The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  The group reached the doors that led back to the agora and stepped out into a light that had deepened to the deep blue of late afternoon. Tints of rose edged up from the sky’s horizons. Helt felt a mild claustrophobia vanish in the wide space and the cool air.

  Wednesday was when the cameras went offline and hid Cash Ryan’s murder. So, Archer and Mena were visiting each other that night. Helt remembered Archer shuffling into SysSu in cardigan and slippers, hardly a costume for wooing a woman like Mena, if that’s what the old boy had been doing. What a concept. Archer Pelham was getting on toward seventy.

  “Anybody want a good stiff drink?” Doughan asked. “That’s also traditional, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll buy,” Archer said. “As an appreciation of your stellar performance in a required, but hopefully not-often-practiced, executive role.”

  “Nothing like a script. A good one obviates the need to think.”

  “Impressive, all the same,” Archer said. “Helt, you coming?”

  Helt’s pocket interface was in his hand and it showed that the announcement of time and place for Ryan’s interment was right there in Community Events, next to listings of Friday evening entertainments of various kinds. Another keystroke showed that Elena was still in her Stonehenge laboratory.

  “Uh, thanks. I’d join you but there’s something I have to do. Good evening,” Helt said.

  He started off toward Athens station. If Elena wouldn’t see him, he would try to catch up on other things that the day’s events had pushed down the list.

  Surely Archer hadn’t made an attempt at an alibi for Mena and himself. It was just too clumsy.

  “… Book of Common Prayer,” he heard Archer say.

  “Nope. Army Chaplain’s manual, modified,” Doughan answered.

  12

  Comfort

  The main corridor of Level One in Stonehenge stretched into the distance, its length marked by lights at the entrances to underground farms. In them, individual dwellings were centered in crowded plots of food crops. The people who grew them wanted to stay close to their gardens, day and night, and the architects hadn’t argued.

  Near the elevator, doorways were closely spaced. The door to Elena’s suite of labs was closed.

  “Elena?” he asked the door.

  She buzzed it open and came to meet him, backlit by the open door to her office, walking through the dimly lighted atrium of her lab complex in a flood of music, voice and strings, rich and somber. She still wore the dull red lab coat he’d seen this morning but the balloon hat was gone, replaced by a headband light, turned off.

  “How’s Mena?” she asked.

  “She’s drinking with the other execs,” he said.

  “That’s good. She dreaded this.”

  “How are you?”

  Kyrie eleison, a baritone voice sang in long-voweled plainsong, a plea rising over rumbling sorrow, eleison.

  “I didn’t want to be where Mena is. So I’m here,” Elena said.

  “Working?”

  She sighed. “Housekeeping. I’ve learned not to try head work when I’m distracted by—other things.”

  Her voice was dull and tired.

  “Fewer errors that way,” Helt said.

  “Yes. Now you know he was murdered. Calloway said he would tell you about the cooling.”

  “He did.”

  “Why are you here? What do you want from me?” She crossed her arms over her chest, her hands gripping her arms so hard that it must hurt. “Did you come see how a murderess responds to the funeral of her old lover?”

  Yes, in part, he had. But he wouldn’t have come here for only that; not to satisfy a voyeurism that could only be ugly and cruel. He had come because he didn’t want her to face this night alone, no matter what had happened.

  “Did you bring a BCI rig? Saline pads? You’ll see a spike at P300 if I see his face. You know I knew him. But that’s so primitive I’m sure you have something more sophisticated in mind. A special set of visuals, perhaps, tailored from what you learned from me last night.”

  Helt looked beyond the goading and saw outrage mixed with hurt and fear, saw a trapped animal attacking a cage. He didn’t want her to hurt like this.

  “I came here to offer comfort, if I can.”

  “Comfort? When you come here to tell me you’ve found something, somewhere, that removes my name from your list of suspects, then I’ll be comforted. Am I alibied yet? Am I?”

  “No,” he said. “Can you help me do that?”

