The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  “There are more of these,” Helt said. “Twenty-seven instances, total. You say you didn’t talk to him again.”

  “I didn’t!” Susanna lifted her head and met his eyes again.

  “You didn’t see him again.”

  “I did not see him! I did not talk to him!”

  “He was stalking you, Susanna. How did you not know it?”

  She tried so hard to read Helt’s face. “How despicable,” she whispered.

  “What?” Helt asked.

  “You make it difficult for me to be sorry he’s dead. But I did not know! I would have gone to Security if I had known.” Righteous anger lent weight to her every syllable. Righteous anger is a secure place to be.

  “I’m sure you would have.” Helt propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and tented his hands, fingertips together. It was a gesture Archer sometimes used. “Susanna, I believe you. I believe that you did not know you were being stalked. I am telling you that everyone who had any contact with Cash Ryan, however minimal, will be asked where they were on the evening he died. You will be asked to document that time for us.”

  And where had she been? She would be reviewing the evening of Ryan’s death now, wondering if she’d been alone, if she’d been on a public camera somewhere, if Yves had been with her and could back up her story. But he hadn’t been, not for all of the missing hour. He’d been making his plea to Helt for part of it.

  “We are reasonably sure that more than one person was involved in Cash Ryan’s murder. We don’t know if anyone else was stalked by him. You’re the only person we’ve found.” That was not quite true. Helt was almost certain Cash Ryan had kept close tabs on Elena, but in ways that public cameras hadn’t found. Yet. “We’re learning that he was an odd man, perhaps a dangerous one. Perhaps dangerous to the ship. We’re worried about sabotage, about funding, transfers of money, things that may have required more than one person to accomplish.”

  Helt looked beyond his fingertips and focused on her eyes. He watched her eyes widen as her comprehension of what he had just said struck home.

  He had just told Susanna he knew about the money and she must be thinking he was keeping his knowledge secret. She was building possibilities about his silence, about what he could or would do or had already done with information that would change her life. He felt her terror, a shadow in the room. She had to be waiting for a question about the Seed Banker money in her account. She had to be praying that no one knew about it, and now this death, her connections to the man who died, brought attention to her that she surely didn’t want.

  He could ask her anything now, prompt her to make any response he wanted to hear.

  He had never had this sort of power over anyone, not a lover, not an enemy. Sitting in the chair next to Susanna, a woman he had loved observed him closely, and he knew that even in the strivings of sex, in the art of orgasm delayed or hastened, Mena had been less helpless than the stranger he questioned now.

  Shiva danced with transcendent glee to the drum of the pulse in Helt’s ear. Conquer this or embrace it. Now you know. This feeling is only a hint of what’s available to you.

  Mena’s good coffee became a nauseating chemical presence in his gut. Helt let his hands fall to his lap. “I’m sorry. I believe what you’ve told us. I’m worried for you. I’m worried for all of us. I’ll want to talk to you again, but this is enough for now.”

  Mena looked out at the courtyard and got to her feet. “Someone’s at the gate.” Mena placed Susanna’s interface in her hand. Susanna looked at it as if she had never seen it before. Her eyes followed Mena as she went to the door, opened it with a jerk, and closed it firmly behind her.

  Doughan unfolded himself from his chair with deliberate slowness and stood. “Miss Jambekar. I am sorry we had to meet in circumstances like this. I would like to tell you that everyone on the ship appreciates your valuable work.”

  Doughan meant it, Helt was sure, but the unspoken part of that statement was something like, “We’ll miss you when you’re gone.” Helt got to his feet. Susanna took her cue and rose as well. Her dazed eyes darted to the courtyard and back to the men in the room. She did not look at Helt’s face, or at Doughan’s.

  Helt heard the click of Mena’s shoes on the courtyard stone, coming back to the door.

  “It’s Yves,” Mena said. “I’ll take you to him.”

  Doughan and Helt stood aside as Mena walked past them, took Susanna’s hand, and led her away.

