The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  Elena tucked up her legs to sit like a Buddha or a Navajo. Her knee touched his thigh and she left it there while she rummaged in the rucksack. He read the touch as seduction, and was a little alarmed. He read it as an invitation, and that was simply, completely wonderful.

  “I’ve never been so hungry,” Helt said.

  “You can have half my sandwich,” Elena said. She handed it over and brought a packet of olives out of the rucksack. “What were you thinking about when you were lost out there?” She waved a hand toward the river.

  Helt swallowed the last bite of his sandwich and picked up the half Elena had given him. His plan to slow down hadn’t worked. “I was thinking how strong you are.” I was thinking about how I wish I had known you before this happened. “I was thinking about how lonesome it is when there’s no one to listen when you want to think out loud,” Helt said. He rummaged in the sack and found the half-sours. They were good with ham sandwiches. With the cider, not so much.

  “You want to tell me secrets,” Elena said. “Do you think we’re safe here?”

  “Safe? Possibly,” Helt said. “But I want to think out loud and I think no one’s listening.” He checked his interface to see if he could call up the locator system here. He couldn’t. There was too much rock between here and the transmitter receiver at Petra station.

  “Heh. Yes, this is a dead zone. That’s why I brought you here. We can talk.”

  “Our interfaces are listening,” Elena said. “But that’s no problem. You can tell me anything. I keep secrets. And after all, there’s no danger that what I learn might incriminate you in something like, you know, murder or whatever. You were in a diner, with cameras. You’re safe.”

  “Ouch,” Helt said.

  “Beyond ridiculous, isn’t it?” Her eyes were shining, but if those were tears he saw, she blinked them away. “Ridiculous, but all too true,” Elena said. “So tell me what you don’t want to tell the people you work with. They don’t listen?” She rolled an olive between her fingers and popped it into her mouth.

  “Oh, I ramble,” Helt said. “I bounce ideas off them all the time. They bounce them back. But what I say is always censored. Filtered. Has to be. Because it’s work, and I want to keep on working with them, and some of the things I think about might come back to haunt me.”

  He stopped short. It was all too possible he wouldn’t be working with the SysSu crew much longer. He’d be trying to hack out a place of refuge on Earth, one that was worth sharing with Elena. He censored that train of thought, the sun-bleached, exhausted colors that went with it, the desperation and the dust. “Is anyone honest? Really honest? We say we are. We pay lip service to honesty, but to stay sane when we work, when we love, we don’t go around blurting out every truth about what we see and feel.”

  “Events like this murder, realities that frighten or hurt. Do you think they bring out more honesty, or more lies?” Elena asked.

  “Both,” Helt said. “You want me to tell you, honestly, what I’m thinking right now, but how do I do that? There’s too much, too many tangents. I’m here, with you, and in my mind I’m shadowing Doughan whether he wants me to or not, because I just found out that he and David II went out looking for something last night—and Doughan left his interface at home, so his location wouldn’t show to me. Now I’m wondering if Mena is at home in bed when her interface says she is. And I still don’t know for sure if Doughan is looking for sabotage. I think he is, but if there are reasons for him to do that, I don’t know them. I should.”

  Elena licked her fingers, slowly. She closed the package of olives and put them away, very carefully, her eyes on her work and not on him. “I hope you find them,” Elena said.

  “You thought about your answer,” Helt said. “You didn’t say you knew I would. Would find the facts.” That she accepted, would accept, whatever he found humbled him. “I don’t know if I’ll discover anything that gets you out of this mess, and it scares me. I’m scared. I’m scared of my own blind spots. I’m scared of failure. Does it show that much?”

  “Yes,” Elena said. “It does.” She tugged a corner of the bedroll up to cover her lap and looked out at the sand, at the river.

  Their cave had been in shadow when they entered it; it was darker now. Elena’s eyes seemed immense, as gray and opaque as granite in this light. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Helt said.

  “I’m thinking you haven’t told me enough,” Elena said. “Tell me what it is you fear you won’t discover.”