  She lifted her head and those amber eyes scanned his face as if to memorize every detail of it, from eyelash to chin stubble. “Dear God. I think you mean it.”

  “I do,” Helt said.

  Elena turned away. “There’s no proof I can give you that I didn’t kill the man, nothing recorded, nothing to show except my trip down that elevator.”

  “There must be something else. Somewhere.”

  “I’ve tried to think. I was here, alone, in these labs. I’ve looked at the lab stamps on those samples I carried down from the tower but they only show when I filed them in the incubators, not when I took the plates out of the lab. I went home when I finished work. I’ve relived that evening in so many different ways, where I was, who might have seen me or heard me. But I was alone, until Calloway called me for the autopsy.”

  “We’ll find something.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Something.”

  She turned her back to him, and the line of her neck curving down to meet her broad shoulders was a powerful and lovely line, even if covered by the faded rough cotton of her work coat. She stared at the atrium and looked from one lab door to another. “I should close down in here. I’m tired and I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll help,” Helt said.

  The music switched tempo, a jazz drumbeat, pianoforte, bass guitar. Christe eleison, the voice sang, meandering through major and minor keys with each iteration.

  “There’s not much to do,” Elena said.

  “May I look over your shoulder?” Helt asked.

  “These are just labs. You’re a curious bastard. Explorer type, right?”

  “I am that.” He was an explorer of his own senses, at least. Because he lived in his flesh and no matter how good a simulation is, to ski fresh powder is a different experience than observing someone else doing it. The totality of the physical experience, the ultrafine bite of ice crystals on a cheek, the transcendent clarity of frozen air, thin, breathless, air-hungry, the flex of muscle, the reassuring bite of edge on snow was a total immersion in a time and place, but that reality was gone forever. Sometimes the loss of the mountains woke him in the middle of the night. Sometimes he knew what he had left behind.

  For skiing, add a gambler’s rush of fear; the cost of a single error could be so high. A man might fall very far and be hurt very badly.

  Elena’s music glided into an intricate counterpoint, flute against flute; its tempo almost giddy.

  She went to a door that led into a lab where racks of tubes and stacks of Petri dishes stood cloistered behind the glass doors of incubators, where hoods and sinks and light microscopes and rows of reagents lined the counters.

  Elena turned out lights and then the darkness glowed with little pips of color, indicator lights for processes Helt knew only in theory, some of them blinking offbeat, some in unplanned synchrony with the pervasive music.

  “See how pretty?” she asked him. “Night lights so the germs won’t have bad dreams.”

  “Anthropomorphic fantasy, my dear Dr. Maury?”

  “Certainly not. I know when the little guys are happy,” she said, with an absolutely straight face. She closed that door and two more. The next one was doubled, like an airlock, and the exit from it was solid black with a red warning sign.

  INFRARED PROTOCOL BEYOND THIS POINT

  “What’s that for?” Helt asked.

  “Multicellular embryos. Daylight, sunlight, stimulates eye formation. You get bug-eyed monsters, for real. The wombs are UV s
hielded and we have lighted stations where we work if we take them out for any reason. But if we’re not working in there, we keep the room dark.” Elena pushed some buttons inside the light-lock cubicle and closed the outer door.

  “In vitro babies?” Helt asked.

  “Some of the embryos are human, yes. We take them to the blastocyst stage. We don’t have the tech to go farther yet and when we do … I’m not so sure. Someone would have to convince me that the whole complex process of a nine-month pregnancy isn’t worth the trouble. Hormonal factors, bonding, and all that. There’s evidence that the mothers of preemies who are machine-grown, essentially, for weeks or months … the relationship is not the same for mother or child, but the parameters of what’s different are elusive, hard to measure.”

  She vets every embryo, Mena had said. Therefore, as part of that vetting, she destroys the ones that fail her tests.

  Beneath a glissando of flutes, in this humid, warm air, the quiet white noise of humming machines tended the examined lives in Elena’s care, and Elena, the living, lush inhabitant of an archetype called Great Mother, stood before him.

