The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

Helt didn’t say that. He couldn’t speak with authority about long-term relationships. The real thing was just not going to happen for him.

  But then he thought of the three of them together, Martin having sex with Nadia and Jerry good with that, or Jerry and Martin lovers, and of Nadia with two lovers at the same time. He didn’t know how Elena felt about open relationships and he knew at some point he’d have to ask her.

  He couldn’t stay in this place in his head a single second longer.

  Not Helt, the hopelessly heterosexual guy. Couldn’t go there.

  “What’s Martin working on?” Helt asked.

  “Long view stuff. Literally,” Jerry said. “He’s had a pet project for a couple of years, seeing if he can adapt human vision to the spectrum we’ll have at the new place. I mean, human eyes are really fine, but there’s a few things missing, infrared and so forth. He has the theory that we could train visual cortex neurons to see colors we don’t see, if the signals were morphed into a different frequency. Adaptation to low light levels—we’ll be living with a lot of those.”

  “Calloway seemed to think he was working on different ways to connect up prosthetic claws or something like that.”

  “That was last month,” Jerry said. “Rock-climber stuff. Grip and let go signals, brain to cleats. He sent it to some Earthside buddies to do up some prototypes. He could get rich on the patents, if the systems work out.”

  “Earthside. We’ll be so close for so long,” Helt said.

  “Close enough to reset Martin’s grippers for half-g climbing, once they’re up and working on Earth. Scuttle up the Petra cliffs in minutes and throw down water balloons, or other responsible shit like that. I like outsourcing,” Jerry said.

  Mena appeared on Helt’s screen. “I’ve asked Susanna to come to my house,” she said.

  Doughan’s sigil blinked as well. “I’ll wait for you at the Petra station,” he said. “Two hours from now. Mena, set the time for this.”

  Jerry got up and made for the door. “I’ll get after Cash Ryan’s data stash,” Jerry said. “If I start looking beady-eyed and evil, tell me, okay, Helt?”

  “I’ll do that,” Helt said.

  * * *

  He asked his interface for Giliam again. There was time to find out what Giliam could tell him and get to Petra.

  “Your office or mine?” Giliam Obrecht’s voice asked.

  Helt pulled up a visual and caught Giliam in a full yawn. He was walking across the agora and a trick of morning light turned his generous crop of carrot-red curls into a saintly halo. “Yours,” Helt said.

  “Come on, then.”

  Like Jim Tulloch, the ship’s in-person Legal Chief had chosen his office location so that people could pretend to be going somewhere else when they came to see him. Helt walked past the vacant tables on the agora and caught up with Obrecht in the Library lobby, a marble-floored, high-ceilinged expanse of calm, and followed him to an office suite on the second floor.

  A thick, intricately patterned gold-and-green rug, a view of the agora below, two big armchairs. Obrecht sat down in one of them. The chairs faced a wall screen that showed rows of books bound in leather and gilt.

  Obrecht’s bicycle spandex and layers of shirts didn’t quite match the ambient décor. He didn’t look like a lawyer. He looked like a large cherub. He was the same age as Helt.

  “I am hurt, hurt, I say, to be this far down your list,” Giliam Obrecht said. The cherub had a basso voice.

  “I’m sorry,” Helt said. “I’ve been scrambling.” Giliam didn’t look like his feelings were hurt. He looked delighted to find an opportunity to tease Helt about his tendency to apologize for anything and everything.

  “And I, barred from the inner circle, I’ve been carefully following only the public feeds. I’ve been noticing NSS has been spending what seems to be an excessive amount of time on this suicide. If that’s what it was.”

  “Not a suicide,” Helt said.

  Obrecht nodded, slowly. “I’ve seen no records of arrests. I’ve not been asked to represent anyone.”

  “That means you’ve had a few nights of undisturbed sleep to get ready for an onslaught,” Helt said.

  “And you haven’t. Okay, Special Investigator. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “How did you know I’m the Special Investigator?” Helt asked.