  “The identities of the murderer and the accomplice. Or accomplices, I should say. Ever.” He was scared that she hated him and was hiding it from him, and he backed away from saying he was afraid he would find proof that she had killed a man. “What worries me is that I’m scared and I’m following trains of thought that may not be realistic. I want to know if you see the signs I saw that tell me Mena and Doughan are keeping secrets from me. Paranoia isn’t one of my favorite mental states.”

  “If you want consensual validation, I may not be the right person to give it,” Elena said. “I’m paranoid, too. But for what it’s worth, I think there’s something going on with Mena. I think she’s walled herself off from me. She’s not avoiding me; work goes on. But she’s put up a barrier. I’ve never seen her so tense. I wouldn’t know about Doughan. He’s a stranger and he’s not easy to read.”

  “He’s not easy to read, ever. I’m getting the feeling he’s convinced Ryan was a saboteur. How do I find out why Doughan believes that? Or knows that?

  “I can’t get my mind off what still needs to be done. I want to go find Doughan and David II and I want to stay here. For a long time. With you.”

  “With me,” Elena said. “With a murder suspect. Here’s a paranoid thought for you. The execs found me on that elevator and are using me as a scapegoat in the original sense of the word. If they don’t find a murderer, they can send me away and everybody will feel safer.”

  Mena would not do that. Doughan and Archer wouldn’t. It could not happen unless they had overwhelming reasons to protect a murderer.

  If they were doing that, and the cover-up worked, the world could seem normal and feel safe for years, perhaps for their lifetimes. Maybe no one would ever know. But odds were, some file, some screen capture, some scrap of evidence would find them out. Perhaps years later. Perhaps after they were all dead. At that point, the deed would be dissected, rationalized, and probably forgiven for the greater good, as such deeds had forever been accepted in the past. The deception would be legitimized and become a tool to be used again, even here.

  No. Not on my watch.

  So that wild-assed theory had to be disproved. Helt had to know they weren’t hiding stuff from him, even if it meant he had to practice some deception himself.

  “I don’t like that plan,” Helt said. “It leaves a murderer loose. Not good. It wrecks your life. That’s worse than not good. It’s unthinkable. I’ll leave with you. I said it and I meant it, but it’s still unthinkable. I’m going to ask you something.”

  “What?” Elena said.

  “To do something when we get back into range. I need to know who the execs are talking to, and where they are doing it. They said they would keep them on, and they’ve been doing that, but I think they’re leaving them at home and meeting somewhere else to talk. So, once or twice, I’m going to ask you to verify if Mena is where her interface says she is.”

  “Is that all?” Elena asked.

  “No,” Helt said. “I want to talk with you a lot. I want to spend a lot of time with you. I want your help, your ideas. I want you to tell me when I’m ignoring things I shouldn’t, or when I’m paying attention to things that don’t help solve this murder, so we can both stay here.”

  “I see,” Elena said. “Well, for starters, you’ll be checking on Archer. Who’s going to shadow Doughan for you?”

  “Probably not Severo. He’s so locked into chain of command that I just don’t want to ask him.”

  “I don’t know
that many people in Navigation,” Elena said.

  “I’ll find someone,” Helt said.

  Helt was in a power struggle with a person-in-charge on Kybele. He didn’t like it. An alpha-male challenge was about the worst thing he could think of at this point, and Doughan seemed to be doing his best to set one up.

  “Elena?” Helt asked. “Doughan’s been asking me to call him out, even if he doesn’t know it on a conscious level. Giving someone responsibility without authority is a sure way to drive that someone nuts. That’s what Doughan’s been doing, with this thing of not setting up clear guidelines for what Severo is supposed to do. Do you have any idea why? Why now? What purpose does it serve?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been around the man,” Elena said. “Do you really think he’s unaware of what he’s doing?”

  “No. So he has a reason for doing it. I just don’t know what it is. I’m the IA. I’m supposed to be good at looking for the reasons for conflicts. I try to look for tilts and shifts in coalitions before they get dangerous. Sometimes I don’t see them.”