  A man might fall very far.

  “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  “Your headband,” Helt said.

  “Oh. Infrared, for the embryo lab.” Elena pulled her headlight off and put it in her pocket before she took off her lab coat and hung it near the door. The lab coat had covered a deep red shirt, unbuttoned far enough to reveal a hint of cleavage. Elena grabbed a dark jacket from the rack.

  “Can we bring the music? I like it.” Helt said.

  “Sure,” Elena said.

  In the corridor, the bubble of sound transited to vocal, Kyrie eleison, the solo voice keening high in its register over a heavy rock beat. Eleison, an ethereal chorus echoed in seeming distance as they stepped on the train. They were alone. The music ended when they sat down.

  “Was that Greek?” Helt asked.

  “Dutch. Tease von Lear. I don’t want to go to Athens,” Elena said.

  Helt glanced at the screen on Elena’s interface, and Tease von Lear became Thijs van Leer. “I was ready to buy you wonderful food and intoxicating wine.”

  “I’ll settle for packaged homestyle and house red in the Petra canteen.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to run into Mena and the others.”

  “Okay.”

  They were the only passengers. The trains were designed to a population that wouldn’t exist for a long time. Some of the seats were arranged in fours, two facing forward and two back, with a table between. Someday, the tables would vanish. All the seats would be turned forward and the spacing between them would shrink. People would know the taste of each other’s breath. Not yet.

  Helt stretched his legs in front of him. Elena stared out the window at the passing kilometers of slick, barren black stone, and all was quiet save for the hiss of wheels on rail. Her blink rate was high, fighting fatigue or maybe tears. Helt suspected both. But he could feel her relaxing beside him. He wanted to slip his arm around her shoulders and let her rest against him, feel the weight of her head against his chest, but he didn’t.

  “Blank slate,” Elena said.

  “The walls?”

  She managed a little smile. “The world.”

  “What would you put here?”

  “On the walls? Beautiful things…”

  Whatever she was going to say segued into a stifled yawn. The train began to descend the grade into Petra station.

  “I wouldn’t have the courage,” she said. “So easily marred, so difficult to restore.”

  “The world?” Helt asked.

  “The tunnel.”

  * * *

  The décor in the Petra canteen was split, laminated bamboo and the food was continental, if by continental you meant, pick a continent, and there will be one entrée from it on the night’s dinner menu, more or less. Elena didn’t even raise an eyebrow when Helt brought a full carafe of house red to the canteen table. She ate her paella like a good girl, down to the last grain of rice. She drank her first well-filled glass of wine while Helt kept pace on food intake with his lamb tagine.

  Compared to Earth below, they ate like billionaires. Meat was a luxury for the few. Kybele kept live animals, and ate them, a food chain cost outweighed by the need to perpetually harvest good tissue against the certainty of radiation damage. But still, every meal here was a sacrament of sorts.

  Elena sipped at her second glass of good, sturdy dark red, thank you, Mena, while Helt shelled pistachios for her and dropped them in her palm. They hadn’t said much, little bits of chitchat, wry observations on the other Friday night diners. Many of them were single, some partnered for the evening, or the weekend, or lengths of time as yet unknown.

  “There’s a different energy in here,” Elena said. “I mean, different from most evenings. More people sitting together. More talk.”

  “Gearing up for the big move,” Helt said. “Leaving Earth orbit is a marker.”

  “It’s not that far away,” Elena said. “Do you worry about it much?”

  “Sure. Renunciations, final good-byes, points of no return, all that. It’s a biggie, but we’ll wake up the morning after and still be able to ignore the latest scandals in Denver and Jakarta and watch today’s game in Barcelona.”

  “Is your family giving you a hard time about it?” Elena asked.

  “Not really,” Helt said. He wanted to leave it at that, but she kept looking at his face. “My dad’s gone. Mom?” His mother had gone away on business when he was young. She came back as someone who didn’t know him. “We talk, remote. We’ve done that for years.”

