My Brother's Keeper

by Charles Sheffield

  I grunted and sat up straighter. "After Cuttack? You said that you did not know anywhere else that he went."

  "I was lying to you." The tears came rolling down the dark cheeks. "I was afraid that you would be hurt, too. If we went to Cuttack, I thought that would be safe. Lee-yo went to see Belur there, and he was all right. But he never came back from Riyadh."

  "Riyadh?" A flash of ocher sands and cool green dimness skimmed through my mind, a level below conscious memory. "Ameera, why did he go there? Was that the `R-I' that I saw in his notes?"

  "I do not know." The tears were coming faster now. "After he came from Cuttack, he left again at once. I do not know why he went to Riyadh—but I think that she knows. Lee-yo-nel, I did not want to tell her. But the hurt was so much, and she said she would keep hurting until I told. I had to tell. I said he went to Riyadh."

  I looked down at her flayed and naked feet. "Ameera, anyone would have told. I am proud of you that you took so much hurt before you spoke."

  "But I did not." She rubbed a knuckle at her tearstained eyes and sat up a little on the sheet. "I am not brave. I told her quickly, as soon as the hurt was bad. I thought she would stop then, but she kept on for a long time. Lee-yo-nel, why would she do that to me? I had told her everything."

  I knew, but I did not want Ameera to know. Zan had been seeking information; when she had it she should logically have left the house at once. If she stayed, it was only for the pleasure of tormenting a helpless victim. Sadism is not rare, but it is unusual to find it given full leash.

  Xantippe had known I might be on the way here, or have telephoned from Cuttack. Only a consuming urge to torture and torment had kept her so long at the house.

  And if time had not been short, so that she could linger as long as she chose with Ameera? . . .

  I went to the window and stared out. Instead of Calcutta, the city of Riyadh now seemed to spread its towers and minarets before me, the jewel of the Arabian Peninsula, a modern miracle of science that bloomed in the desert. I had been there many times, to play in the pinnacled concert hall and underwater theaters, making music for the idlest rich of the world.

  Now I had to go there again; in pursuit of an unknown goal, following a woman who frightened me more than any wicked witch of childhood stories.

  For Ameera's sake, I would be on the first airplane that could take me.

  A gigantic bookcase, and beyond it the chair of a Titan. I blinked, blinked again, and screwed up my eyes against the sunlight. In the distance, over at the limit of vision, a dark-edged monster crouched forward over a colossal bed. There were sounds, the pizzicato plucking of strings over unresolving harmonies. An automatic filing system in my head identified the Bhairava raga, with its symbolism of waking dawn and reverence for the new day. The vina played on, its notes clean and soothing. My eyes closed.

  And opened, to a room filled with uniformed figures, shrilling and gesturing to each other with insectoid precision and rapidity of movement. They were gathered around a bed, and I heard the sforzando command of a single voice demanding silence for the sleeper there.

  I blinked once more. When my eyes opened again the group of figures had suddenly shrunk to two. They were wearing the uniform of the Calcutta police, standing solemn guard by the bed where Ameera lay. She was silent, her face open and innocent in sleep. Heavy bandages swaddled her feet.

  "Any better now?" It was Chandra, sitting quietly by my side.

  I shivered and took a deep breath. "I'm all right. How's Ameera? I guess I fell asleep for a while. Boy." I shivered. "Weird dreams."

  "You have a right to them. Ameera told me what the two of you went through in Cuttack. Her condition?" He shrugged. "As well as can be expected. There is mental injury as well as physical. The woman—Xantippe?—said she was helping you. Ameera trusted her, they came back here, Ameera sent the servants away. Then—" he shrugged. "You know what she did next."

  I shuddered from head to foot and looked more closely at Ameera. "At least she is sleeping. When I first arrived she was hysterical."

  "It is more shock than sleep. When you passed out—"

  "Me?" I stared at him.

  "You do not remember it? You let me in, came up here, and fell over into that chair. That was four hours ago." He stared at me as I turned away from him. "Now then, what do you think you are up to?"

  He grabbed me by the arm as I began to stagger off towards the door. I shook off his grip.

