closer to the screen.
“Interesting,” Jerry said.
“Tell me,” Helt said.
“I looked at yesterday’s weather in Center. There were some of those twisty winds, the really fierce ones, starting around 1600. Sixteen to sixty kph. They died down by 1900, more or less.”
“It was breezy when I went up there to meet Severo,” Helt said.
The control of winds in Center was not easy and never would be. Drone earth-movers were constantly revising the berms that spiraled out from the north and south towers. Every degree of temperature change in Kybele’s manufactured seasons changed the wind patterns and the drones tried different configurations to control them, on specs that came from Navigation engineers assigned to Biosystems. There were windmills to catch some of the turbulence and change it to electricity. There were deflection sail drones as well, up where g was nil, spin was apparent, and most human inner ears insisted that their humans were required to throw up, right now, and get somewhere else fast.
“So I was thinking, remember when Calloway said Ryan might have tried to glide down? He could have just been caught in a wind spin.”
“Heh,” Helt said. “Passive positioning. That’s good. I mean, it’s something to think about.”
“Does the stuff SysSu comes up with go to you, or to Severo?”
Helt took a breath. “I’m thinking.” The execs had just made him the boss of this mess. However, the police work on it belonged to NSS, and would be their job until and unless Biosystems found a good case for suicide. But he had the job of collating what anyone found.
“I mean, I know Severo needs the information,” Jerry continued, “but there’s Archer, there’s you.”
“Not a clear decision tree, is there? Not yet. I’ll try to come up with one. For now, send what you find to me and I’ll cc Archer and Severo after I look it over. Your third call was?”
“Was that Nadia’s going down to Venkie’s for breakfast samosas. You want one?”
“I want three,” Helt said.
“Yes, sir.”
Venkie’s kiosk offered a mix of fruits and nuts and spices plus a few choice nuggets of chocolate, wrapped in half-moons of yogurt pastry and baked. The kiosk was convenient to the Library entrance, and the pastries were expensive.
On Kybele, the highest salaries were paid for work done by human hands. The system meant that Venkie’s pastries were pricey, and it meant SysSu didn’t have difficulties finding people to do manual labor, like, say, overseeing the machines that collected garbage. As a side benefit, the garbage collectors got plenty of material for sociology papers.
Venkie made things that people wanted. Venkie was going to be rich in a few years, and Helt wondered what he would do then. Or maybe he was rich already. Maybe he had come to Kybele loaded.
Helt checked. Venkat Raghava, PhD in linguistics, Cambridge, therefore probably not at all rich. He was a lottery winner, not a contract worker. He wouldn’t be breaking down his kitchen and heading back to Bangalore.
But some of the lottery winners would not be staying. The unconditionally un-chosen were on Helt’s off-list, the one Archer called Get Out Now. GON.
That task had a time frame and would soon end. The other part of his task—not his alone, everyone’s task—would continue after Kybele was on her way, and would never end. Permit—no, encourage the living of creative lives; permit—no, encourage experimentation with social systems, family structures, ways of living with each other that didn’t destroy the ecology. Experimentation would be a necessary condition for survival over time in this terrarium.
Meanwhile, give as much slack as possible to those who hear different drummers. Find or create enough space, physical and emotional, for people to live and grow and explore the possibilities of the genomes they expressed—new genomes, blended and mixed, and that led him back to Biosystems and the tinkering that would be done, must be done, in an environment where radiation damage and the necessity for ongoing repair was a given.
Elena’s work had to continue. If she had to be replaced, someone would replace her, but Mena had called her a wizard.
Who needs to Get Out Now, Helt?
Being socially different was not necessarily a criterion for expulsion. Some of the best minds on Kybele were not well socialized, but they had dysfunctions that were not crippling, and were sometimes even charming. If you played nice, no one here cared much if your socks matched. Some diagnosable personality disorders, like depression, anxiety neuroses of various types, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, were well within the spectrum of tolerated behaviors. In fact, without a considerable number of OCD and high-functioning autistic nerds on board, Kybele probably had no chance of survival at all.
Helt used a lot of psychiatric terminology to structure some of the things he looked for, but he was no shrink. Last night’s searches of protocols for dealing with suicide had included looking over something called a “psychiatric autopsy.” Okay. He checked Jim’s schedule. James Mair Tulloch, MD, was with a patient for the next five minutes.
Jim’s office was here in SysSu, because even in this enlightened day and age—Helt added an overlay of irony to the term enlightened—a lot of people didn’t want their need for psychiatric tune-ups known to all and sundry. So Jim was here, not in one of the medical clinics, Supporting Systems in his own way. As a planned side effect, he was also available for a quick chat now and again with the Systems Supporters themselves.
