by Eric Brown
Then she stopped herself. There was only one reason he was talking to her now. He wanted to use her. Perhaps he was another scar freak.
They chatted about cities of the Earth, and then some of the colony worlds he’d visited. Sukara sat open-mouthed at the descriptions of the cities he’d seen, the natural wonders of the Expansion.
When she next looked at the clock behind the bar, it was almost six. Strange thing was, she no longer felt like going home. She could have sat and talked to Osborne all day.
He must have noticed her glance. He tapped her knee again. “Like I said, nice talking to you, Su.”
She was momentarily tongue-tied. She wanted to beg him to stay, to talk to her some more.
He pulled a baht note from his wallet, slipped it into her fingers. “See you around, okay?”
“Yeah, sure. See you around.” She tried to make it sound like she wouldn’t be bothered if she never saw him again.
Osborne eased himself from his stool and strolled, casual to the last, from the bar. Sukara watched him go, her heart sinking. She told herself not to be such a little fool. Then she lifted her hand and stared at the note. Two hundred baht... The sight of the bright orange note gave her a kick, and she told herself that she should be thankful.
At six, she jumped down from her stool and made her way unsteadily from the bar. She picked her mask up from reception, slipped it over her head, and hurried through the polluted dawn to the metro station.
The express was almost empty at this hour, heading out of the city, and she arrived home in record time. She locked the door behind her, switched on the vid-screen, and cooked egg noodles on her tiny stove. She ate them while watching an adventure movie set on Mars, then turned down the sound and prepared herself for bed.
As she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling a metre above her head, she thought over the past few hours. She considered the drunken Indian, then Osborne. She should have felt pleased that he had talked to her in preference to the other girls, pleased that he’d given her the two-hundred-baht note.
But, she could not help asking herself, why? Why her? She wanted to hate him for leading her on like that, giving her false hope. Then she recalled the charm of his smile, and how it had made her feel, and she could not bring herself to hate him.
She let her mind drift, and soon she was considering her little sister, wondering what she might be doing now.
* * * *
TEN
ONE SAD BASTARD
So this was how the super-rich lived... and died.
Perhaps a hundred mourners were gathered on the sloping lawns of the Sylvan Gardens that afternoon, preparatory to the ceremony that would see Gerhard Weiss, his wife Genevieve, and son Toby interred beneath the expensive sod of Bengal Station’s only cemetery.
Vaughan stood in the shade of a silver birch, nursing a glass of white wine and examining the mourners. So far as he could make out, they comprised three distinct sub-groups. He recognised Weiss’s managerial colleagues from the ‘port, sober men and women in traditional black, doing a good job of feigning an appropriate response to the loss of someone they had never really liked. Then there were the artist friends of Genevieve Weiss, agents, rich patrons, and the usual social parasites of the art world. A group of Toby’s schoolfriends and their parents formed a smaller clique. All told, it was the kind of elite soiree that Vaughan would rather have avoided. A greater contrast to Tiger’s funeral he could not imagine.
Unaugmented, he nevertheless felt the tone of varied emotions from the minds of the mourners, and grief was not uppermost.
He spotted a waiter bearing a loaded tray, eased through a press of chattering artists, and captured another glass. He wandered through the gathering, less self-conscious while on the move.
“Jeff. I didn’t think you’d bother turning up.” Jimmy Chandra appeared beside him. “Not that I’d ever accuse you of lacking compassion.”
“Of course you’d never do that, Jimmy.” Vaughan raised his glass in an ironic salute. “Actually, I’m not here to shed tears.”
“I thought not, somehow. How about shedding a compassionate thought for innocent victims?”
Sometimes, just sometimes, Vaughan felt like pushing a fist in Jimmy Chandra’s smug, smiling little Indian face. “Bullshit. I don’t feel anything for anyone they’re planting here today. To tell you the truth, I think it’s a waste of space.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“I suspect for the same reason that you are, if you’re honest.”
Chandra considered that. “So, what do you hope to find?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
“Another piece of the enigmatic puzzle?”
“Yeah, right.”
“For what it’s worth. I’ve been doing a bit of work on the case.”
“What is it worth?” Vaughan asked.
“Precious little, to be honest. I’ve contacted the police authorities on Verkerk’s World, enquired about the Jenson family.”
“And?”
“We won’t hear back for a few days. I also asked about the trade in endangered or proscribed animal species.”
Vaughan nodded. “Do you know anything about Verkerk’s World?”
“The planet was explored, developed, and settled by the Verkerk-Scherring Company, fifty years ago. It’s a bit of a backwater, no big cities or heavy industries. The same governing council ran the place until recently. A couple of weeks ago the government was ousted in a peaceful coup.”
A loudspeaker announcement informed the guests that the ceremony was about to take place in the burial glade. Mourners close to the family began to move from the lawn, while other guests waited respectfully.
