by Sage Walker
“Cash Ryan was drugged. There was scope-and-speed in his bloodstream and in his stomach when he died.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means—it means he took some stuff or someone gave it to him, and it means we aren’t going to talk about it until morning. You look like hell.”
The next train slowed. Its door opened on an empty car. Taking drugs didn’t mean Ryan hadn’t played “jump off a tower and see if you live.” Really, it didn’t. Helt wasn’t really sleep deprived. Three hours last night, two this afternoon, that’s five. It should have been enough.
Ryan had been drugged when he died. Damn. Oh, damn.
“Thank you, Mena.”
“Good night, Helt,” Mena said.
9
Last Meal
A ladder, legs, a feminine rear in jeans with a knot of canvas tied at its waist, and from there on up Mena was hidden by the leaves of an apple tree.
“That you up there?” Helt asked, although he knew the curve of Mena’s ass and could have identified it in a lineup. Or he thought he could, anyway. He wondered if anyone had tried to ID people that way and wondered if it might be more accurate than looking at a row of faces.
“Just a few more and I’ll come down,” Mena said.
Uh-huh. She would pick every apple she could reach without tipping over backward.
His neck would get tired if he just stood there squinting up at the sun, so he looked for windfall on the ground. He shuffled an array of leaves and twigs with his foot and found a couple of brown saggy apples whose intact parts were red and green.
“What are these?” Helt asked.
“McIntosh. Do you want one?” Mena asked. She shifted on the ladder and Helt saw that the knot at her back was attached to an apple picker’s apron, a heavy thing bulging with picked fruit, a botanic pregnancy of sorts.
“Sure.”
He caught the tossed fruit, polished it on his sleeve, and bit in. The apple was sweeter than he expected and juicy, a New England autumn in one bite. He remembered the glory of sugar maple leaves in October, red oak and white oak in full color, white trunks of birch bright against the green-black of pine and hemlock, colors almost painfully vibrant in the muted brightness of a south-traveling autumn sun. He had scraped his knee that day, scrabbling in rattling leaves in colors he had never seen before, on a long-forgotten journey with his father. His blood had been no more red than a maple leaf beside him and he had not cried.
His mother was nearby, in that memory. In that memory, he knew she would have been proud of him. It was before a shard of granite slammed into her brain and left her unable to love him.
Something large, warm, and hairy nudged Helt’s shoulder. It smelled like horse, and he liked the smell of horse.
It was not a tall horse, but its eye was as big as an egg and right next to his ear. It had the damnedest mane, pale at the base and tipped with black, clipped neatly into ridges like a dragon’s crest. It was a fjord horse, a small draft horse or a big pony, depending on how you felt about the appropriate size for horses.
“Who’s this?” Helt asked. He raised his apple to shoulder height. The horse lipped it politely and then lifted it away from his palm. The orchard was so quiet that the breaking of the apple sounded like a pistol shot. After some determined crunching, the horse explored Helt’s palm with its lips and, finding nothing but a little apple juice, gave an exasperated whuff.
“Eple. That’s her name.” Mena backed down the ladder. Eple’s long, cream-colored back brushed Helt’s arm as the horse moved toward Mena’s apron.
Mena tugged at her apron strings.
“Could you help me with this?”
“Sure,” Helt said. The knot came loose with a few tugs. Helt took the apron from her. It didn’t hurt as much to be close to her as it had once. Helt chided himself for being fickle. A new woman was taking away old pain, unless she was going to cause more.
The apron strings made a handy strap, so he slung the weight over his shoulder. Mena picked an apple off the top of the batch. The horse noticed this.
“A bruised one, just for you.” Mena fed the mare an apple. “No more, pretty one. Enough. Come with us.”
Mena led horse and human to a gate, not the one Helt had entered by, which was people-sized, but a bigger one. Beyond it, in the great shallow bowl of Kybele’s croplands, black plowed fields were furred with the first sprigs of winter wheat. In a circle of vivid green winter rye, the monoliths of Stonehenge guarded their bed of parent stone. The remnants of this morning’s mist blurred the horizon.