  “It’s in the minutes of the exec meeting Thursday morning. Along with the boilerplate of your job description.”

  Helt pulled out his interface and shut off the mike. The locator function would still know where he was. That was okay.

  “It’s quiet in here.” Giliam waved his arm around the room.

  “Has anyone asked you about providing legal counsel for the people Doughan wants to question?” Helt asked.

  “Not yet. Isn’t questioning people your job? And why isn’t Severo asking? I know his troops are out talking to people.”

  “Severo’s looking for people to talk to, mostly. Cash Ryan was a loner. And NSS is recording every encounter they get. There are no arrests as yet, on or off the record.”

  “If you’re recording, you don’t need one of us there. Can’t imagine why you’d think of it unless you were worried about what you’re doing. Are you worried? Is that why you’re here?”

  “Yes. I’m worried. Archer found some suspects for Doughan to focus on. There are seven people on board that Archer’s tagged as Seed Bankers.”

  “Seed Bankers? And Doughan thinks they’re involved in a murder? What are they, contract killers?”

  “Damned if I know,” Helt said. “All I know is that Doughan jumped on them as suspects and he wants to ask them about their connections to Cash Ryan.”

  “Helt, it would be most convenient of you to find a single murderer, not seven, please. We have three lawyers on board, and that’s all we have. Seven charges of—of what, Helt? Murder? Conspiracy to murder? We’re not set up to handle that at this point in time.”

  “I doubt you’ll be asked to represent any of them,” Helt said. “Doughan and the execs plan to send the case, and all the Seed Bankers, back to Earth.”

  “So that’s what’s bothering you,” Giliam said. He rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and looked down at the carpet.

  “Yes,” Helt said.

  “It bothers me, too. It can be handled like that, yes, but it may not be wise. I need time to think about this.

  “Jurisdiction. Venue. All this arbitrary go and stay ends once we’re moving,” Giliam said. “The switch to sovereignty is really quite arbitrary, actually.” He sighed. “No, we couldn’t ask for the rules on dismissal to change before we depart, could we? They do change at that instant.”

  He was talking to himself, his rumbling voice feeding Helt a few hints about his chain of thought, but not the whole picture.

  Giliam had been deeply involved in the wording and structure of Kybele’s constitution, a compilation of evidence-based structures gleaned from millennia of trials and errors. The successes and failures of any government that had ever recorded them on planet Earth had been examined and mined, beginning with strategies tried in Sumeria and ancient China and from then on, including the several attempts and failures in the restructuring of the UN.

  Kybele’s constitution was based in part on the protoype of the U.S. Constitution, with several major changes in the areas of franchise (universal in electing electors), qualifications for office (specific, and qualifying exams were part of that), and entitlements (Kybele would always provide basic levels of food and shelter and health care. She could not afford not to).

  At all levels, it included people who were chosen by lot, and there were strong inducements to do your public duty if your number came up.

  Its overwhelming concern was consent of the governed and its foundation was fear of governance run amok. And it was as brief as it possibly could be, for which many thanks to Giliam and his peers and predecessors.

  “We don’t have much time,” Helt said. “Five da
ys, counting this one.”

  “This is going to be terribly difficult, isn’t it?” Giliam asked.

  “Yes. Giliam, would you look at what Archer’s put together about these people?”

  “If you request this in your role as Special Investigator, then it’s an order,” Giliam said.

  Giliam had the expertise to sort out the Seed Banker finances and what they might mean. That meant he’d become part of the prosecution, not of defense, and that limited the ways Helt could use him. So be it.

  “It’s an order. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry. That’s twice in this conversation. You apologize too much, Helt.”

  “I’m sorry. Oh, damn.”

  “All Scandinavians apologize too much.”

  Giliam waved him out of the office.

  * * *

  Jerry in one office, Archer down the hall, and Helt in his, with a timer set to tell him when to leave for Petra and three screens up.

  Helt went to the biography he had on Susanna Jambekar for a quick review.

