Necropath [Bengal Station 01]

by Eric Brown

  In scan-mode he would have been unable to face the torrent of minds in the thoroughfare—the overload of so many individual identities invading his own would have obliterated his sense of self. Even unaugmented, the buzz of a thousand minds so close would have affected him like a severe migraine. But with the sedative of the chora damping his senses he felt safe: each mind was a sphere of modulated music, contained within itself.

  A gaudy array of neon arrows pulsed in the darkness up ahead, pointing to the entrance of Nazruddin’s. Vaughan paused outside the restaurant, watching the street kids. They were a sorry gaggle of waifs and strays, pot-bellied and skinny-limbed—or missing limbs altogether—which Vaughan seemed to see afresh tonight with eyes made observant by loss. Every time a diner approached the open doorway, a couple of kids forced themselves across the sidewalk on crutches, palms outstretched. Occasionally they were rewarded with a carelessly tossed confetti of low-denomination notes, grudgingly given. More often than not they were ignored. He tried to banish the image of Tiger from his mind’s eye.

  He hurried into the restaurant, glanced around the packed tables for Chandra—but the cop was late. Nazruddin lifted a meaty hand in greeting from his station behind the counter and ambled over as Vaughan seated himself in his booth.

  “Mr. Vaughan! Are you dining tonight? Today’s speciality—”

  “Just a beer, P.K.”

  Nazruddin squeezed a wink, a gesture at once servile and complicit. He snapped his fingers and yelled in Hindi. A thin-legged, teenage waiter hurried over with a bottle of Blue Mountain lager. Nazruddin made a performance of drying the condensation from the bottle and pouring a glass.

  “No Tiger, Mr. Vaughan?”

  “No,” he said. “No, not tonight.”

  As Nazruddin smiled and sailed away, Vaughan found himself wishing that Nazruddin had known about Tiger’s death and expressed his condolences. It seemed a slight to Tiger’s memory that her passing was not universal knowledge—people’s ignorance of the fact that she was no longer around seemed to devalue her existence retrospectively: she was just another parasitical street kid, after all, and one fewer would not be missed.

  He cursed his muddled introspection. The chora was wearing off. He pulled the vial from his pocket, tipped a liberal dose into his glass, and drank. He began to feel his senses dull.

  Jimmy Chandra arrived five minutes later.

  “Jeff, good to see you. It must be what... three, four years?”

  Chandra stood uncertainly before the booth, the confidence of his greeting not matched by his expression. He was a short, trim, boyish-faced Indian in the khaki uniform of an investigator. His smile was the perpetual feature of his round face, but today the smile was uneasy.

  “It’s okay, Jimmy. I’m not reading. Why don’t you sit down? I’ll get you a beer.” He gestured to the waiter.

  Chandra slid into the opposite seat. “I’ve got nothing to hide, Jeff. Nothing personal, that is— even if you were in scan-mode. But, you know—investigations...”

  “Hey, don’t mention it.”

  Chandra’s smile lost its uneasiness, became eager. “So, how are you? It’s been a long time. I called by your apartment, but you were always out.”

  “I work unsocial hours, Jimmy.” In fact, Vaughan had always ignored Chandra’s odd call. He had nothing against the young cop, but the thought of socialising had never really struck him as that important.

  The strange thing was, he liked Jimmy Chandra. He reminded Vaughan of himself before the operation to make him telepathic had spoilt his illusions. Like Chandra, he’d been idealistic, hopeful for both himself and humanity.

  Chandra sipped his beer. His mind emanated a melody of harmonious emotions. Vaughan was unable to read individual thoughts without his augmentation-pin, but he received a general mood of charity and well-being from the young cop. It seemed that he’d changed little over the years.

  Chandra rolled his glass between flattened palms. “Well, how are you?” he asked again.

  Vaughan shrugged and turned his palm in a you-know, so-so gesture. He knew that Chandra found his negativity, his laconic cynicism, more than a little discomfiting.

  The beer and the chora combined were having an effect. He found himself saying, “Can you remember Tiger? Street kid, one leg?”

  “Sure.” Chandra smiled. “Sure I remember her— you helped her out, right?”

  Vaughan recalled Chandra’s approval, tinged with just the hint of suspicion, when he’d introduced the cop to Tiger years ago.

  “Tiger died early today.”

  He could not look into Chandra’s face when he, said this. He waited five seconds, then looked up.

  Chandra was not smiling; his mood had darkened. Perhaps he sensed that Vaughan was baiting him, taunting him with another example of how horrible the world was. Vaughan recalled one drunken meeting when he had, cruelly and cynically, tried to explain to Chandra the true awfulness of the human condition. It had been here, in this very booth. He recalled that he’d repeated one line over and over— if you could only see what I’ve seen—without telling the cop too much about his past: his work with the Toronto police, the minds he’d read.

  “I’m sorry,” Chandra said now.

  Vaughan stared down at his beer. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  “Perhaps by talking, sharing the pain, it might make it a little easier.”

  Vaughan almost smiled. The same idealistic Chandra as ever. He looked up. “Nothing can make it any easier, Jimmy. That’s bullshit. It might make it easier at the time, briefly. But nothing can take away the grief that corrodes over the years.”

