Analog Science Fiction and Fact - July-Agust 2014

by Penny Publications

  "How's the scavenging business?" I asked.

  "Not bad. It keeps you from getting too bored."

  "You get much competition around here?"

  "Ha! As if. We do things according to the rules around here. You got your guys who think they can strip a house and sell it on the black market, but they get ten cents on the dollar for their scrap. But if you go down to Town Hall and get your salvage ticket, you can sell the stuff up at Trader Jack's on the weekend for fair price. You want some coffee?"

  "Always," I said. He nodded, then led me into the house. The kitchen was small and cramped, half filled with a small table and chairs. The whole house looked small enough to fit in the living room of my kilotower apartment.

  And on one wall was a flag. An American flag. With a big red dollar sign, surrounded with a big red circle, with a big red slash across it. A Tax Breaker flag. I tried not to look at it too long. I didn't want Poole to see me looking at it all. But he was a Tax Breaker and that set my nerves on edge.

  "The thing that killed these houses was the finances," he said a few minutes later as he poured black coffee into a clean-ish cup.

  "What do you mean?" I asked, sipping carefully to avoid burning my lips.

  "You know those old houses in town are still standing after two hundred years or so because they're built like castles—lath and plaster, huge wooden planks and beams, way over-engineered. Drywall and two-by-fours weren't meant to last that long. But before these places started to fall down on themselves, they stopped making sense financially. You could put money into fixing them up year after year without adding to the value. Banks stopped fronting people the money for the fixing. They moved out. Abandoned them. Put up salvage tickets in Town Hall for guys like me."

  "This place looks like it's in pretty good shape," I said.

  "That's because I rehabbed it myself. Rebuilt the frame. Put on a new roof. I've got solar panels across the backside of it. A fuel-cell in the basement for when I can get the hydrogen. I grow tomatoes and peppers and asparagus and, uh, you know, medicinal herbs, trade 'em with the neighbors for corn and beans."

  "Sounds like a good deal. Your neighbors don't look like the type to trade easy with."

  "The 'Nesians? They're okay. Fifty years ago, they would have been living up in Rockville and you'd be out here in a tract home. You don't know how easy you've got it."

  "I think I'm about to find out," I said.

  He raised his eyebrows in a virtual question mark. I told him how my parents were selling our apartment out from under me. He laughed.

  "Well, if you get desperate, I can show around and help you pick out an empty place."

  "I'm half tempted to take you up on it," I said.

  I was finished with my first cup and working on a second one when Poole brought up the Tax Breakers.

  "You saw my flag and my ink," he said. "You know what I was."

  I nodded.

  Back before I was in high school, the Tax Breakers had risen up against the government, what some called the last gasp of resistance against the loss of liberty. I knew better than to think they were really the last, but they were the latest. For seven months, they'd demonstrated in towns and cities across the country.

  Then, one night, they leveled up. In a wave of coordinated strikes, they'd assassinated the governors of thirteen states, left another three wounded, and attacked dozens of state legislators. Political terror on a scale never seen before or since.

  "I didn't have anything to do with the violence," Poole said, his voice resonant with regret. "But I spent some time in a camp anyway until they figured that out for themselves. When I got out, Gramma Bonnie staked me to this place. She helped me out from time to time whenever I needed something. She was a good lady. I'm sorry to see her go."

  "What can you tell me about her?" I asked, pulling out an old-fashioned reporter's notebook and a pen. I like to use the old tools—people see them and are reminded that they're on the record.

  Poole told me about his family, how he didn't get along with his mother, how she didn't get along with hers, and how no one got along with Bonnie. Except him. "I was the first boy in three generations. I kind of got spoiled. I think that's what made my mother so mad."

  He went on with stories of family holidays ruined by fights. Of a misspent youth filled with broken dreams. How the Tax Breakers were never understood—and him in particular.

  I scribbled it all down, knowing that if he had a hand in his Gramma Bonnie's death, this was going to be gold in my pocket. And after a while, he wound down, started to run out of stories, sat silently for long minutes between them.