  “So that’s what those constructs are,” Elena said. “The interacting spheres, the virtual world thing you live in so much of the time, where groups coalesce, and morph into different shapes, and divide, over and over.”

  “You’ve been scouting for traces of me that show in what I do,” Helt said.

  “Sure,” Elena said. “And a bio search.”

  “So you know a lot of things about me.” He hoped they weren’t going to talk about the bachelor site Jerry knew about. Helt was not going there. Not.

  “Schools you went to, countries you lived in. I’ve learned a lot of things about you. I know your birth name was Halvor, not Helt.”

  “The nickname stuck,” Helt said.

  “I know you got a C in botany. Why?”

  Elena shifted close to his side and he lifted his arm so it fit behind her shoulders. Helt slid his arm beneath her jacket. His fingers explored the texture of the soft flannel that covered the warmth of her waist. His hand wanted to move to the mound of her breast, so near, and surely even more wonderful. Helt hugged her and decided to keep talking while he still had the ability to speak. The sensory input from his hand was occupying more than half of his mind and displacing everything else. Other methods of communication were going to take over soon, and leave him capable of grunts and moans, at best. “I thought plant sex was too weird. They do it in too many ways. I couldn’t keep track of the names for all those parts.”

  “They’re inventive, I’ll grant you that,” Elena said. “I thought of aquatic plants when I looked into your world, but those little globes in your construct are people. I pulled down some of the names. I looked for me. I’m not in there.”

  “No, you’re not there. You have to cause trouble, or be a target for attention, positive or negative, for me to set vectors on your actions and put you in play in that game.”

  Helt leaned forward and explored the rucksack one-handed. He retrieved Mena’s box and fished out a diamond of baklava.

  “Your world thing looks like something alive, living and moving and growing,” Elena said. “It isn’t geographic. There are three … blobs, I guess you’d call them, where Petra and Stonehenge and Athens would be, but what you’re doing isn’t based on location, is it?”

  “No.” Muffled. Helt’s mouth was full of honeyed nuts and buttered phyllo. He chewed and swallowed and tried again. “No. The connections don’t develop from physical proximity. They grow from repulsions and attractions, from the acts of givers and takers and how people gather around one and avoid, or are pulled in by, the other.”

  “That looks good,” Elena said. “What you’re eating.”

  Helt leaned forward and retrieved the box. They munched through three or four pastries each. Helt drank the last of his cider.

  “The shapes in my imperfect attempt to look at group interactions?” Helt said. “They cluster around successes and failures, more often than not. The model’s predicted some areas of conflict. It didn’t find the Seed Bankers. It didn’t predict Cash Ryan’s murder.”

  “And that scares you,” Elena said.

  “Yes. It does.”

  “I am reassured,” Elena said. She lifted the beautiful oval of her face and looked up at him. She was so close, so apparently calm, so hard to read. “There’s no way to say this that doesn’t sound dramatic, but it’s true. You hold my life in your hands. My future, at any rate. If you weren’t frightened, I would be even more afraid than I am.”

  Helt wanted to curl up into a ball and die. He wanted to run away, run as far as he could, as fast as he could. He wanted to be strong for her, and he didn’t feel strong. He felt stupid and he couldn’t find any words to say that would make any sense at all. He couldn’t tell her not to depend on him, and he didn’t want to tell her not to trust him. He wouldn’t lie to her, and he was about to lie with her under a burden of uncertainty that sat ill on his soul. She deserved more than that.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “I’m sure you will, but not quite yet,” Elena said. “You have powdered sugar on your chin.”

  Helt lifted his hand to check but Elena grabbed it. “Wait a minute,” she said. She found a wet cloth in a bag in the rucksack and wiped her hands, and his hands. She folded the cloth to bring up a clean corner of it and wiped his chin.

  Had he been four years old the last time someone had washed his face for him? Five? Whichever, it had been long before he was capable of growing the five o’clock stubble he felt on his jaw now. Helt nipped at one of Elena’s fingers and then kissed it.