  Chandra stared at him. “I thought you said Tiger died this morning?”

  The cop was fishing, but Vaughan was not taking the bait. There were some things that were beyond discussing.

  “Like I said, I don’t know why I’m telling you about Tiger.” He paused. “She was just another scheming street kid. But she meant something to me.” He dried up; he couldn’t tell the cop why she meant something to him.

  Chandra said, tentatively, “I remember you saying that no one meant anything to you, or words to that effect.”

  Vaughan shrugged. He pushed his glass around the table. “I arranged her funeral earlier today. And guess what?” He forced an ironic laugh. “They’re all booked up down at the burning ghats during the day. The only time they’ve got free is at one in the morning. How about that?”

  Chandra shrugged. “Tough.”

  “Yeah, tough.” Vaughan said. “It’ll make a pretty bonfire, though.”

  The cop cleared his throat, nodded at Vaughan’s empty bottle. “Another beer?” He turned and called the waiter.

  Vaughan stared at his empty glass. He’d stay here till past midnight, get loaded, then go down to the ghats and attend the funeral ceremony which, now that he’d arranged it, seemed increasingly meaningless. Drunk, he might not be able to recall all the morbid details. Tiger would have understood.

  When the beer arrived, Vaughan sat up and looked across at Jimmy. “So much for all that shit, Officer Chandra. You didn’t come here to watch me crying into my drink.”

  Chandra gave athink-nothing-of-it smile. “I must admit, it was a surprise to hear from you. I’m pleased you got in touch.”

  Vaughan wondered if the cop was lying. “So you got something on Weiss?” he asked.

  “Came up with some interesting facts.” He looked at Vaughan. “Can you tell me what you have against this guy?”

  “It might be nothing. I might be being paranoid, who knows? What did you find?”

  “Well, it appears that his identity is suspect for a start. He has papers to certify he’s a citizen of the European Federation. But I’ve run checks with Europe and drawn a blank. He just doesn’t exist. The persona of Gerhard Weiss is a front. Likewise all his qualification cards and records—all forgeries.”

  Vaughan nodded, showing a calm he did not feel. He’d had no idea what might be disc
overed by putting Chandra on the trail of his boss at the ‘port, but this was far more than he’d hoped for.

  “Okay, but this is between you and me.” He poured two beers and told Chandra about Weiss and the ships from Verkerk’s World, Vega II.

  Chandra looked up from his beer when Vaughan stopped talking. “Could he be smuggling something to Earth?”

  “More like someone—someone he doesn’t want me reading.”

  “Wouldn’t this someone just leave the ship wearing a mind-shield?”

  Vaughan shook his head. “I have the authority to take every traveller with a shield into custody and demand its removal. Weiss wouldn’t want me doing that.”

  “Right.” Chandra said. “But why didn’t you just read Weiss’s mind?”

  “Come on, think about it.”

  “He’s shielded, right?”

  “As ‘port Director it’s within his remit to demand that he’s shielded at all times. Who knows what sensitive information us teleheads could get our hands on, otherwise. Damned convenient for Weiss, though.”

  Chandra nodded. He looked eager, the ambitious law enforcement officer faced with injustice. “So we’ve got this guy going under a false identity running the ‘port and letting ships in without the usual checks. Where do you go from here?”

  Vaughan refilled the cop’s glass from his own bottle and called for two more. “There’s another ship from Verkerk’s World due in at midnight tomorrow. I’m on duty, though no doubt Weiss will find some excuse to get me out of the way. Of course, if he wasn’t at the ‘port...”

  “Wouldn’t he make sure the ship was manned with guards under orders not to let you near?”

  “He might, but that’s no problem. It’s Weiss I need out of the way, just for a few hours—say, from ten tomorrow evening until two in the morning.”

  He stared across the table at Chandra. “You have enough on him to take him in for questioning, Jimmy. So haul him in, don’t make a big deal of it straight away—maybe don’t even let him know you know about his false identity. I don’t want him spooked yet. I don’t want him calling off whatever he’s doing here. Make it look routine, so he doesn’t suspect we’re on to him.”

  Chandra was nodding slowly, mulling over Vaughan’s words. “I could do that easily enough. I could pull him in on his forged flier licence, say we’re having a sweep. It’s routine; he won’t suspect a thing. I’ll book him for driving with invalid papers and let him go at dawn.”

  “I’ll do my best to get aboard the ship. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  They shared another beer, but Vaughan’s silence must have spooked the cop. He quickly drained his glass and said he’d be in touch.

  Vaughan watched Chandra hurry from the restaurant. He glanced at his handset. It was almost time to be setting off for the ghats.

  * * * *

  SIX

  THE PRICE OF INTIMACY

  Vaughan made the edge in five minutes and shared a downchute cage with a dozen Taipusan cultists, a Hindu sect that practised self-mortification as a means of purifying the soul. They were naked and emaciated, old men with stick-limbs and long hair matted into stiffened hanks. They had anointed their limbs and torsos with grey ash and painted their foreheads with Hindi script. Six of the group had arms or legs missing. One sadhu, reposing in a plastic tray on castors, was a limbless torso, his huge member slung across his abdomen. They were making their way to the burning ghats to eat the flesh of the Hindu dead.