Someone whistled and Eple trotted toward the sound, her shod hoofs almost silent on the black gravel of the road. Her back was almost white in the sun and then shadows from the latticework of the pillars of Stonehenge tower, high above her, marked it with stripes. Helt saw a human leading a matching horse, far enough in the distance to seem that the road was climbing. Mena and Helt turned the other way, toward Stonehenge tower. A cluster of low buildings and tall barns huddled close to the central shaft and its elevator.
“Why are you breeding fjord horses?” Helt asked. “To get a harvest in if the power goes out?”
“We have more people than horses,” Mena said. “But if I ran out of willing human labor, sure.” Mena gave very literal answers to questions, sometimes, but then, she was used to people whose knowledge of farming was all theory and no reality. “Eple and her partner Eikenøtt are breeding stock; the breed is thousands of years old and a good size for this climate. They live a good life, those two, and their trainer has willing apprentices.”
“For down the line.”
“Down the line.” Mena frowned. “They are test subjects, bless them; big, long-lived vertebrates—they can live twenty or more years—good candidates for testing radiation damage therapies. So far, so good; they are six years old and healthy, and we have harvested a few embryos.”
A breeze came up, cool air from the poles moving down beneath the sunny air rising over the sun-warmed fields. To say that the Biosystems Headquarters complex in Center was unassuming was an understatement. Mena’s office was in a low building that connected a lab complex to a barn. The barn was a well-kept barn, but if you closed your eyes in Mena’s office you could get an unmistakable whiff of hay and manure.
“May I have the apples?” Mena asked.
“Sure.” Helt stuffed a couple of them in the pocket of his jacket. “Carrier fee.”
Mena smiled at him and carried her apron through the lab-side door. When she came back she closed her office door and braced her shoulders against it, her hands behind her.
“This is what I know about the scope-and-speed in Ryan’s blood. The levels were high but not toxic; scopolamine ran 400 picograms per mil; dextroamphetamine 40 nanograms per ml; that’s in high therapeutic range. Scope-and-speed is an old mix for motion sickness and it’s in Medical’s formulary. Scopolamine for nausea plus dextroamphetamine for alertness is the original formula. You should talk to Elena or Calloway about their experiences with the drug if they’ve used it, or seen it used. I haven’t.”
“Why didn’t you send me to them first, Mena?”
“Because Elena is analyzing the contents of Ryan’s stomach this morning, and I want you to be here. There are so many possibilities—” She was facing him, but her eyes looked through him or past him, focused on grim scenarios he couldn’t see, histories he didn’t know. A breath, and she returned to the present, to the now.
“Let’s take the stairs,” she said.
He didn’t want to see a stomach on a plate, or what was in it. He wanted to follow Eple up the road and play in sunlight, at least for an hour or two.
* * *
The ceiling of the Level One corridor was four stories above their heads, this near the tower and the elevator. The plan was to build the Stonehenge complex from the top down, but for now, one-story construction, entered from corridor level, served for the labs and the few dwellings. The four-story ceilings over the crops tha
t grew behind closed doors, far down the corridor, gave plenty of height even for fair-sized trees.
Elena’s lab was cut into the rock of Level One, close to the elevator, close to the stairs. There was no stomach on a plate to make Helt feel squeamish, but there was a screen on the wall where small objects floated in a clear yellowish fluid, pushed around by a giant, blunt probe.
It was actually quite tiny, a needle with a sharp point. Elena sat bent over a binocular microscope, guiding the probe through a thin layer of liquid on a glass slide. She lifted her head and pushed her chair back from the lab table. The projection of fluid on the wall screen continued to tremble, Brownian motion setting up tiny currents that nudged its contents from one place to another.
