by Sage Walker
“Tool? Helt’s no tool. He might become a madman.” Jim stretched his legs out to full length and looked at his socks. They were both blue. “No, he won’t. He’s an adaptive bastard. I think he’ll manage to narrow the fields when he needs to. I mean, well beyond switching to normal vision at will; Martin says almost everyone masters that in a few hours. Martin’s given him an amazing number of choices for selective inputs.”
“He’s given us an amazing amount of work to do. Every lawyer and three linguists on ship plus several others on Earth have been set specific tasks, to be completed by dawn tomorrow. Directed, Helt says, toward the goal of saving the ship’s future. And he’s been checking in with one or several of us about every half hour. I feel whipped into near-frenzy, and what’s worse, I’m enjoying the feeling. Have you seen him yet?” Giliam asked.
“I’m going over there right now. The dragons say it’s okay.”
Giliam looked worried.
“It was a figure of speech, Giliam,” Jim said. “I’m not having auditory hallucinations. Mena and Elena say it’s okay.”
WEDNESDAY 1314
“You called me an adaptive bastard,” Helt said.
Jim grinned at him. “I did.”
“Adaptive bastard that I am, this still takes some getting used to,” Helt said.
“What does? Augmented vision? Data you can access by focusing on a virtual keyboard?”
“I won’t run amok. I’m wiring in safeguards against that.”
“In your head?”
“In the social contract,” Helt said.
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t feel pain. There’s some sort of local in there, Elena says. Timed not to wear off until the eyelids and the white part, the sclera, until all that stuff is healed up. The new stuff can’t feel pain…” Helt checked schemata of the “tissue” layers of his new retina and its attachments to his optic nerve. Not a pain fiber in there anywhere.
“How do you feel about who you are now? How have you changed, Helt?” Jim asked his questions very gently.
“You just won’t take an easy answer, will you?” Helt asked, and got the grin he was looking for. “I’m not hurt like my mom was. What happened didn’t scar my sense of empathy or my ability to feel emotions. I’m still me. And knowing that makes it easier to…”
The spybots on the house were still working. Via their inputs, Helt looked for Elena and found her in the kitchen with Mena. Mena sliced something on a board and Elena worked at the kitchen table, a cup of tea beside her. The mood in there was rich with comfort, the feeling of small talk about important things.
“… to accept the risks of love. The changes…” Out on the surface, microchanges in temperature marked Kybele’s spin from light to dark and to light again. The eyes on her poles marked the path of the incoming shuttle, on schedule, moving as it should be. Vibrations in Level Three said that crews were boring out more living space. If he asked for audible range near the crew down there, he could hear laughter and small talk.
In Center, a swirl of afternoon breeze brought down a drift of rustling aspen leaves.
“… I wish I could show you. I can’t, Jim. You’ll have to trust that I’m still me.”
Jim looked him over with a calculating look that spoke of skills he’d honed over years and wars, through failures and successes with people in grief, in despair, in madness, and seemed satisfied with what he saw.
“I’ll call my mom, once we’re under way. We’re strangers, but I think—I know—we’d like to get to know each other. There’s enough distance now. And we’re more alike than we were. Now.”
Jim nodded. “Yeah. You’re still you. How do I look in infrared?” Jim asked.
Helt looked. Seeing him that way was still a little weird.
“I’ll tell you if you get Giliam’s ass over here when I bring the execs in for a conference.”
“When will that be?”
“Probably sooner than you think.”
“I love you, man,” Jim Tulloch said.
THURSDAY 0600
Elena was so beautiful this morning, too, sleeping on her side, turned away so he could truly appreciate the beauty of her shoulder beside him. There would be more mornings like this. It was something he knew, and the certainty of knowing it was the most solid thing in this spinning world.
It had taken him a minute or two to line up the flood of memory, nightmare, analysis, and other things he didn’t want to think about for a while, to stack the files into chronologic order and ready them for this morning’s work. Helt looked at the ceiling and the State of Kybele, much augmented, capable of analyzing so much more now, cleaner, thicker, richer, and still imperfect.