  "Got to get to Riyadh." My voice was a thick-tongued mumble. "Next plane."

  "Not yet." Chandra had taken my arm again, and this time his grip was firmer, holding hard enough to hurt. "You want to pursue Ameera's tormentors? Very good; I commend the intention. But before you think of doing that, you must know of some other matters. You realize that they are murderers?"

  "They killed Rustum Belur, and I think they killed a woman called Valnora Warren."

  "It comes closer to home than that. When Ameera told the servants here to leave, one of them refused to go. Xantippe asked to speak with him privately, downstairs." Chandra lowered his voice to a whisper, glancing at Ameera. "When the police arrived they searched the whole house as part of their routine work. Mr. Chatterji was found in the pantry. Dead. He had been stabbed, many times."

  He followed my look. "She does not know. There will be a time for such news. Not yet. It was enough effort, after the treatment of her injuries and after the police were finished here, to ease her into sleep. We talked about many things. We have surprisingly much in common, and Ameera has an excellent mind. But she could not rest, for all our talk, until we came to music. It worked where words could not."

  "That was you? Playing the ragas?"

  Chandra smiled, and there was a flash of the old, superconfident prodigy. "For my sins. The instrument was not in great condition, and the technique is rusty—but she did not complain. I know the music of Bihar, the folk tunes and the festival dances of her native area. I think that I played well. Perhaps there is still more to life than jute."

  "But your fingers—I saw them last week. They were not in shape to play."

  "Indeed?" This time the smile was different, a sad glint of oriental resignation. "Now you mention it, I think I noticed."

  He held up his left hand. The soft fingertips were bloodied and torn from the pressure of the vina's seven thin strings.

  "It was in a good cause. My suffering was nothing compared to hers. And now she is asleep, peacefully, without drugs."

  He looked at his watch, and I realized that it was late afternoon. He had spent the whole day here. "Chandra, what about your work? I've already taken more of your time than a friend should ask."

  "Assume that I do this for Ameera—not for a feringhee with no sense. Do you still talk of running off to Riyadh, now that you know what may face you there? Your enemies have more knowledge and more resources, and they are ruthless. How will you know what to do there?"

  "How did I know what to do in Calcutta?" Despite the logic of his argument, my resolve was strengthening. "Chandra, there are other factors involved here. Earlier today, you were playing the Bhairava raga for Ameera. Correct?"

  "True enough. What of it?"

  "I recognized that piece."

  "So? It is famous enough."

  I shook my head. "To you. But I don't know Hindu music at all. Yet I recognized it. Don't you see what that means? I'm getting some of Leo's memories. I was told this would happen, and it has started."

  He pouted and shrugged his chubby shoulders. "That is excellent. But if you stay here longer, you will receive more memories. Why not wait until you know exactly where to go, and what you are doing? There will be risks in Riyadh, but here you will be safe."

  "That's not the whole story." I was stammering, and cursed myself for my lack of control. "I'm getting Leo's memories, and they will help—that's the good news. But I'm also getting flashes of sensory distortion. When I was first waking up here everything seemed out of proportion and the time scale went
crazy. If I'm going to follow Scouse and Xantippe to Riyadh, I'll have to do it soon. The doctors warned me to watch for those symptoms. A few days from now I'll be in no condition to chase Zan, Scouse, the Belur Package or anything else."

  I paused. My manner was much too emotional to persuade Chandra. Perhaps it was the sight of Ameera, a tiny child-figure with her bandaged feet and rope-cut wrists, that upset me so.

  "I must go now," I said at last. "Time is short. If I can find a charter jet at Dum-Dum Airport and leave tonight, there's a chance that I can be in Riyadh before Zan or Scouse."

  Chandra was behaving oddly, too. At my last sentence his face had twisted into a scowl, and now he was shaking his head violently.

  "Before you think of going within a thousand miles of that —that woman, you must know one other thing. She expects you to follow. Can you not see the danger? She plans to trap you in Riyadh. Look at this, and then tell me if you wish to be in that city when she is there."

