Starfire a-2

by Charles Sheffield

  “Something made Alpha Centauri go supernova. And that same something arranged for the gamma pulse and the particle storm ter run right smack bang into our solar system.”

  7

  From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

  A Proustian obsession with one’s own past is, to my mind, an indicator of mental illness.

  And yet, sometimes, it is necessary.

  Seth Parsigian had departed at midday telling me that he was going to “check out ideas” that might solve the problem of my inability to face a trip to Sky City. He did not tell me what those ideas were. I did not ask. Nor did he mention an intention to return. I knew the man. He would be back.

  Meanwhile, there were the records. Parsigian left with me a mountain of data and conjectures relating to the twelve murders, together with the less-than-helpful advice “See what you can sift out of it, Doc.”

  Sifting, however, was not what I had in mind when I sat down, early the same afternoon, to begin my review of the material that he had left with me. What I sought was that intangible sense of contact, the ineffable touch of another’s mind.

  Murders, particularly murders of compulsion, represent consequence rather than cause. They occur as the result of some particular motivation. In my own case, it was-and is-a desire to match mental to physical perfection. What, then, motivated the murderer of teenage girls in Sky City? What had been in his mind before he killed?

  I examined once more the known facts of the murders, and found thin gruel. I had the dates, the circumstances and places of death, the physical descriptions, and the names: Myra Skelton, Tanya Bishop, Doris Wu, Cissy Muller, April Jarrow, Brenda Cleve, Lucille DeNorville, Denise Braidley, Julia Vansittart, Elke Edson, Georgina Yang, and Kate Ulrey. What did they have in common?

  They were young, they were female, and they were dead.

  More informative, perhaps: What did they not have in common? They were of widely variable wealth and social class, from the dirt-poor welders’ daughters Brenda Cleve and Cissy Muller to the rich Myra Skelton and the even richer and royally connected Lucille DeNorville. They were not, as Seth had suggested, all beautiful, at least to my tastes. But who could say how the murderer had seen them? Before I knew that I would have to learn to see through his eyes.

  The most significant fact was the wide range in the victims’ ages. April Jarrow had been eight, Doris Wu close to fifteen and a half. Although Seth had remarked that April was big for her age, he’d missed the point. I had studied the photographs and medical reports, and April and Doris lay on opposite sides of the great divide of puberty. This, in turn, seemed to place the murderer’s mind beyond reach of my own, since I would never have thought to approach a prepubescent girl.

  Would I?

  I have an excellent memory for facts. But how to summon to mind bygone emotional states, sensations past? That must also come from the study of cold, hard facts. Alexander Pope puts it as well as anyone: “Remembrance and reflection, how allied. What thin partitions sense from thought divide.”

  As afternoon wore on into long summer evening I put all records to one side, abandoned myself to recollection, and sought the depths of my own past.

  The initiating event was clear in my mind. I was in my first year of postdoctoral study, bubbling with the ferment of ideas on the causes of apoptosis that led, five years later and via a circuitous route that I could never have imagined in advance, to a full understanding of cell death and thence to telomod therapy.

  The research facility where I worked occupied a full block in the center of Atlanta. And here, for the unseen reader who is presumed to hover at the shoulder of every diarist, I must note that I am talking of a time close to forty years ago. The blooming of postapocalyptic Atlanta lay far in the future, while Atlanta’s first golden age was far vanished in the past. When first created, the Institute for Probatory Therapies sat on choice real estate; by the time I moved there it was totally surrounded by the dark metallic heart of the city. The Scantlings had taken over, and that sect’s insistence on uniformity of dress, diet, appearance, possessions, beliefs, and behavior had created the peculiar form of urban paralysis so characteristic of the second decade of this century.

  I do not remember being much aware of this at the time. In fact, I feel sure that I was oblivious to details of my surroundings that did not relate directly to my work. The lab still possessed first-rate equipment. My own living quarters, a mile and a half away, consisted of two rooms in a four-story walk-up with a shared bathroom and inadequate hot water, but it satisfied my needs. Had I been asked, I would surely have said that I was perfectly happy.

  How much of human happiness stems from an ignorance of what we are missing? I had tried sex with women in four brief affairs since the age of twenty, and found it fairly enjoyable but inferior in excitement to the intoxicating pleasures of research. I felt no urge toward sex with members of my own gender. Thus I had no partner or companion, and with no one else to set the pattern of my days it was my habit to rise late and work until I felt ready to stop. Usually that was after midnight, and often far beyond.

  Sometimes, as on this day, dawn was touching the horizon as I left the institute and headed home. The Scantlings’ rigidity had one beneficial effect: The hours between eleven at night and six in the morning were the decreed Scantling time for sleeping, and the streets during that interval were deserted except for the machine security patrols.