A greeting is an assessment. Elena looked at Mena first and then at Helt, her attention on each of them in turn. Everyone does this, Helt knew; everyone gauges the status of someone who comes near, to make a guess if they friend or foe, to see if they are happy or angry, if they are in a mood to hug or to hit. But because he knew Elena was a trained physician, as well as a geneticist, he felt the texture of his skin and the little veins in the whites of his eyes and the ease of his breathing had been thoroughly evaluated.
His own assessment was that Elena looked rested this morning, and that her amber eyes were bright and her skin, in the lab’s light, was a color he couldn’t name, but it looked like satin and it was beautiful. There was a hint of golden-pink color under the pale tan of her face. The color was similar to the olive of Mena’s Greek Mediterranean skin, but it was a shade or two lighter and, well, younger. He deliberately did not look at Mena, did not want to analyze the effects of ten years’ difference between her skin and Elena’s. He didn’t want to be rude.
“Good morning,” Elena said, and she offered her visitors a nod of approval. Helt felt he had passed his physical. “Would you care to sit down? I have another chair here somewhere.”
Mena reached for a chair Helt hadn’t noticed at the table behind them, rolled it over and motioned for Helt to sit. Elena stepped back and leaned against the edge of the table where she’d been working. She wore a lab coat, a soft, faded red one, and Helt admired the way it tightened over the slight indentation where hip met table. Not too much flesh, obviously well toned, but soft enough to dent.
Mena took the chair Elena vacated. “I don’t think he liked veggies, Mena,” Elena said. “I didn’t find carrots or spinach floating around.” Mena had a tense musculature, as always, but Helt thought he sensed a slight lessening of tension in the muscles of her back.
The screen blinked abruptly and the fluid was replaced by a list of names and levels. “Here’s what we have so far from the liquid analysis. He ate a few fruits; there’s apricot and grape residue. The grapes probably weren’t wine; there are no wood tannins. Probably raisins.”
“Or really cheap jug wine,” Helt said, to make Mena bristle. Mena had strong feelings about good wines.
“Sheep protein, yeast, and wheat, so probably lamb and bread. There’s turmeric, it would look bright yellow in a dish. Some other spices, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin …
“And the alcohol he drank is certainly there. It was probably gin; there are some juniper oils. And then there’s scopolamine and dexedrine. My best estimate is that he ate three or four hours before he was found.”
“That’s as close as you can get?” Helt asked.
“I think so,” Elena said. “There are so many variables. If there’s a lot of fat in a meal, it stays in the stomach longer. Alcohol is absorbed through the stomach lining itself so the concentrations often match blood levels pretty closely. Ryan’s did. The scope-and-speed would have speeded up the gastric emptying reflex, but stress would have slowed it down. Stress, anxiety, fear; they change everything.”
Mena seemed lost in reading the wall screen.
“Mena. Something about carrots worries you. What is it?” Helt asked.
“I was thinking about vegetable residue, not carrots,” Mena said. “The substrates—the basic compounds—of amphetamines and scopolamine come from plants. Scopolamine is a belladonna alkaloid. Belladonna is a plant, but the compound can be grown in many plants. I didn’t think this Ryan person would have chewed raw Datura or made himself a toxic dose of Mormon tea to get his speed. If he had, he would probably have vomited and been too sick to jump off a chair, much less a tower. But I had to wonder if someone is growing those plants, or others, for a private lab. Not that it’s illegal, but nobody’s applied for a license yet.”
“And if they do, Kybele wants the tax revenue,” Helt said.
“Let me run some signatures,” Elena said. She suctioned some fluid from a jar into little vials, set them in a cabinet thing, and entered some parameters.
Those hands again. Helt couldn’t stop watching them. So beautiful, so sure. Mena didn’t look at her or at Helt; she searched screens while she waited, looking for?
“There aren’t any signature proteins for Datura or Ephedra,” Elena said. “His drugs were purified to at least a kitchen-lab level.”
“And the compound was dexedrine, not meth,” Mena said. “Meth is easier to cook, so it shows up in homemade drugs. So he took drugs because he wanted to. Or he was drugged by someone else.”