  That was the point where I knew to step in with the big questions.

  "So did you get in to Rockville to see her a lot?" I asked. "It seems like an awful long walk."

  "Not as often as I should have."

  "When was the last time you saw her? Did she say anything you remember?" I hoped he didn't realize what I was fishing for, or that I was fishing for something at all. He was still a Tax Breaker.

  "Weeks ago," he said. "Last summer. I don't remember what she said. And I think it's time for you to go."

  I felt my face heat up, but hoped it was too dim in that little kitchen for Poole to see it. Even so, I knew that he knew that I was fishing. And coming up with nothing.

  I hurried out the door with just the barest of courtesies and headed quickly up the road to Trader Jack's.

  Then I walked the long walk—two miles of it—back to Rockville, with nothing but trivial details of Poole's youth and pointless thoughts about his role in Bonnie's death to keep my mind occupied.

  Halfway home I began to understand in an intimate way the importance of mechanized transport in all its forms—and the limitations of our current system. For all its shortcomings, the automotive age let you get around quickly and easily.

  I took a shower, checked my messages, sent a note off to Vince telling him what I planned on writing tomorrow, then put on my best shirt and shoes before heading out the door.

  "Is this a date?" Gaby asked when I arrived at the ice cream parlor across the street from the Harriet Beecher Stowe kilotower. She offered a sly smile and twisted a curl in one finger.

  "More like an interview," I said.

  "That what I thought," she replied. "Do you do all your interviews here?"

  The parlor was decorated in historical style—chairs with curved iron scrollwork, black and white tiles on the floor in harlequin pattern, Tiffany lamps. I was having a dish of something called a "Good Humor bar"—I don't know why—that consisted of orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream. Gaby had a dish of butter pecan.

  "So tell me about Bonnie Bannister and the people who work with you," I said.

  "Should I start with me?" she asked, scrunching up her nose.

  "With whoever you want," I replied.

  As I suspected, once I got her talking, I didn't have to do much more.

  Gaby had been working at Maxwell Court for three years. Her full name was Gabrielle O'Rourke. She was part Irish and part Italian. She was not a nurse or a doctor or a physician assistant, but she had loads of specialized training in the equipment needed to maintain a disembodied brain. And she had learned loads more from Bonnie. She lived upstairs in one of the many rooms offered by Maxwell Court. She liked Judge Adams. Bonnie herself, not so much. A lot of her job was keeping the judge company, so it was good that she liked him. She worked eight-hour shifts, but was on call for the rest of the day... if she were around. She was home the night Bonnie died.

  "Am I a suspect?" she asked abruptly.

  "I don't know," I said. "Are you?"

  "If I am, then this would be more than just an interview, wouldn't it be? I mean, it would be an interrogation."

  "Maybe. But that would mean I would be asking more questions and you wouldn't be telling me quite so much about yourself."

  "Perhaps I am a diabolically clever killer," she said.

  "Perhaps. But who else was there that
night?"

  "Abigail, of course. And the night staff." There was a live-in housekeeper—the rest of the housekeeping staff went home at the end of the workday. And the cook—though she was out most of the evening with her boyfriend, an older man who ran a black-window pizza restaurant over in Talcottville. Abigail was always home. She and her husband had split up years ago, before she came to work for Bonnie. She was a nurse—an LPN. Her husband came around from time to time. He was a small, effeminate man with a lisp. Gaby couldn't figure out why they had ever gotten together, but could speculate on why it didn't work out. But for some reason, it made Abigail sad, she said, because whenever he came around, Abigail cried.

  "They're both pretty odd," she said.

  "And people who've had their brains removed and put into a stainless steel can are not?"

  "I guess when you put it that way..." she said, looking down and studying the melted ice cream at the bottom of her dish. "And oh yeah! David Poole was there that night."

  "Poole? He told me he hadn't seen her for weeks."