“I’ve talked to all the known drug dealers, Jeff. They’re either lying, or they know nothing about rhapsody. There’s nothing to suggest that Weiss was smuggling the drug to Earth. Then again, there’s nothing to suggest that he wasn’t.” Chandra smiled up at Vaughan, a sliver of gold glinting between incisors. “Did I tell you, Jeff? I don’t like puzzles.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m going to circulate. I’ll be in touch. Contact me if you come up with anything interesting, okay?”‘
Chandra strolled off through the crowd. Vaughan joined the sedate procession of mourners from the lawn and into the glade of silver birch that was Sylvan Gardens proper.
Three coffins stood on a raised platform for all to see, the child’s tiny and pathetic between those of his parents. In a touch at once novel, and macabre, the material of the caskets was transparent. As Vaughan filed past with the other mourners, he saw that the morticians had done a good job on Gerhard Weiss’s blood-suffused face: his death mask was unnaturally pale. His wife was as beautiful in death as in life, an imperious ice queen garbed in black velvet and surrounded by red roses, as if, artist to the very last, she had had a posthumous hand in the aesthetics of her send-off.
As the coffins were lowered into three precisely excavated rectangular graves, a choir of a dozen female sopranos warbled a lament, and a silver haired man in a white suit—combining practised gravitas with avuncular hospitality—welcomed everyone to this sad yet joyous occasion, the celebration of the lives of the family Weiss.
“Gerhard Weiss was a loved and respected member of the community, as admired among his loyal staff as he was by his friends. Genevieve, as we all know, was a world-renowned artist who never let her fame interfere with her work or her regard for the many people close to her.”
Spare me, Vaughan thought. As tactfully as possible he eased his way to the rear of the gathering. He was waiting for a suitable opportunity to make his exit when he sensed someone beside him.
“I take it that you are not an artist?”
He looked up. “I consider that a compliment.”
The woman was of African origin—the skin of her severely angled face as black as graphite—and tall. Vaughan was six-four, and the woman stood a good head a
bove him, her height emphasised by the attenuated quality of her limbs and the fact that she wore a skin-tight white suit.
“I’m Dolores Yandoah.” She held out a limp hand. The glow of her mind suggested someone blitzed to a Zen-state acceptance of everything by expensive designer pharmaceuticals.
He nodded, ignored the proffered hand. “Vaughan.” He returned his attention to the eulogy.
“What do you think, Vaughan?”
He looked at the woman. She was serenely staring over the heads of the guests, watching the ceremony.
“Of this? To be honest, I think it’s a hypocritical farce. And tacky.”
“Oh, do you? I think that, as funerals go, this one is rather good. Aesthetically satisfying, and yet cathartic to those here to mourn.”
“Perhaps that’s the reason I can’t share your appreciation,” Vaughan said. “I have no aesthetic sensibility, and I’m not mourning.”
“I was right,” she murmured, more to herself. “You’re not an artist. I’ve been watching you. You look as if you hate everything, Vaughan. You have a rather negative view of reality.”
He laughed. “Is this reality?”
“It’s just as much reality as anything you would care to offer up as such,” Dolores drawled. “But then you’re the kind of person who would sneer at your own reality, even.”
Vaughan glanced up at the woman. “What are you, some kind of psychologist?”
Dolores smiled, her mouth expanding to reveal a wide corncob of teeth. “I’m an artist, Vaughan. Tell me, what are you doing here if you’re not mourning?”
“I’ve come to sneer,” he said.
Dolores laughed, as if in perverse delight. “You are one sad bastard, Vaughan.”
Their sparring was interrupted by the arrival of a small woman in a black suit. Her pale, pretty face, diminutive stature, and flighty, bird-like movements were the complete antithesis to Dolores’s attenuated, ebony hauteur.
The new arrival, barely half the size of the African, linked an arm around the top of Dolores’s right thigh. “Dolores, darling. What have you found? Do share!”
“An interesting specimen,” Dolores wisecracked. She bent and whispered something to her friend.
“Don’t mind Dolores,” the young woman laughed. “She’s highly temperamental. Carmine, by the way. Carmine Villefranche.”
He nodded. “Jeff Vaughan.”
“Now let me see. This is exciting!” Carmine tapped her lips with a straight finger. “From what Dolores has mentioned, I’d guess you’re an atheist, right? But not a humanist—am I warm?”
“Yeah.”
“How wonderful! I do so enjoy the vicarious thrill of despair one gains from dialogue with a nihilist. Dolores, darling, do you mind if I steal Vaughan for a teeny-weeny while? I might even be able to convert him.”
“You’re welcome to him, darling. But do treat him gently.” Dolores leaned over, bending herself into a stark, white-suited right angle, and kissed the young woman on the forehead. “Till later, ma chérie.”