Giliam had his presentation ready. Giliam didn’t think he did, but he did. Archer and Doughan were both still asleep, and so was Mena.
Elena had been beside him since Monday night, cleared of the suspicion of murder in the hours so long ago in SysSu, but he hadn’t acknowledged her relief or her joy then, or the mix of emotions she must have felt. He hadn’t offered her support or sympathy or celebration. On that crazy night, he had done nothing but send her away. He’d been obsessed with ways to get Doughan to stalk him. There had been no time for her needs then and he wasn’t sure what he could do now, or ever, about it.
Elena rolled over, looked at his face, and laid her arm across his stomach. “Your eyelid is going to be a little scarred. It was the best I could do.”
“With what was available,” Helt said. He reached for her hand and stroked her fingers. Her nails were so smooth. “Who’s been taking care of your lab?”
“Susanna and Andrea.” She leaned closer to his face. “You can’t really see the sensor array unless you’re close to the pupil. It looks a little strange.”
“Monday night? I want to say something about Monday night. I sent you away,” Helt said. “I wasn’t there for you when you were getting used to the idea that the murder suspicion nightmare was over. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You had other things to worry about. And anyway, I didn’t leave.”
“You went to NSS and hung with Evans.”
“I like her a lot,” Elena said.
“Let’s finish this up in the next…”
“Two?” Elena asked.
“Three or four hours and get back to our lives. I’ll tell the execs we’ll meet here at 1300,” Helt said.
“Are you ready for that?”
“And Giliam.”
Elena looked at him as if he were a contaminated cell culture. “You’re not ready for this,” she said.
The social lie he was about to offer shriveled up and ran away.
“I know,” Helt said. “And Jim. Jim has to be here.”
“You won’t rest,” Elena said.
“No.”
“We’ll talk about this after breakfast.”
Elena got up and padded across the room to get her buckskin sarong.
“In bed?” Helt asked.
“Dream on,” Elena said.
30
Old Masters
Giliam got there early. Mena ushered him in and went back to the kitchen. She’d brought in chairs and side tables, and stacked pillows from her great room behind Helt’s shoulders so he was sitting up quite comfortably, his work stuff on a breakfast tray over the precisely smoothed surface of the brocade bedspread.
“Rembrandt, I’d say, the family assembled at the bedside of the dying patriarch, except you look far too healthy for that,” Giliam said.
Helt accepted the statement for the sympathy it probably hid.
Giliam had his hands clasped behind his back and he rocked back and forth on his feet, evaluating the setting. “You haven’t given me much time to sort this out, not even enough to check statutes on some of your more esoteric points.”
Helt looked at the room around him to see how it might look to an outsider.
The bed lay in front of tall windows that let in dark rainy-day October light diffuse
d by folds of sheer curtains. Sprays of vivid autumn leaves in Attic vases stood on Mena’s tables here and there. The comforter evoked a sort of practical grandeur, maybe. Giliam was right. It was sort of Old Masters in here. “Sit down, Giliam. Mena does a good job, doesn’t she?”
Giliam nodded and sat down.
“I looked over the draft of the changes to the Articles of Governance,” Helt said. “It’s good work, Giliam. Thank you.”
“I’m not happy with the word Lawspeaker but no other term really works,” Giliam said. “It was a strange role to play even in its historic antecedents, counselor, reference source, goad. What you’ve designed is a sort of sensory apparatus to praise successes and point out dangers in the body politic. It’s not an executive position. Whoever fills it has no authority to do anything but advise. No authority at all.”
“Heh,” Helt said. “That’s all to the good, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but you can be ignored!”
“But not silenced.”
“There is that,” Giliam said.
Giliam Obrecht looked profoundly uncomfortable. Maybe it was the bedroom setting. “I’d be in your office for this but Mena won’t let me out of here yet,” Helt said. “House arrest.”