  It was a half-hour walk, a fine opportunity for the solitary thoughts that summarize today’s work and make plans for tomorrow. I expected to see and hear no one and nothing, except the occasional blinking and electric hum of a mobile monitor camera. With the rising sun in my eyes I did not notice the girl sitting on the stone steps of one of the buildings six blocks from mine, until she moved as I passed.

  Objects came rattling down to the sidewalk and rolled under my feet. I, startled out of my reverie, trod on one of them and almost fell. I was still recovering my balance when a dark figure hurried past me and swooped on the rolling sphere.

  “Got it,” said a girl’s husky voice. “Did you see where the other one went? Don’t want to lose it.”

  In the morning light I saw a gleam of dull red retreating down the slight incline. I took four quick steps forward and picked it up just before it vanished into the open grille of a storm drain.

  I looked at what I was holding. It was a glass marble, its swirls of white shot through with blood-red streaks. Before I could do anything else the girl was next to me and had grabbed it from my hand.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I wouldn’t have minded losing a glaury or a spumy, but this is an alley-taw blood-orange and I got nothing else like it.”

  She spoke with the flat vowels and swallowed consonants of the streets. Her words were gibberish, though I realized that she must be referring to the glass marbles and some children’s game. She went on talking about the little spheres, holding them out to me for inspection. I replied, but I was hardly listening. She was slim and short, no more than an inch or two above five feet. I saw a tangle of black ringlets above a pale, smooth forehead, dark, wide eyes below, a mobile mouth, a clear complexion, and the slender, budding figure of a girl on the brink of adolescence. Her clothes were ugly, too big and too adult for her.

  “What are you doing outside at this time of night?” I asked. “You ought to be home in bed.”

  My words were, I swear it, spoken in all innocence, and with nothing but the girl’s safety and welfare in mind.

  ” Tisn’t night,” she said. The deep, husky voice belied her age, but she couldn’t have been more than fourteen. “It’s light now.”

  “You know what I mean. Where do you live?”

  “Right here.” She raised one arm to point to the building behind her. The overlarge sleeve of her black blouse hung down like a bat’s wing. “Third floor.”

  I had entered the building briefly eight months earlier when searching for a place to live. It was, like the tenement where my apartment w
as located, one of the few structures of central Atlanta not controlled and occupied by Scantlings. Even though it was closer to the institute, I had rejected the place because it seemed populated entirely by transients and smalltime criminals.

  “What are you doing out here so early?” I asked.

  “That’s my business, not yours.” She stared up at me. “What are you doing out?”

  “I’m on my way from work. At the institute.” I pointed west, away from the rising sun.

  She nodded, but her mind must have been still on my question to her, because she said, “I come outside because she brought somebody home with her.”

  “She?”

  I knew the answer, even before she said, “My mother. She brought him last night, about eleven.”

  “You had to leave?”

  ” ’Course not". She frowned at me, as though I had asked a nonsense question. “I live there, don’t I? I could have stayed, even though he was an all-nighter.” She cocked one dark eyebrow at me. “There’d be nothing new, you know. I’ve seen it all before.”

  In conventional tests of knowledge and speed of comprehension, I am not boasting when I say that I score well outside the range where such measurements are deemed useful. If I seemed slow to understand what she was saying, it is only that we were beyond my parameters not only of experience but of acceptance.

  “Your mother brought a man home to sleep with her last night?” I said.

  “Right. Flush, by the sound of him.”

  “And you’ve been out here ever since?”

  “Oh, no.” She rubbed the blood-orange glass marble against her blouse and peered at it anxiously for damage. “I only come out here a couple of hours ago, when they woke me up. My bed’s right up against the wall and they was making too much noise.” She stared at me and added, apparently in defense of her mother,

  “They was both pretty high, I could tell soon as they come in.”

  “So when will you go back?”

  She pulled a face. “Can go in anytime I want. But I don’t want. Where you going now?”

  It was chilly, with a brisk wind swirling around the street corner. I became aware of how hungry I felt. I had eaten nothing since the previous afternoon.

  “I’m heading home, for a hot breakfast,” I said. “It’s not far from here. If you don’t want to go home and you would like to eat, you can come with me.”

  She took a step closer and looked up at me with eyes too knowing for her age. “Breakfast. That all?”

  “It’s all I’m offering.”

  “Yeah. Well, okay. Breakfast.”

  “Don’t you need to tell your mother?”

  “Tell her what? She isn’t invited, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, she never eats when she’s working.” She stuffed the marbles into a pocket of the long brown skirt. “Ready when you are.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Paula. Paula Searle.”