  He had gone over to the window sill and picked up a sheet of paper. "Here." He held it forward. "A message, Lionel—for you alone."

  I stared down at the thick, creamy notepaper. A white rose from the front garden had been pinned in the middle of the sheet. Above it sat an imprint in lipstick, a vermilion mouth shaped to kiss, and written beside those full lips were six words in dark red ink: durch Blut und Eisen, te inveniam.

  Chandra was watching me closely. "There is no doubt who the message is intended for, and I assume that there is no need for me to translate it. Do you know why she did this?"

  "Durch Blut und Eisen, te inveniam—through blood and iron, I'll seek you out." I muttered the words, while the full red lips seemed to glow at me from the paper. I struggled to control my voice. "It's Zan, following Scouse's orders. I'm sure he wants to make sure I don't follow them. Psychological pressure. He wants me too frightened to go on to Riyadh."

  And he's doing pretty damned well, I felt like adding.

  Chandra nodded over to the bed, where Ameera was still sleeping soundly. "So why didn't Xantippe kill Ameera, as well as Chatterji? Then you could not have followed."

  "She couldn't be sure I didn't know it anyway." I thought of Ameera, and a chill certainty grinned within my mind. "And she wants me to follow—never mind what Scouse wants, Zan has her own desires. I know how she looked at me in Belur's house. Ameera has just whetted her appetite. She missed her chance with me twice now, once in London and once in Cuttack. Third time lucky."

  Chandra gave a nod of relief. "It is settled then. You will stay here."

  "No." The red lips were smiling at me above the rose. "I'm going. Chandra, I'm going tonight. I won't let those bastards win. If they get away with this, Ameera suffered and Chatterji died for nothing."

  He was staring at me, wide-eyed. "But Ameera—" he began, then paused. "You are right. Revenge is a universal emotion. It should be ours."

  He was heading for the door. "Be ready quickly. Let me take care of Ameera, and do not worry about this house. If there is a charter jet of any kind at the airport tonight, you have my word that it will be yours."

  - 15 -

  Calcutta had been easy: all the time in the world to wander the city while I waited for some kind of subliminal clue from Leo to lead me to his contacts. But in Riyadh I would have only a few hours before Scouse and his bullyboys came after me.

  Right.

  Calcutta had been, at least to my knowledge, quite safe. But Riyadh would hold a crew of known killers, waiting for the next chance to slice fillets from my delicate flesh.

  No denying it.

  I had a personal friend in Calcutta, a man who was willing to drop his work at a moment's notice and come to help me. In Riyadh I had no close friend.

  Absolutely true.

  Beyond question, Chandra was perfectly logical. He had made all these, and a thousand other arguments, in the hours before I flew out of Calcutta. And yet, despite everything, I was right. On to the Arabian Peninsula and Riyadh, as soon as the plane could take me, and never mind every argument that a subtle, devious, and devoted Indian mind could conjure to hold me in Calcutta. That was the way to go.

  I was right, and Chandra was wrong.

  He didn't have all the feelings that lay behind the cold facts.

  I spoke maybe a hundred words of Arabic, picked up in travels from Morocco to Iraq, but I felt at home in Riyadh. The city fitted my inner self. My first concert there had been back in '88, when I was only nineteen years old. I had played the obligatory Tchaikovsky Number One in the brand-new concert hall, before a vast (and, I suspect, mystified) audience who had been dragged in from the streets for the inaugural concerts. Most of them were receiving their first taste of western music. That was the year the king decided to import European culture. Between the movements I had sensed a dignified and baffled silence.

  That bizarre first exposure led to a genuine love for the city and its hospitable Najdi population. Over the past eighteen years I had taken engagements there whenever they were offered to me. Apart from anything else it allowed me to follow the fantastic change from desert to garden as ten billion gallons per day of fresh water gushed in from Dammam on the Persian Gulf.

  Not only that, Riyadh had the best zoo in the whole world. The new Tokyo Zoo was the only competitor, but Tokyo didn't have those hushed deserts to the north and west, less than a day's drive away, where I could struggle mentally with tough nuts like the Hammerklavier, and decide how I was going to play them that night.