  He set searches for Seed Banker interactions and found football and not much else, and about twenty things he needed to search but maybe he could send those to Nadia. The third screen was archives of Elena’s childhood. He looked at a few baby and childhood pictures before he filtered those away and focused on interactions she had with the adults in her family. He wanted to find out how Elena responded to frustration, how she’d been taught to deal with anger.

  The damned timer beeped.

  * * *

  Doughan and Mena would influence this Seed Banker interview and be players in this Seed Banker interview. Mena’s interface said she’d gone to Stonehenge this morning, after a quick visit to Athens—probably to look in on the well-being of the new human baby, Helt figured. She had left the clinic at 0312 and she was back home now. Doughan’s interface had been firmly inside Doughan’s house during the night and he was on his way to Petra station now.

  The locations said he had worked at home all morning.

  At Petra station, Doughan greeted Helt with a curt nod. “I signed off on your announcement,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  Doughan didn’t look angry. Helt was a little surprised. The exec had probably viewed the data stream and seen for himself that rumors of murder were widespread. Helt didn’t know whether to worry that Doughan wasn’t showing any upset about it, or accept that the man didn’t fight reality when he knew it was there.

  They walked the Sunday morning street, bright imitation sunlight from the roof high above, joggers out on the walkways in this deep valley with its village carved into the rock walls on both sides of the river. Bare cliffs above waited to be honeycombed into dwellings as the generations passed. The palette was a spectrum of reds and golds, autumn leaves against black cliffs, their vivid glow mirrored in the glazed surface of the black river. Helt had a sudden, aching longing for the colors of limestone, sandstone, marble, granite, blue-gray sand beaches. Not here. Not ever again until someday, there, and he wouldn’t be around to see them.

  “She’ll know it was murder, then,” Doughan said. “If she didn’t hear it on her own, Mena will have told her. You ask the questions, IA.”

  “Why not you?” It was warm out here. Helt shrugged out of his windbreaker and slung it over one arm.

  “Because this investigation belongs to you and NSS.”

  “About that,” Helt said. “It would help me a lot if you let Severo know that information comes to me when he gets it. He wants to clear everything with you first. Don’t slow me down, Doughan. Please.”

  “I should have thought of that,” Doughan said. “Okay. I’ll tell him.”

  It was almost too easy. Helt felt a little hurt that he hadn’t had to battle for that particular piece of turf.

  “You’ll get all the reports anyway,” Helt said.

  “Yeah. I’m the Navigation exec, so I’m responsible for the performance of NSS, but from a different place. We missed the Seed Bankers. Archer found them. We should have.”

  “I should have,” Helt said.

  “You’re the go-to man for problems between divisions, and not in charge of any of them. The Seed Bankers aren’t an interdivision problem. I’m not sure who they should have belonged to.”

  They were a problem Helt hadn’t seen because he hadn’t looked for it. He could have; he had tools that might have worked.

  Helt had started to game interaction problems inside SysSu years ago, to search out nodes of irritation where efficiency dropped, where work slowed down, where work schedules got shifted to avoid someone or some problem. The early visuals had been ripples in a stream, then beds of sand where repulsions or attractions moved pebbles from place to place as if pushed by tiny ants. At first, he took his prototypes to Archer. Archer would glare at them for a while and then pick up his coffee mug and go walkabout. A question here, a nod of approval there, and most often the flow pattern around the perceived irritant returned to normal in days. Now variants of the program ran for Mena, for Doughan, for Severo. Helt’s own version of the Irritant Watcher ran for public spaces, non-work hours, where the divisions met and melded. The Seed Bankers hadn’t caused a ripple in any of them.

  “They’re an infrastructure problem, damn it. I made the faulty assumption that one of the secure pillars, one of the strongest bonds for us was the common goal of getting somewhere else,” Helt said. “It was a blind spot.”

  Every colonist had signed a contract that included an obligation of shared responsibility for the well-being of the ship and its journey, an edifice made of language. Venkie would have the linguist’s expertise to predict how the document might be interpreted after a hundred years of isolation. Isolation in a culture where even the definitions of up and down were already changed. Up, inward, central. Down, outward, peripheral.