  She pulled her hand away.

  “We will make love.” It was not a question, but Helt’s unspoken concerns made it sound almost like one. “We don’t have to.” Not at all what he meant. “I mean, leaving the ship is my decision and you have no debts to pay because I made it.” That he wanted to offer comfort, and perhaps, hopefully, a little time of unawareness of what she lived with every moment, what they both faced, there was no good way to say that, not one he could think of now or maybe ever. “I want—”

  “So do I.” She turned away from him, perhaps to hide a smile.

  “Help me with this bedroll, would you?” Elena asked.

  Somewhere in the process of opening the bedroll, of opening their clothes to the wind, of seeing Elena’s perfect skin stained by the dull red light of sunset, somewhere, while he watched her kneel to stuff their discarded shirts and jeans into a corner of the bedroll so they would be warm if they ever decided to put them on again, Helt forgot to worry that first times can be clumsy. He forgot to worry about his endurance, his ability to wait.

  He exulted in his nakedness, in the chill air that bathed every square centimeter of his skin. He dropped to his knees and pulled Elena close to make a single unbroken surface of warmth; thighs, bellies, chests pressed tight together, the length of him warmed by the skin of her belly but not warmed enough. Elena wrapped her arms around his back and clung to him as if she were drowning. His hands explored the smooth curves of her back while his mouth tasted hers. He kissed her throat, her shoulders. He cupped her breasts in his hands, traced the tight buttons of her nipples with his thumbs, and she leaned back, holding his waist to keep her balance, breaking the seal of warmth between them, to let him explore the little ridges of her brown nipples with his tongue.

  He moved his hands to her hips. She shifted her pelvis, lifting it forward to blindly seek even more contact with his skin. He leaned back, away from her, and reached for a corner of the blanket. The cold slapped his skin where Elena had warmed it. They maneuvered themselves into the bedding and found each other’s heat again.

  After a timeless time, he was dazed and grateful, and amazed with himself and with her.

  * * *

  Not even the first time had felt like the first time.

  When he looked up, the wash of moonlight on the sand beyond the cave, the irregular diamonds of light on the bedroll,
on Elena’s shoulder, were blue silver. The river’s murmur was so loud here.

  * * *

  Helt was as comfortable as anyone alive ever needs to be, warm in the puffy bedroll, waking to the music of the river and the moonlight. He wondered if he should wake Elena. She slept so deeply, pillowed on his arm and perhaps even warmer than he was, with the dolphin’s-back stone on one side of her and his bulk on the other. But she had been so exhausted. She needed a full night’s sleep and then some. She’d sleep better in her own bed.

  Helt shifted his arm. It was getting numb.

  He yawned.

  * * *

  He reached for Elena beside him and she wasn’t there. Helt lifted his head to look for her and icy air flowed into the gap at the edge of the bedroll. Elena was walking back toward the alcove from the river’s edge. The moonlight had waned and the stars were bright in a black sky. She had managed to get into her jacket and her jeans without waking him, but her feet were bare and she was hugging herself to keep warm. She climbed in beside him, shivering. Helt rolled on his side and fitted her against his belly, spoon fashion, clothes and all. The collar of her jacket made a nice pillow for his chin.

  * * *

  He noted, after a time, that his hand had slipped beneath the waistband of Elena’s jeans and come to rest on the amazing softness of her stomach.

  He thought about zippers.

  He thought about the zipper on the bedroll, and the limitations of the space it enclosed.

  It was time to do something about all that.

  23

  Code Talkers

  The data construct centered on Cash Ryan’s death hadn’t changed much overnight, damn it. It was still a hollow sphere where various facts hung lonely out near the periphery. Elena’s name glowed bright, closer to the center than any other because of that trip she’d made to Athens tower, and because of the affair she had had with Cash Ryan so long ago.

  Elena was in her lab in Stonehenge by now.

  Helt got out of his chair and started a pot of coffee. He felt good. A tiny flash of memory came floating by, the memory that Elena’s sheets smelled vaguely, pleasantly, of sandalwood.