  So here I was, maybe half a day ahead of the killer pack. But how was I going to take the next step? Scouse and Xantippe must have some idea where Leo had been heading, but I didn't. Yet I had to get the Belur Package—and keep them from getting it while I stayed in one piece.

  A nice problem.

  My chartered plane had arrived at the airport north of the city at midnight. I hired a car, parked it at the exit to the rental area, wandered back into the arrival area, and settled down to wait. Each time that any plane with a stop in Calcutta came in to land, I went over to watch the passengers arrive in the lounge. And every couple of hours I risked leaving my inconspicuous post for ten minutes, to wolf down a sandwich or go to the bathroom. Naps were taken when I knew there was no flight due in the next hour.

  Dawn at last. The passengers who straggled off in the chill morning light were paste-white and red-eyed, shuffling zombies sifting the piles of luggage for missing bags. In half an hour the last of them was leaving. An age until midday. Then I stretched, yawned, and dozed through a long afternoon. The glow of a fine evening streamed in through the high lounge windows, and finally the hush of desert night, lulling the activity in the airport. I had to prop my eyes open, and the lure of a hotel bed grew stronger and stronger. I went to the rest room, washed and shaved, and came back to my seat. Midnight again; cramps in my legs and back; imagined insults and bloodcurdling oaths from Sir Westcott about the way I was abusing my body. Worse aches as the second night wore on.

  If my analysis of the situation were wrong, I was in for an uncomfortable couple of weeks.

  Anywhere else but in an airport I would have been conspicuous, but here I was surrounded by dozens of weary passengers waiting for their flight, the one that had been delayed in London, Rome, Athens, Bombay, Moscow, Baghdad, Jakarta, or Sydney.

  There was plenty of time for thinking, about Leo, Nymphs, and Ameera. I did a negligible amount of it. Other factors were taking over. The latest signs of sensory distortion had begun in Calcutta, when I was overtired after the drive from Cuttack. Now they came sweeping back, con brio, during the long hours of solitary waiting.

  The towers of the flash distillation plants that took piped seawater from the Persian Gulf and turned it to drinking water and valuable solid minerals lay ten miles east of the airport. By day they had appeared to me like new temples to Allah, dazzling white spires and metal skeleton mosques rearing their heads four hundred feet above the desert while the watchful German engineers sat in the control rooms at
their summit, infidel muezzin flooding the plain below with water instead of the call to prayer. Now, as midnight approached, the warning navigation lights on each tower glowed in the night, red eyes in the desert. They crept steadily closer until they peered in at me from outside the glass windows of the lounge, glowing tigers ten times my height. I was a homunculus in the dust beneath their paws as they pressed against the fragile panes.

  I forced myself to look away, to concentrate on my hands in front of my face. This was what Sir Westcott had warned about back in Reading. I struggled to recall his fat, scowling jowls and brusque orders.

  If you feel like you're getting smaller and smaller, cram a couple of these pills down as fast as you can . . . get to a hospital . . .

  Inside my head, the nerve cells were sprouting their long, threadlike axons, reaching out to couple and reconnect with a billion neighbors. The slow work of regeneration had been going on for months, but no results could come until near the end. As the neurons finally locked in to their matrix of shared pathways, information would begin to flow through the new lines: a tiny trickle at first, then suddenly a mind-breaking flood, a trillion items of data transfer between the lobes of my brain and Leo's. When the flood came, I ought to be a patient at peace in some quiet hospital ward of a London suburb—not a stiff-limbed hollow-eyed ghost in a foreign airport lounge.

  I heaved myself to my feet and picked up the little bag of necessities I had brought with me from Calcutta. If I drove carefully it was less than half an hour in the rented car to Riyadh's Yaghut Hospital. I had been there six years ago for a gamma globulin shot, when the hepatitis epidemic was running wild through the Middle East. There would be no traffic at this hour—it was almost three A.M.

  Before I had taken two steps, there was a shimmer of green lights behind me. The big screen that provided arrivals information in Arabic and English was flickering again. Terminating passengers from the Manila-London flight were now clearing Immigration; intermediate stop: Calcutta.