  20

  Mena and Doughan

  Doughan went to the window and scanned Mena’s courtyard as if it were enemy territory. He held his right hand behind his back, like a reverse Napoleon. “What about this boyfriend?” he asked.

  “His name is Yves Copani. He’s an overqualified welder on David II’s miner crew. He’s an architect, among other things.”

  “What other things?” Doughan began to pace, three steps from the window to the door and back again.

  “He’s a sculptor and an acute observer of the influence of geometry and habitat on human interaction.”

  “Is he a friend of yours?” Doughan found a water spot on Mena’s window and rubbed it away with his thumb.

  “I met him the night Ryan was killed,” Helt said. “He came to ask how he could stay on board with Susanna.”

  “But he’s on contract.”

  * * *

  “Yes, he is. I’ve seen some of his work.” A minor piece, worked the full height of the Petra cliff. “My advice to him was to take a portfolio to David II.”

  “And what will be your recommendation to David II?” Doughan asked.

  “I think we need him,” Helt said.

  Doughan left the window and took the three steps back to the door. “That good, eh?” He opened the door for Mena.

  “That good.”

  “I think she’ll be all right,” Mena said. She walked past him and leaned down to the screen, which was frozen on a view of Susanna in half stride at the threshold of the opening door of the train. “Enough,” she told it. It went dark. Beside it, the untouched pastries waited on their tray. Doughan grabbed one. Mena handed him a napkin and rolled the stand to the back of the room. “I have no idea what she’ll tell Yves. Sit down, both of you.”

  Helt did. Doughan went to the window again, munching baklava and lost in some private reverie far away from this room and its inhabitants. “Mena, you know her and we don’t,” Helt said. “I thought she was telling the truth, that she didn’t know she was being stalked. Do you?”

  “Is that all the information you have about this stalking?” Mena settled herself in her chair. “Come back, Doughan. Stop fidgeting. You’re making me nervous.” Mena didn’t look nervous. She looked determined and patient and durable. The hollows under her eyes were deeper than Helt remembered. An inverted parenthesis of frown lines was beginning to show itself between her eyebrows, tiny lines. Helt’s fingers didn’t remember them, although they remembered tracing the silken wing of her eyebrow, the delicate softness of her temple. He didn’t remember seeing those lines in the harvest tent so long ago. Yesterday, when Elena was there. Mena’s relaxed calm seemed to be a veneer of determination and patience over what looked like crushing fatigue.

  “That’s all,” Helt said. “I searched for captures that show Cash Ryan near her door, in groups, concerts or the bars and so forth. I looked for her near his quarters as well.”

  “Really,” Mena said. “Near his quarters. I hadn’t thought about that. It had to be looked at. Of course it would.”

  “I scanned for messages, of course, but those are never private and Ryan wasn’t stupid. He didn’t make that mistake. What I have are camera captures, those twenty-seven times they came and went in close proximity. The number of near connections, near misses, is above random, but not by much. It was what she told us today that makes the stalker hypothesis viable.”

  Doughan came back to his chair and sat down. “So did she know about the stalking, Mena?” he asked.
/>   “I think not,” Mena said.

  “But now she believes she was stalked, whether it was real or not,” Doughan said. “Now her boyfriend knows, this guy Helt is pushing us to keep. Or he knew before, and did something about a man who was harassing his woman. He just went high on my list of suspects.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Helt said. “We have a degree of rapport. If you’re going to ask me whether he’s capable of murder, my answer is I don’t know yet but I doubt it.” That Yves was capable of anger, Helt doubted not at all. The guy could punch someone out, no question, but Helt didn’t know the man’s parameters for the use of physical violence, didn’t know what codes he had for its use. He had protective instincts about Susanna. Helt had roused them when he told Yves Susanna was on the list of people NSS would be looking at. No question about the protective instincts, either. And he was a contract worker. If he wanted to off Cash and thought he could get away with it, the days before he got shuttled Earthside would be his last chance.