  "Well, that's just silly," Gaby said. "He was always stopping by. Every week. You could always tell when he was there."

  "How's that?"

  "His laugh," she said. "He has a very deep voice and very deep laugh and you could hear it all through the house. He was laughing that night."

  I frowned. Things were making less and less sense. Poole had lied to me. But I couldn't put my finger on exactly why.

  I stopped asking questions, but Gaby kept on talking. After a while, she stopped, and we got up to leave.

  At the door the ice cream parlor, she turned to me.

  "If this were a date, I might have let you walk me home," she said. "And if it were just an interview, I might have pretended it was date and you could have walked me home anyway. But I'm not sure it wasn't an interrogation after all. And who knows, I might be a diabolically clever killer after all. So I think it's better for both of us if I just go home alone."

  And with that, she pecked me on the cheek, said good night, and left.

  Which was just as well as far as I concerned. After all I had learned about Maxwell Court and all the people who had an opportunity to put an end to Bonnie Bannister's long, long life, I was still unsure who might have been responsible. I didn't know enough... and at the same time, I was starting to realize that I knew all that I was likely to learn. It was enough to keep me awake long into the night.

  I woke up in the morning with a plan. I'm not sure where it came from, but it was the only one that made sense. I called Gaby and told her I needed to meet that afternoon with everyone involved in Bonnie's death—including Dave and the AI twins and the entire staff that was on duty that night. She said she'd take care of it, even Dave, though she didn't say how.

  I went through the morning as if in a dream. I made my rounds to Town Hall and the school offices. I sat in on a meeting with teachers and principals about a new headring-based curriculum program and even though I took notes and wrote up a story, I still don't remember what anyone said. I had lunch... but I can't remember what I ate. And I did some other things to prepare for the meeting.

  Then I took the long walk up the hill, past the park, to Maxwell Court.

  Everyone was there when I arrived, seated around the big room with the large lights and equipment so that we didn't have to move Peter and Paul, no small task I'd been told.

  Dave was there, to my surprise.

  "We sent a hired car to get him," Gaby said.

  "Can you do that?" I asked.

  "We can do a lot of things now that Bonnie is gone," she answered.

  Gaby and Abigail and the cook and the housekeeper were there. Even Judge Adams was there, through a remote.

  I started directly.

  "As some of you may know, I've been trying to figure out who, if anyone, had a hand in the events that caused the death of Bonnie Bannister. I've been doing what I do for a living—poking around, asking questions, getting not much of anywhere—for a couple of days now. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I was spending all my time looking at the crime without spending any time at all looking at Bonnie."

  Gaby smiled and so did Dave. Abigail sniffled a bit and put a knuckle to her lips.

  "I've been looking at old videos and news stories and other things. She was quite interesting in her time. Dynamic and creative. She was someone who wanted things done her own way and was willing to push and push until they were. She cared deeply about the things she cared deeply about."

  "She was quite the lady," Dave said unprompted. I nodded to him.

  "Yes, she was," I said. "Probably not the easiest woman in the world to get along with, though. Strong-willed, but not always right about everything—and that bothered her because she knew it and regretted it."

  "Ask my mother," Dave said. "And my grandmother. They've got stories to tell."

  "I know. Some of them even made it into the newspapers. And after I read those stories and saw her in life, in her own words, I began to think about what it must have been like for her to find herself trapped inside one of those big coffee urns that they made for her."

  Abigail made a slight sob. The judge made a crackling sound.

  "I think it was a lot easier for you, Judge," I said. "Maybe it was a better alternative than pouring yourself into a bottle in your old age."

  "I don't think I appreciate that," the judge said.

  "I don't mean that as a bad thing. I'm sure this life isn't easy for anyone. But you seem to be taking it in stride. I think you've always taken what life throws at you and thrown it right back. I don't think Bonnie Bannister could do that—or at least not quite as well."

  "I have to agree with you on that one," Dave said.