He’d had his breakfast in the kitchen and made it back to bed, barely, with wobbles, was the truth of it. He’d spent the rest of the morning laying out decision trees of fact and conjecture, constantly revised via rapid exchanges with Nadia and Jerry and Severo and the changing status of the Murder Mess, the Huerfano version, accessed here so it could be displayed for everyone in the room.
“There are some aspects of this I simply haven’t had time to consider,” Giliam said.
Helt heard Archer’s voice in the great room, heard Mena asking him if he’d come into the kitchen and carry a tray for her.
“You’re not alone,” Helt said. “You’ll do fine. Let’s play it by ear, shall we?”
The word ear reminded him that the long ear outside Mena’s courtyard was still listening. Helt disabled it. Details, details.
Doughan came into the bedroom without stopping by the kitchen and halted at the edge of the bed. “Let me see that eye.” He leaned over, inches away, to look closely at it, and then nodded. “Amazing.” He looked around for the chair with the best view of the door, and sat down in it while Archer put a tray on a table. Archer came to the bedside in his turn. He clasped Helt’s right hand in both of his, gripped it tightly and gave him the stare.
“It’s okay, Archer. I’m back online.”
Archer retreated without a word, set up a folding screen on his table, and lost himself in it while Mena went about the business of coffee and tea. She glanced into the great room, put her coffeepot down, and went to the door. Doughan watched her bring her visitor in. She indicated a chair and Jim Tulloch picked it up and brought it into the room.
“You, too?” Doughan asked.
“I’m here to keep Giliam focused,” Jim said. He looked at seat location possibilities, brought the chair he was holding around to the other side of the bed, and put it down next to Doughan.
“Okay,” Helt said. “Okay, you’ve been following the NSS reports, all of you. The latest news is that there are no traces of Cash Ryan in the vault Yves and I explored Monday night.”
“There’s nothing on the swabs, no DNA,” Mena said.
“Even so, a strong case can be made that Cash Ryan was a terrorist and a traitor. The evidence for that would be stronger if I hadn’t fried half of it.”
“You’re three minutes wrong about that,” Doughan said. “The case was damaged here and there but it has Cash Ryan all over it. He opened that transmitter case and wired the laser in all by himself.”
“So it’s verified. Cash Ryan was a Bad Guy who planned some serious destruction.”
It wasn’t news to Doughan, but it seemed to be to Jim Tulloch. Helt watched him scoot down in his chair a little, stretch out his legs, and scan the company. He’d told Helt once that he never blocked the door when he was working, left an exit for a patient to take if he wanted to panic and leave. He had done that here, in this room. He’d placed his chair so that anyone here could get to the great room and Mena’s front door if they felt they had to run for it.
Giliam had his head down and was entering data at a frantic pace.
“If I’d known that, if any of us here had known that. But we didn’t,” Helt said. “I’m supposed to notice if someone is making ripples in the communal pond. I didn’t see this coming. If I had, I could have alerted Jim. I didn’t; a man died. Your response was to give me the job of investigating a suicide that turned out to be a murder.”
Helt didn’t know how this was going to sell. He had to do it anyway. “You gave me the job because you had other work to do, and you had to do it in a hurry. I didn’t find a murderer. I still haven’t. I found a chain of mishaps done in haste. I have enough…”
He stopped because he was afraid. He stopped because he couldn’t be sure he was doing the right thing.
“I have enough solid evidence to charge Navigation’s exec with manslaughter, at least, and SysSu’s exec with evidence tampering, at least.”
Helt didn’t expect surprise, and he saw none. He didn’t expect denial, and he saw no signs of that, either. What he did see were tiny indicators of something that looked like relief in Doughan’s posture and in the slightly slower rhythm of Archer’s constant keyboard entries. Mena, by contrast, seemed to be bracing herself for a fight.