Carmine, her mind bright with love and delight at life, took Vaughan by the hand and tugged him away from the gathering. “Would you care for a drink, Vaughan? I bet you drink scotch neat, am I right?”
Vaughan shook his head. “Beer. Blue Mountain,” he said. “Did you know the Weisses well?”
Carmine twisted her lips into a thoughtful moue as they crossed the lawn. “Not that well, Vaughan. They were fellow believers. I met them at the Church—”
“The Church?”
“The Church of the Adoration of the Chosen One,” Carmine said.
Vaughan almost halted in his tracks. He said, “Tell me about your religion. “
“Gosh!” Carmine cried theatrically. She mimed speaking into a microphone. “Subject indicates latent interest in abstract philosophies,” she whispered, but there was a smile in her eyes acknowledging the game.
They found an al fresco bar on the lawn overlooking the ocean and ordered drinks. As Carmine made her selection, a daiquiri with ice, Vaughan felt that for some reason—no doubt Carmine would have a suitably cutting psychological hypothesis—he could not equate the young woman sitting opposite him with anything to do with the kidnapping of Elly Jenson.
“How long have you been a member of the Church?”
Carmine sipped her drink, watching him over the rim. “Why the sudden interest, Vaughan?”
He shrugged. “Religions fascinate me.”
She positioned her glass on the table. “What do you think of the dominant religion here? Hinduism?” she asked.
Vaughan shrugged. “I don’t hold with it myself. But I can understand how millions of Hindus believe—”
“You sound like you condone such superstition.”
“I understand how historical and social conditions create the climate for the growth of belief systems,” Vaughan said, watching the girl. “I don’t condone, I try to comprehend. Anyway, you have your own belief system. Who are you to call someone else’s religion a superstition? Isn’t yours?”
Her gaze hardened. “No. No, it isn’t, Vaughan.” She paused there, watching him, seeming to consider her words. “Once I was like you... I had no belief, no hope. I could see nothing good in anything around me.”
Vaughan took a swallow of beer. “What happened?”
“What happened? I found the Church, that’s what happened. I met Dolores. I fell head first and we shared everything. She had her belief, her Church. I was sceptical at first. Like, it wasn’t ‘on’ to believe in anything but the liberal ideal of no-holds-barred free expression, right? So I went along, expecting to hate the whole thing.”
“And you were converted.”
“You know something, you’re so ugly when you sneer.”
He tried not to smile. “But you were converted?”
She waited, nodded finally. “I found the truth. I found I belonged. I was no longer alone, adrift. You know—even when you have someone, you’re still alone. Inside. We all need something more than just someone.”
“So what was it you found?”
“I told you. The truth. Cosmic awareness. Suddenly, I understood.”
“I’m trying not to sneer, okay?” He pointed to his woodenly straight face. “But please tell me— you know, I’d really like to know: what is the truth, Carmine? I’m really eager to know.”
“You bastard.”
“Okay, so I’m a bastard. I don’t believe a damned word. So convince me. Tell me: what is this Truth of yours?”
She spoke deliberately, each word as hard as steel. “I took communion. I ate the wafer and, for the next thirty minutes or more, I was no longer Carmine Villefranche. I was... unified. I shared cosmic awareness. I saw the place of humanity in the universe, the small part we are of the much vaster sentient organism.” She stopped there, eyes wide, as if she were reliving the experience.
Casually, aware of the sweat breaking out on his forehead, Vaughan said, “Who is the Chosen One?”
“She is the very centre of our Church.”
Vaughan reached into his jacket pocket. Earlier that day he’d had Genevieve Weiss’s graphic copied to the size of a snapshot. He passed it across to Carmine. “Is she the Chosen One?”
“Hey—how come you have this?” She looked at him, suspicious.
“Like I said, I’m interested in religions.”
Carmine gazed at the pix, and Vaughan could not mistake the look of awe in her eyes. “Every two years, the Godhead chooses anew. She is the present Chosen One.”
Attempting to keep his voice even, he said, “Have you looked upon this Chosen One?”
She blinked. “Why, of course. Just last night.”
“Where? Where did you see her?”
“In church, where else?”
Vaughan nodded. He took a swallow of beer. He had to be careful, very careful. “Tell me about your religion. Its history, origins.”
Carmine finished her drink, gestured to the waiter, and ordered another
daiquiri.
“It started perhaps thirty years ago on Verkerk’s World,” she said, and Vaughan tried not to show any reaction to the mention of the colony planet.
Carmine went on, “A young girl was granted a vision one day while walking alone in the mountains. She was granted communion and told to spread the word. She told colony leaders, those in authority, about a drug that would bring humanity together, eliminate the division caused by greed, put an end to national pettiness, aggression, and warfare.”