  Vaughan turned his back on them and stared through the mesh gate as the cage descended. He was aware of their minds behind him. The collected energy of their thoughts hummed at a low threshold, a deep, vibrant note sustained serenely without fluctuation.

  Through the mesh, which cut the scene into a grid pattern, he watched the ghats come into sight. The dark margin of the stepped platform, raised above sea level, encircled the Station like a plinth. Countless fires burned on the broad upper step, a succession of roseate beacons diminishing into the distance. Each pyre illuminated a knot of mourners, dark figures washed in the ruddy glow of the flames. Vaughan counted fifty individual fires before they merged into one long, unbroken line.

  The cage clanked to a halt and Vaughan hauled open the gate. The sadhus filed past him, pushing their limbless compatriot in his cart and murmuring an eerie, monotone chant as they stepped out onto the holy ground. A crowd of hawkers and beggars swarmed outside the cage. They allowed the holy men through without hassle, then surged at Vaughan, thrusting everything they had to offer—joss sticks, images of Buddha and Kali, holy relics, and amputated stumps—into his face. He pushed through the crowd, ignoring their cries, swatting away the more persistent hands that tugged at his jacket.

  The fires extended in both directions, north and south, each pyre located in a narrow strip cordoned off from the next by a length of white tape. On the sheer, polycarbon fa ç ade of the Station bold black numbers were painted on circular white backgrounds. Vaughan stood before a massive numeral Sixty-Seven. For a period of perhaps thirty seconds, disoriented by the unfamiliarity of the place, drink, and chora, he searched his memory for the number the funeral director had given him over his handset. It was something in the forties. The ghats numbered from one to fifty were Buddhist, he realised; from fifty-one to one hundred, Hindu. He set off at a hurried walk along the crowded ghats. It was almost one o’clock.

  His progress was impeded by the passage of mourners crossing his path from the many funeral parlours set into the wall of the Station. On biers they carried their dead, swaddled in crimson, white, or saffron winding sheets, to the waiting pyres beside the sea. From the cremations already in progress came the stench of petrol fumes and burning meat, and the ululating cries of prayer. The heat from the fires swept the ghats like a desert wind.

  He paused before the great painted number Forty-Five. The parlour beneath was deserted but for a tiny, orange-wrapped figure laid out on a trestle table. Slowly, his steps retarded as if he were walking through mud, Vaughan approached the cut-price catafalque. The tightly wound material robbed Tiger’s body of individuality, reduced her to just another anonymous corpse-shape.

  An old woman in funeral whites appeared from the shadows of the parlour and prattled at him in Thai.

  “I’m sorry...”

  She switched to English, “You here at last. Come to collect...” She rattled off a Thai name of many consonants. Vaughan was nonplussed for a few seconds. Tiger had told him her name, years ago, but he had always known her as Tiger.

  “Take her.” The woman waved meanly. “Monk waiting.” She scurried back into the parlour to prepare the next corpse.

  Vaughan reached out, removed the cloth from Tiger’s face, and gazed at the sleeping girl. Her expression was composed, serene. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted in the hint of a smile. Her dark skin held a waxy sheen, where fuel had been injected to accelerate the combustion of the corpse. Leaving her face uncovered, Vaughan bent forward and slipped his hands beneath shoulders and thighs. She was so light that, when he lifted her, he almost fell backwards. He turned with her in his arms and stared across the deck. The funerary area between him and the sea was deserted but for the Buddhist monk standing beside the stacked pyre.

  He was conscious of his isolation as he carried Tiger’s body across to the pyre and laid her atop the stack of wood-substitute. The monk surrounded the body with a barricade of the material, obscuring the saffron sheet and her clean profile from sight.

  Vaughan backed off as the monk pressed a touchpad with his sandaled foot, and the pyre ignited with a roar like a jet engine. The heat beat Vaughan further back and he stood with his forearm protecting his face, squinting to see the dark outline of the body in the orange heart of the leaping flames as the monk intoned a monotonous chant. Vaughan sat cross-legged, hung his head, and closed his eyes.

  Seconds later he became aware of sad mind-emanations. He opened his eyes. Gathered around the pyre were perhaps ten young boys and girls, quie
tly watching Tiger’s body burn in the raging flames.

  Dr. Rao, Vaughan noted, was not present. As if he’d really expected the rapacious doctor to pay his last respects...

  From time to time the monk added fuel, and the pyre exploded as if in anger. The sound of the flames, the cracking and popping of bones, lulled Vaughan to the edge of sleep.

  He awoke suddenly, jerking upright, disoriented for a second. He was the last mourner at this funeral: the children had departed. To the east, the sky was gradually lightening: it was almost dawn. Before him, the monk was sweeping the remains of the pyre into the sea with serene, measured strokes of his broom. Only a dark, oval stain remained on the deck to mark the position of Tiger’s pyre.