Helt topped up his coffee, walked through SysSu, a quiet, busy place this morning, and left the lobby via the corridor that led to Jim’s office.
The door was open. Jim wa
s in his chair, his long, thin body stretched out, his sandaled feet crossed at the ankles, his coffee cup in hand. His socks matched. They were red.
“Good morning,” Jim said. “I never saw the guy.”
“That leaves you a little short of material for a psychiatric autopsy.” Helt closed the door, took the empty patient’s chair, had a sip of coffee, and looked at the faded yarn-and-branch Medicine Eye hanging on the wall above Jim’s head. Three square yarn eyes, actually. They might have been green and yellow once. Each of them faced a slightly different direction. “Did Jerry or Nadia send over what we have so far on Ryan?”
“They did. Charles ‘Cash’ Ryan didn’t make a single visit to any medic during the past three years, except for the required yearly physicals. He turned in his radiation badges to his supervisor when they were asked for. That’s all that’s on record.”
“Heh. I know better than to ask you what’s off the record.”
“You know I respect patient privacy. You know I’m required to speak out if someone is demonstrably a danger to self or others. I didn’t see Charles ‘Cash’ Ryan as a patient.” Jim Tulloch leaned back farther in his chair, locked his hands behind his head, and grinned. “I do so love a challenge. You want a psychiatric autopsy on someone who kept to himself, left no obvious warnings about suicide, in behavior or written records, and managed to spend three years here without making a single friend that we know about.”
But the dead man had known Elena. Helt’s fantasies of who Elena was and what she might become to him had lasted less than a day. One single day, and then she got hurt, got trapped in something terrible. It was enough to make him feel he was responsible for her forever, and that was truly nuts.
He didn’t want to talk to Jim about her. He knew some of the reasons for that. A Scandinavian tendency toward keeping private things private was part of it. Nuts or not, he wanted Elena Maury to come out of this whole, sound, and happy. And he didn’t want to tell Jim Tulloch anything right now.
Not now. Not yet.
“I’ll do what I can,” Jim Tulloch said.
“I know you will.” Helt nodded, got up, and went back to his office.
* * *
The GON list, when he brought it up, gave him no comfort. Cash Ryan’s name had never been on it. He had been expected to climb aboard the last shuttle without protest.
By design, there wouldn’t be much time for protest for the GON people. The plan was that the division chiefs would give the off-listers the news in person. The plan was that NSS would march them to the shuttle while a team packed their personal belongs, up to the weight limit and not a gram more.
There were people in the world who didn’t mind saying, “You’re fired.” Helt wasn’t one of them. Parse it any way you liked, but the message remained the same. Your job performance doesn’t meet the needs of the project. I don’t want to play with you. I don’t like you. You’re not my friend. Or, no one likes you even if they don’t say so. Go away.
The exits would be demeaning, ugly, and cruel, a model taken from the worst of corporate behavior. Ugly, but effective, or so the chiefs hoped, at diminishing possible threats to the ship’s safety. Helt didn’t like the plan and had no other to suggest.
Black letters on the white screen in front of him suddenly focused themselves. Nadia’s biography of Cash Ryan had grown longer. This was his second tour. He’d been on Kybele thirteen years ago on a three-year contract. He had worked on the reactors at the poles then, under David Luo I, Kybele’s chief engineer during the first decades of her existence.
Whoa. Helt messaged David Luo I. He sent him the death report, complete with the video of Mena’s announcement. He asked David I, retired, currently living in Vancouver, Earthside, for a conference time. A copy of the request, flagged, went to the execs and Severo.
David Luo I had been chief engineer twenty years ago. David Luo II, his son, Kybele’s current chief engineer, would have still been a college kid, working on various projects assigned by his dad as apprenticeship for the work he would do on Kybele. Helt cc’d David II as well, and looked up to see Archer, in the flesh, standing in the doorway.
“I’ve some information for Wesley Doughan,” Archer said. “And you.”
Helt swallowed the last bite of a samosa. He hadn’t noticed he was eating one, and he didn’t know whether Nadia or Jerry, or both of them, had put them on his desk.
“It’s best if I discuss this in person with Wesley. Can you come with me?”
Helt nodded. He closed his screens, shrugged on a windbreaker, and put the remaining two pastries in his pocket.
Archer led the way through the lobby and out into the agora.
“Doughan’s office?” Helt asked.
Archer nodded.