Jim Tulloch ran recreational drug assays on his patients if he thought it might be helpful to them. The common ones were legal, licensed, quality checked, and available over the counter, although routine drug assays were part of the requirements for any job on ship that required motor skills. Don’t work when you’re stoned was an old tradition, and a sound one. Kybele enforced it. The tradition was an old one.
“Now we know that much,” Helt said. “It doesn’t help, though. And we know he managed to jump off Athens tower, with or without assistance from someone else. That’s what we know.” It wasn’t enough. The suicide versus murder question remained unanswered.
“I think it’s safe to say the drugs should not have killed him and that the fall did,” Elena said. “Did Severo find my fingerprints up there, Helt? Or his?”
Helt didn’t want to tell her.
“Yours are,” Mena said. “So are traces of lots of other people. Severo’s tech is still sorting.”
Ryan’s fingerprints were remarkably absent. Helt knew Mena knew it. Were there gloves in Ryan’s clothing list? Helt wished he had a screen inside his eyes, so that he could blink and look, right now.
“And I’m still a murder suspect,” Elena said. “I don’t like the feeling.” Her eyes showed hurt and an instant’s bewilderment.
Helt rolled his chair closer to Elena and turned it so he could face her. “My dear Dr. Maury, I’m a murder suspect, too. So is Mena. What sort of luck put you on Athens tower then, anyway?”
She looked closely at his face, intent on reading something from his expression, or maybe just looking at his nose or his eyebrows. “I was up there late because I was at work late because I was noodling around with a gene sequence in an arctic char. That’s a fish.”
Helt had eaten a few of them. They were pink-fleshed, but not salmon. He liked salmon better. Neither would be part of his future, unless enough people requested them and aquaculture could get some good strains adapted.
“But I remembered it was time to check tower flora, so I went up to smack Petri dishes against the walls and the floor, to see which little bacteria and fungi have managed to colonize the towers. We follow that over time.”
“Is there anything interesting in the batch?” Helt asked.
“I don’t know yet. The process isn’t that rapid. Things reproduce at their own pace. Some microcritters, fungi, for instance, can take weeks or even months to grow in culture media.”
“But you logged your samples into the lab,” Helt said.
“I did.”
“Time and date.”
“Yes.”
Which would be a great alibi, if anyone could prove she didn’t have the samples stashed, ready to log in at a convenient time. But it would have been
weird if she had planned and executed a murder and then managed to get herself on camera in order to be the only human in camera proximity to the victim shortly after he died.
“Mena, are you covered for the hour?” Helt asked.
She shook her head. “I was at home, but I have no proof of it. The reports from NSS says there’s a lot of time to cover before Ryan’s death.”
“There is. Cash Ryan left his shift at 1500. No one reports seeing him after that until the SysSu techs found his body at 2044. Severo and his crew are doing everything they can to fill in those five hours—no, only a long three, because it takes ninety minutes to get back to Nav offices and his work team was with him—but we don’t know yet where Cash Ryan was after that, or who knew him; don’t know anyone who even saw him after he left work. We’ve scheduled a psychiatric autopsy, but Jim—Dr. Tulloch—tells me he can’t do a good one unless he has more personal data, more narratives, for the guy.”
“I have none to offer you about his life on Kybele, because he never tried to approach me. Perhaps that’s odd in itself,” Elena said.
She could be lying. Helt, you idiot, you know she could be lying and you don’t want to believe it.
“But you didn’t approach him, either.”
“No. I don’t test well on social skills. I didn’t really want to talk to him and I didn’t want to think about how I would keep him at a distance if I did.”
Helt was not finding her social skills to be inadequate in any way. The name for that fine blend of gold and red in her cheeks came to him. It was apricot. He wanted to see if it deepened when she blushed, or ran, or became aroused in other ways. He wanted to know her. He didn’t want her to be someone he’d met briefly, and then sent away forever.
The golden apples of the sun were apricots, someone had said. There were apricots in Cash Ryan’s last meal. Helt thought he knew where he might have eaten them.