  The Seed Bankers were a blind spot. There had to be other blind spots, things that no one was looking for. And if we set a watcher, Helt wondered, and if I end up being the watcher, the question remains, who watches the watcher?

  “Okay, so it’s your bad,” Doughan said. “Be prescient from now on. I’ll have Archer write it into your job description.”

  “Give me a sound database that predicts shifts in human moral imperatives and I’ll extrapolate,” Helt said.

  “You do that. You’ll have to build the database first, I take it.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Later,” Doughan said. “For now, you’ve been tagged as the behind-the-scenes ax man for the off-list, but the execs still have the job of sending people away. You don’t. They’ll hate us, not you. But I, for one, won’t lose sleep over the Seed Bankers. Sending them away is the only reasonable thing to do.” Doughan’s right foot took careful aim at a maple leaf on the path and punted it out of his way. It circled in the air and came back down inches away from its original position.

  “Is it?” Helt asked. “There’s going to be political fallout about this, whether it’s that one, or several, of the Seed Bankers faces murder charges, documented, and Earth has to deal with them, or one, or several, of them were sent away simply on suspicion of being Bad Guys, undocumented, because of membership in a lobbying group. Earth is not going to be able to slap our wrists for that, but they will want to.”

  “I know,” Doughan said. “I know. But you’ll get this sorted out, and send the facts along with the people. And until our doors are closed for good, we can send anyone back to Earth for any reason at all.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Helt said.

  “I know.” Doughan slowed his pace. They would be a little early, anyway. “However. This can of worms, this murder, is on your plate, IA Special Investigator. I’m just the Navigation presence while we interview this woman. I’m glad I’m not asking the questions. I’m scared of women.”

  Was he, really? Doughan had a history of one divorce, much earlier in his career. If he was looking for a partner here, now, Helt hadn’t heard any gossip about
it. Kybele was short on State Dinners and many other public spectacles, so choosing a companion for one wasn’t an issue. It was long on documentaries designed for Earth audiences, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Helt wasn’t sure women liked Doughan up close and personal, but he’d seen women who didn’t know him do that posture thing, a slight straightening of back and tucking down of chin, when Doughan came into a room. Women smiled at him a lot, and Doughan smiled back, a lot. Doughan didn’t fit “afraid of women” definitions as Helt knew them.

  “I’ve never seen evidence that you’re scared of women,” Helt said.

  “Let me put it this way,” Doughan said. “My past history suggests that at times I haven’t been scared enough. It was an ugly divorce, Helt.”

  “I’m sorry.” They walked on, quiet for a while.

  “What if I miss something?” Helt asked.

  “Then I’ll chime in.”

  Doughan might or might not have read Helt’s brief on Susanna Jambekar. He might or might not have noticed that Helt hadn’t said anything about her relationship with Yves. There was no reason Doughan would know about that unless he’d looked for it.

  “I’m dreading this interview,” Helt said.

  “Don’t make me doubt you,” Doughan said. “Don’t go soft. You have the job and you’ll do it well. That was the assumption Archer made, Mena and I made. Don’t prove us wrong.”

  Doughan seemed to be trying to bolster Helt’s confidence in himself, in his ability to do the job. A tiny, nagging suspicion rose in Helt’s mind. Doughan was distancing himself from the data stream on these Seed Banker interviews and Helt wondered why. And it seemed that he was trying to tell Helt he trusted him to do his job well.

  But the bastard had just called him a coward. Helt felt macho tropes try to take over his bloodstream. What did the guy want him to do? Go punch everybody out? Helt figured he would begin with Doughan. The tiny, nagging suspicion rose—they picked me because they think I can’t do it.

  But they were only steps away from Mena’s courtyard gate, and the concern that showed on Doughan’s face, the pleading, looked completely real.

  Helt rang the bell. “I yield to your wisdom. You’ve just showed me an effective motivational technique, or one of them. A challenge and then a call to battle, a variation on carrot and stick.”