During the five-minute train ride, Archer said nothing at all. He was like that. Helt took advantage of the quiet time and rescheduled some of today’s canceled appointments. Since most of them involved telling prospective colonists they hadn’t moved up the list of hopefuls, he had mixed feelings about the delays. He thought it was only fair to talk to them in person, and he dreaded doing it.
Navigation’s chief’s office was in Operations, down on Level Two, a complex built next to the airlocks where shuttles came and went. Incoming shuttles docked at the far end of Kybele’s north pole, out where half her big engines were housed. From there, they spiraled inward through airless tunnels and ended their journey at Kybele’s waist, her equator. When they had unloaded and reloaded, they left via a drop tunnel that led to the surface and they fell away with a half-g boost from Kybele’s spin to use for going wherever they were headed.
Doughan met them in the Level Two departure lounge, empty, and led them past the Customs office, empty, and into his office.
“A personal visit,” Doughan said. “I’m honored.”
His office was dome-shaped and his desk was a curved affair smack in the middle of the room. The wall behind him showed blue Earth. The rest of the walls were live views of the near-real-time starscape outside, a display doctored by camera cuts so it looked stationary.
“Nothing’s recording. Coffee?” Doughan motioned his visitors toward four empty chairs surrounding a table.
“I’ll pass, thank you,” Archer said.
“You, Helt?”
“Sure.”
Doughan filled two mugs and brought one to Helt.
“SysSu is burdened by many things and one of them is banking.” Archer pulled a small Huerfano, a self-contained unit not connected to any other device anywhere on the ship, and sent a display to a space on the wall, easily visible to all three of the humans in the room. Nine names appeared, none of them familiar to Helt and none of them on his off-list.
“We have seven people aboard who have received money from Seed Banker front companies in this past year,” Archer said.
Huh? Helt knew of the organization. It was multinational, vocal, claimed to be pacifist, and raised funds for Earthside seed banks. It also bitched about Kybele’s existence, but that bitching was countered in world opinion by the fact that some highly influential people had cousins or sons or daughters here.
Doughan sighed, a quickly suppressed sound of exasperation. “What have they done here?” Doughan asked.
“Nothing,” Archer said. “These seven people have been remarkably quiet for activists, if that’s what they are.”
“Your list says they’re all colonists,” Doughan said.
“Yes, colonists. If they stayed quiet, they would have decades to try to persuade us to change our deluded notion of going to the stars. Or pool their resources and buy spin doctors or whatever they think they need from Earth or the belt.”
“Like a shuttle filled with technocrat commandos,” Doughan said.
“We started gaming pirate takeovers years ago,” Archer said. “The expert systems that watch political unrest haven’t pinged a hot spot that could divert resources to stopping us for more than”—Archer looked at blue Earth for a moment—
“six years. If we’re at risk from anyone, it would have to be the Northern Coalition.”
Archer paid close attention to Earthside politics, border wars, coalitions, hate groups. The northern circumpolar regions supported a couple of billion humans. Russia, whose boundaries with Central Asia had been forcibly rearranged, Europe, Canada, and the northern United States were players in the Northern Coalition. Those nations were divided on many things but, so far, able to find common cause in staying alive. The southern arable zone was smaller, as it had been before the big melts, and it had even less land now. South America’s narrow tail was above water in some places, and parts of Africa were usable. Antarctic melting had changed the pattern of currents, and therefore rainfall, so that agriculture was pretty viable, with a lot of help, up to the Tropic of Capricorn.
Earth was alive. Her polar caps had almost vanished in the past hundred years, which was no surprise to anyone. The seas had risen, as predicted, and the coastline cities had moved inland, with predictable amounts of turmoil. The damage to the oceans would take centuries to heal, but Earth was still alive. For now.
Archer made note of shooting wars, the endless disputes that formed a band between lands that were still arable and watered and the ever-widening dry zones that girdled the planet below. So did Navigation.
“And the Coalition has spent considerable chunks of money on us,” Archer said.
The Northern Coalition had coaxed the UN into funding a great deal of the building of Kybele. Contributions were tax-deductible from anyone or any company in any UN signatory nation. A lot of private funding was involved as well, and then there was the lottery. The lottery had been key in keeping a sense of involvement alive in the hopeful.
Doughan put the incoming shuttle’s path on a wall screen, a white dot on a white line that stretched from China Station to Kybele. “When this last cargo gets here and leaves again, we’re done with boarders, and anyway I know the pilot. Went to school with him.
“These Seed Bankers just don’t give up,” Doughan said. “Leave Kybele where she is, right up here in her nice stable LaGrange orbit; Earth needs a safe biologic haven off-planet.” He vanished the diagram and looked again at the list of names on the Huerfano. “I don’t see Cash Ryan on the list.”