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  “No. You?”

  Elena smiled. “I’m an only child, but I grew up in an intentional family. There are three generations at home now, so there’s always somebody to talk to and somebody who is willing to distract you if you’d rather not talk to one or the other at the moment.”

  “How many people?” Helt asked.

  “I think … around thirty? But only seven or eight in residence at one time. A good thing, too. Sometimes several batches show up at the same time, and that gets really noisy.” Elena was smiling at old memories.

  The idea of that many people who had grown up together, who had aunts and uncles and cousins, who were young together and got old together, was one Helt hadn’t thought through.

  He’d learned to make friends fast, but once they were gone, they were gone. It was part of his father’s travel. Doughan said he acted like a military brat. Military brats, hell, military people, Doughan said, made friends fast. When they moved on, they tried to leave the impression of friendship even if they didn’t like the people they were leaving, because someday they might meet up again. Helt had sort of done that, but he had never known whether it was a good or a bad thing.

  “What do you do with newcomers?” Helt asked.

  “We pretend they’ve been around forever. We pretend they share our memories and know our—traditions? I guess that’s what they’ve become, little things over the years, shared jokes and remembered griefs. Eventually, they do, because they’ve added some.”

  Helt wanted that. No, he wanted to have the sense of self that could come from that, but then he’d be a different Helt.

  “Will they miss you?” he asked.

  “Every one of them. I’ll miss them, too. But they love me, and I love them. They’re rooting for me, Helt.”

  Elena covered a combination smile and yawn with one hand.

  “You didn’t sleep last night,” Helt suggested.

  She shook her head as if to clear it. “Wrong. Didn’t sleep two nights.”

  “I’ll walk you home.”

  She shook her head again. “I’m not sleepy. I’m tipsy. That’s different.”

  Uh-huh. She was both, although food and wine had wakened some buried reserve of tightly wound energy. “Stay right there,” Helt said. “I’ll get go-cups.�
��

  She had finished her dinner like a good girl, so Helt cleared the table like a good boy and took the dishes away. He poured the rest of the wine into cups, and brought them back to her.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “I want to walk for a while.”

  They left the canteen, cups in hand, and paused at the edge of the shopping area that surrounded the station. Beyond its roof, the cliffs of Petra rose steep and high. The sky over them was programmed for waxing moonlight. It lighted the bridges that arched the river and whitened the leaves on trees in the courtyards.

  “How well do you know this place?” Elena asked.

  “Petra? I know how to get home. Lady, you don’t get to win the workaholic competition with me without a fight. I get off the train, I grab food if I’m too tired to cook. I stagger to bed.”

  “You’re in fairly good shape for a nerd,” she said.

  “Sometimes I go up to Center and wander around the wilderness to look for some of the new creatures Biosystems turns loose up there. When I need to think about things, I climb rocks, or trees. Keeps up upper body strength. That’s working, right?”

  “Do you brachiate?”

  “Heh. Yes. It’s a quirk of mine. But I stick with one tree at a time. No swinging from one to the other. I’m a cautious man.” He tried to be, and knew sometimes he wasn’t. “Your muscle tone is not shabby for a workaholic, if I may say so.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I do stoop labor for Mena. I weight-lift boxes of cabbages and things, part of the job. And I wander around and look at rocks. Seeking the animal in the mineral.”

  “Bio-po-morph-izing,” Helt made the word up on the spot, “our nickel-iron. I suspected as much.”

  “Give me lichen and I will make loam from sand.”

  They were past the last of the houses, one of them as yet only a rectangular maw of shadow in the cliff wall. The street became a path of flat stones set in the black sand that bordered the river. Nothing was planted here yet. Stone, water, air, and darkness existed here, and that was all. The canyon was a preview of where humans would first live on Nostos, a canyon with a water supply that could be purified, a roof over it where air could be filtered, a testing ground for what could and could not be grown in the new place. Dwelling in caves by rivers was an ancient strategy. Its efficacy was proven.