  “You turned Susanna Jambekar loose with the news that we’re worried about sabotage,” Doughan said. “That will result in false alarms to answer, tests to be run on equipment, food, you name it, by Security Personnel who are supposed to be spending their time finding a murderer. What led you to fantasize Ryan was a saboteur?”

  “That’s a hypothesis from the psychiatric autopsy.”

  “Hypothesis. You let loose a sabotage scare based on a hypothesis.”

  You’re the one who just brought up sabotage, not me, Helt didn’t say.

  “Susanna’s not a gossip,” Mena said.

  “But she’s a Seed Banker.” Doughan’s glance at Mena was full of reproach. “And everyone talks to someone. This boyfriend of hers, for instance.” Mena set her jaw and stared at the chair Susanna had occupied so recently. Doughan returned his attention to Helt. “You still haven’t shown that Ryan got Seed Banker money. Or did he?”

  “Not that we’ve found,” Helt said.

  “I am relieved to hear that,” Doughan said. “You told her we’re on to ‘transfers of funds,’ is how you put it. If that isn’t a heads-up to the other Seed Bankers, I don’t know what would be. What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish?”

  “I want to solve a murder and we’re running out of time. If we could keep the Seed Bankers on board until we know if they killed Ryan, we also might have time to sort out whether or not this ship is going to blow up, and when.”

  Doughan’s hesitation could have been a pause while he deliberated what to say. The corners of the exec’s eyelids narrowed for the briefest of instants while he sighted on a target across the room. “They have to go,” Doughan said. “They have to go on schedule.”

  “The shuttles can keep coming and going until the poles are powered on.” Helt meant the statement to be a blunt challenge to Doughan’s authority, a test to see how much power the execs had turned over to their IA. Their IA knew that in a less stressed situation, he would have offered his challenge after more planning and hopefully at less risk. Let me do this or fire me, was one way to look at what he was doing. Please, let me just go hide in a corner, was another.

  Doughan looked at Helt as if he were a tool, a wrench that could be repurposed to hit something, hard. “I won’t list the fuel costs if we don’t power up when we said we would. Or the remote, but very real, danger of piracy.”

  Mena frowned at Doughan. “Archer says the Northern and Southern Coalitions are quiet for now,” Mena said.

  “For now. But the sooner we can turn on the plasma shields, the better off we are.”

  It was definitely time to back down. “Understood,” Helt said.

  “If we don’t have these bastards in hand in time, that’s when to think about delays. Not now.”

  It was a sort of concession, or, Helt figured, it would be wise to accept it as such.

  The paired lines between Mena’s eyebrows deepened. She glanced from Doughan to Helt and back to Doughan, evaluating them for signs of incipient battle rage, or something like that.

  “I accept that,” Helt said. “If possible, before they go, I want to see connections between the Seed Bankers. If they’re a terrorist cell with a mission to kill this ship or keep her where she is, they are extremely skilled at not leaving traces. I haven’t found friendships between them, or messages, or even physical locations they’ve been to that might serve as drop-boxes. Two of them, Kelly Halkett and Oriol Bruguera, play on the same soccer team as David II. We haven’t talked to Bruguera yet.”

  Doughan had been on his way to see Oriol Bruguera with David II yesterday, right after the Kelly Halkett interview. Okay, he and David II had gone somewhere else.

  “He’s due to come down to Navigation tomorrow with David II,” Doughan said. “I wanted him to have a little time to worry.”

  “I don’t mind that at all,” Helt said. “I want the Seed Bankers to be nervous. The Security people tailing them might get some useful information that way. So far, there’s been no communication between these seven people since Cash Ryan died, not via interface, not in person.”

  “None?” Doughan asked.

  “None.”

  Doughan moved in his chair, the motion of a man with a backache who wants the cushions to be where they aren’t, exactly.

  “We know about the Seed Bankers now but they almost slipped by us,” Helt said. “What about other people with other agendas we haven’t even thought about? It’s in our interest to give people space to be themselves, to have private loves and hates, but which loves, which hates, should we be on watch for?