“The rule of law is clear. Charges should be filed and Severo should march you off the ship. It’s the honorable thing for me to do.” He sent the Murder Mess to their screens as a timeline. This time it wasn’t the public version. It was the Huerfano version, all neat and tidy now except for some foggy blurs where Helt had no idea what had happened. “I don’t want to do it. Here’s what I think I know, salted with plenty of pure speculation. The facts are highlighted. They are not thick on the ground.”
The room went dead quiet. Helt waited them out.
“This really isn’t enough to successfully prosecute,” Giliam said.
Archer looked up.
“It would be, except he doesn’t have some of it right,” Archer said. “Let’s at least be accurate about our crimes. Wesley? Mena?”
“Let us help you, IA,” Doughan said.
Mena gave a terse nod.
Let us help you. Let’s get it right. It was the reaction Helt had hoped for, but his hope was based on projections that could have been faulty. Helt cleared his throat, because there was a lump in it. “Tell me where I got it wrong, then,” Helt said.
He cleared his throat again. “Cash Ryan had a serious jones to stay on board; an obsession reinforced by the fact that he’d managed to get a tour up here. He had pulled off a faked degree, a faked job history, and that gave him absolute confidence, proof, that it’s easy to fool people, even if your tool kit includes only bravado and a few hacks that any idiot can pull from the cloud.”
“Add his successes at undiscovered stalking,” Jim Tulloch said.
“Susanna was a substitute for Elena,” Helt said. “I’m not protecting Elena, Jim. She doesn’t need it. She was part of his plan, sure. Ryan hadn’t conquered her yet; but he had no doubt he could if he had enough time. Agree? Disagree?”
“Agree,” Jim said.
“Ryan hacked Mission Control files on October 11.” Helt looked at Doughan, who raised a quizzical eyebrow. “That evening, within hours, you replaced the bad data he’d entered and waited him out. He signaled you on October 18 and you made contact with him and told him to come to your office after hours.”
“I told him to get in the same way he got in before, or else,” Doughan said. “He opened that trapdoor and came down from the ceiling, on schedule, calm as you please. I’d never noticed that hatch before.”
“Yves showed me an entire area of hidden territory we don’t pay attention to,” Helt said. “You offered Cash some spiked booze and one
of Venkie’s samosas.”
Helt sorted some files. “I can’t prove that.” It was a blurred entry on the timeline. “One hundred and twenty-three people bought samosas that day. You knew, because you’d done your best to find out that Cash Ryan liked his scope-and-speed. So you added some doses to his food. And then you gave him a coverall—with a defective heat pack in it—and walked him downstairs, and left him there for a while.” Helt was just guessing on the coverall.
“I wanted to chill him a little. He was still awake when I got back,” Doughan said.
“He’d built up tolerance to scope-and-speed,” Mena said. “Even so, with the alcohol on board and the hypothermia, I’m surprised he wasn’t more suggestible.”
Mena’s words were deliberate and clear. Mena, Helt wanted to tell her, stay out of this. I haven’t written a part for you in this scenario.
“I came back and he was huddled against the wall,” Doughan said. “That was expected. I grabbed him and pulled him up. I punched him in the belly. I wanted the punch to be hard enough to let him know I meant business but I didn’t want to knock him out. He doubled forward but he came back from that and hit me in the ribs.”
Doughan, standing in Mena’s great room waiting for Mena to come back after Susanna’s interview, had held on to his back. Helt couldn’t remember him breaking his pose of perfect fitness at any other time.
“That’s when he went out on me, Helt. I never had time to ask him anything.”
“The sudden exertion threw him into V-fib. You called me,” Mena said. “When I got down there, you were doing CPR. But Ryan was dead, fixed and dilated pupils, brain dead unless we got him oxygenated in a very short time and probably even if we’d been able to do it. I didn’t have a defibrillator; which would have done nothing until he was warmed anyway, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I had no kit at all.”
She had been staring at the curtained window. She looked at each of them quickly, and then focused on Helt’s face. “It would have taken twenty minutes to get to the clinic, and that’s all I could think about. We had hauled him on the elevator by the time I sorted that out. We were still doing CPR.”