  "Thank you, Dave," I replied. "You know, for a while, I thought you might have been the one who told Peter and Paul to shut down Bonnie's equipment. But Gaby said she didn't think so, and I looked into it a little further. I found out that you lied to me—small lies—about a couple of things. You came to see Bonnie a lot more often than you were willing to admit."

  "It was none of your business," he said.

  "Probably not. I wondered what you talked about when you were here. But that's none of my business either. The fact that you came and talked and laughed made it more unlikely that you did her any harm. And then there's your house. She didn't buy that for you, did she?"

  Dave looked sheepish, then hung his head. "No, she didn't."

  "That was her house. I looked it up. It's the house she grew up in. She was a child of that suburban neighborhood, grew up in that tract home with the school down the street and cars and driving and all that world that's gone so many years ago. Her world was gone long before they put her into that can on the shelf. The world of the suburbs and television and ordinary life on a whole different stage."

  "She told me about what it was like," Dave said. "Night after night. High school and shopping centers and doughnut shops. All gone now."

  "Exactly. So I started thinking that the question here isn't who would take Bonnie's life. It was who would end it. Taking a life requires a whole different motivation, and none of you seemed to have it. Judge Adams doesn't profit from it. Neither does Dave. Gaby could be diabolically clever, but not to any end that I can see."

  She stuck out her tongue at me.

  "But ending her life... that's a different thing entirely. Someone who cared a great deal about Bonnie could have done that. Someone like Dave. Or even Gaby. Or someone like Abigail."

  I turned to her and stopped. She looked at me and her eyes widened. Her hand began to shake.

  "How about it, Abigail? What happened that night?"

  A tear formed in one eye and ran down her cheek. She brushed it off. For a moment, I thought she wasn't going to answer me, but then she spoke.

  "She used to tell me, night after night, over and over, how she felt she had lived too long," Abigail said. "She used to tell me how powerless she felt, with nothing but her voice to make th
ings happen. She couldn't go anywhere. She couldn't do anything. She was just a disembodied voice. An empty thought rattling around in a steel can. She told me she hated it."

  "Night after night," I said. "For how many years?"

  "Too many years," Abigail said. "I cared about her so much. I couldn't stand to see her suffer. I couldn't stand to suffer with her. So one night, I figured out what to do. I figured out how to put an end to the suffering. I told Peter what to do and I told Paul what to do and I made them both forget it. Then I went to bed and waited for the end. And I'm so sorry. So sorry. I didn't know what else to do for her."

  She broke down, then, sobbing softly to herself, the tears flowing. Gaby looked at me like I was the murderer, then put her arms around Abigail and comforted her.

  I felt like Gaby was right. And worse, I felt guilty for knowing that I had a great story that was I was going to have to write up. Just as soon as someone charged Abigail for what she did.

  Afterward, I went down to the library and visited with Judge Adams, just the two of us. Dave was calling the police—he said it was his duty to his great-grandmother.

  "I'm not sure what they're going to charge her with," the judge said. "If I were her lawyer, I'd argue that Bonnie died back when they put her brain in the can. Make the state prove that she was a legal person. I don't know if they want to get into that issue just yet."

  "If I were her, I'd want to have you as her lawyer," I said. "Have you still got any good beer stashed in here?"

  "You're the only one who's been drinking it, so you'd know better than I."

  I found a bottle and opened it on the table next to the judge's steel urn.

  "You know, there's just one thing that bothers me," the judge said.

  "What's that?"

  "For years, Bonnie used to tell me the same things she told Abigail. 'I've lived too long... I can't do things any more... I don't know how long I can go on like this.'" He said it using a tone and inflection that I didn't know you could make with an artificial voice.

  "That's kind of creepy," I said.

  "Yes. After I a while, I couldn't take it any more. I told her she couldn't jack into my circuit whenever she wanted—especially not at night when she was feeling sorry for herself. That put an end to it... at least for me. I should have known she'd take it out on someone like poor Abigail."