  “You asked me what I want to accomplish. I want us to leave system with a chance to get where we’re going. I don’t want to burden us with the lifetime sequestering and care of two, or maybe even three or four killers. And I don’t want to purge us of creative, perhaps quirky, perhaps irritating people who may make our journey richer, not for fears that have no basis in fact.”

  “The Seed Bankers are traitors. End story,” Doughan said.

  “Ryan wasn’t a Seed Banker,” Helt said.

  “Biosystems is supposed to deal with crazies,” Doughan said. “They missed Ryan.”

  Mena’s hurt look was momentary, but there.

  “To be fair, so did NSS,” Doughan added.

  “Tulloch and his associates are as accessible as they know how to be.” Mena’s voice was dull and flat. “NSS intervenes only when a person’s behavior interferes with the physical or mental well-being of others. Cash Ryan didn’t set off any alarms, even when he stalked Susanna. I wish he had.”

  She poured Doughan another glass of tea and smiled when he reached for the cherry jam. “If you doubt the ethical concerns of Biosystems, I might ask you to review a meeting where we discussed how many roosters are needed for the optimal emotional health of hens. Interminable discussions, but perhaps humbling,” Mena said. “Medical and NSS did the jobs they are authorized to do. But they are not Thought Police.”

  Doughan raised an eyebrow in her direction. He looked sad and thoughtful.

  Willingly, consciously, or not, Mena’s Biosystems and Doughan’s Navigation were marked with the individual stamps of their personalities, their priorities. Mena’s Biosystems was filled with curiosity and tenderness. Doughan’s Navigation was all confidence and competence. Archer herded cats, quirky ones, with bemused skill. Helt liked their versions of the way things should be, the versions he dealt with in his work, in his life here, in the comforts that came from them.

  Backlighted by the window, Mena’s profile belonged on a Greek coin. Doughan’s face was suddenly, clearly, despite the few generations his family had spent in Texas, a face carved on an Assyrian gate. He was Lebanese, a child of the city once called “the Athens of the Mideast.” No longer.

  Helt’s ideas of justice didn’t match Doughan’s. Due process, rule of law, was supposed to be how things were. But. But this bending of procedure was obviously something Doughan would do because it fit his version of protecting the ship.
The Seed Bankers would be sent away with no criminal charges, no blots on their records. In many ways, they were scheduled for a soft landing. If they stayed here, they’d end up in jail. In many ways, what the execs planned wasn’t cruel.

  A culture finds its way toward new behaviors, new, hopefully more adaptive, versions of right and wrong, slowly at best. Humans didn’t bait bears now—well, they didn’t in most places. In others, they did.

  “I’ll tell Severo to put a tail on Susanna’s boyfriend,” Doughan said.

  Mena shook her head as if to clear it. “Doughan, to phrase this very clearly, it’s not your job to do that. We gave this investigation to Helt.” She tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair, twice, and then looked away from Doughan and sought Helt’s eyes. “Yes, Archer told me your concerns. I support you,” was her clear, unspoken message.

  “Susanna is a suspect,” Doughan said. “So is her boyfriend. Many a man has killed another because of a woman. He needs tailing. He needs to be questioned.”

  “He will be,” Helt said. “It would be such a neat, tidy, explicable solution, wouldn’t it? ‘Jealous boyfriend and outraged victim kill stalker.’ I won’t believe it until I can prove it.”

  Mena came to a sort of attention in her chair. “If that turns out to be so, I’ll accept it. However, if she’s not a murderess, I want to keep my midwife,” Mena said. Her voice was brighter, sharper, deliberately, and falsely, lighter in tone. “In order to do that, I’d like to see her cleared of a murder charge, and if it’s possible, the matter of this Seed Banker money must be resolved. Until I know why it’s there I’m going to think of it as a smoke screen, placed in her account to draw suspicion to her, something false.”

  Doughan put his tea glass down and stared at her.

  “Doughan, I remind you that unless criminal charges are filed against her, I am within my rights to keep any colonist in Biosystems.”