  “I’m Oliver. Oliver Guest.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said calmly. The scream or gasp of horror that invariably followed the mention of my name would not occur until five years later. She reached out, her small hand swallowed up in mine for a formal handshake. “You must have a rotten job if it keeps you up all night. What do you do?”

  We began to walk side by side, I deliberately shortening my step to fit hers. There seemed little chance that she would comprehend any element of my work, but we had six long blocks to walk. I told her of my own background in biology. I started to explain the nature and causes of apoptosis, the preprogrammed death that comes to most (but not all) cells of an organism. I spoke more for my benefit than hers-my mental review of the previous night’s work had been interrupted by our chance meeting-and I made no attempt to talk down to her or to simplify the intrinsically complex biochemistry.

  She said nothing, and after a couple of minutes brought a couple of marbles from her pocket and began to chink them together. I assumed that she had stopped listening, until suddenly she said, “It all happens from inside, don’t it, like the cell’s wearing out? I mean, it’s not like a virus or something gets in and kills it.”

  Paula Searle, in thirty seconds, made real and tangible a truth that I had previously known only intellectually: Just as mental slowness occurs no less frequently in those of royal descent (more frequently, some would say, with an argument based on sound genetic principles), so intelligence and talent and quickness of wit may surface in the deepest despairing depths of society.

  Paula was bright.

  We walked, we talked, we came to my building and went up. I cooked while Paula explored the small apartment and made derogatory comments concerning my inadequate wardrobe and rickety table and total lack of entertainment facilities. She had removed the dark blouse and dowdy wraparound skirt that mimicked Scantling attire, and was now revealed in brief shorts and a T-shirt of pale yellow. With her coltish limbs and liquid dark eyes, she danced and skipped between the two rooms of my apartment and brightened any spot upon which she lighted.

  At one point she sang a Scantling hymn, “The Narrow Gate of Heaven.” She had a small, true voice, and I listened with pleasure until I realized that the song was a parody, the same tune but with words of sexual innuendo and details of illegal surgery to make you shudder.

  “Don’t sing that,” I said.

  She paused in her wandering and stared at me in surprise. “Sorry. I know somebody had it done to her, just like in the song. But if it makes you too hot, I’ll stop.”

  “Please.” But I wondered, could she be right? I was in truth oddly excited, although not in any way that I could relate to my previous sexual experiences.

  Even with distractions, I am a good cook. When we ate-her reaction to my food and my cooking were positive-l asked more about her background. How old was she, how long had they been living where they were now, where had she been before that, did she have other relatives in Atlanta, where was her father?

  I was making conversation, easily and naturally. Just as when we had finished eating, she, easily and naturally, went through to sprawl across my bed while I cleaned up.

  It took me no more than five minutes. When I came through to ask if she now was ready to go back home, she was sound asleep.

  It seemed wrong to wake her. I moved a soft chair in from the other room and sat down. She had in her answers to my questions revealed an appallingly adult knowledge of the world. Her mother had moved from Norfolk four months ago. They had become afraid when Paula’s “father” was killed in an argument over stolen goods from a warehouse raid. Paula and her mother were not registered, so she had not been able to go to school for over a year. When she was older — not much older, though she was not sure how much-she would help earn her keep. Not with men like her mother brought home, Mother promised her that, but with ones young and nice. But-her red-rose mouth stretched wide in a grimace-you’d be a fool to believe that, wouldn’t you?

  I looked down at her. In sleep, all her cynicism vanished and only innocence remained. Here was a beautiful and intelligent child, on the brink of becoming a woman. The world ought to be opening out before her in all its glory and diversity, but that would never happen. Not to little Paula. The narrow gate of heaven had for her already closed. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen, with grace and brains and talent far beyond the women with whom I had made love, but already she was tainted and blighted. “That which is marred at birth, time will not mend.”

  I did not intend to sleep, nor did I make plans before I slept. Nor, while I slept, did I dream. And yet, when I awoke soon after noon, the idea-the resolve, the compulsion-was already formed in my mind, to the smallest detail of planning and execution. (Yes, yes, I know; let us not trivialize a life with a sniggering and obvious play on words.)

  She would be missed, maybe in hours but possibly not for days. Her mother, as an unregistered resident of Atlanta wary of authority, might never report the disappearance; and if
she did, what would any rational investigator conclude? Surely that Paula had chosen the unknown future of a runaway’s life over the sordid certainties of the present.

  I waited two hours more, until Paula stirred and sat up and smiled at me. “Oliver Guest,” she said. “Doctor Oliver Guest. Do you really work with all those animals and things like you said, or were you making it up?”

  “I really do. And I must go back to work this afternoon. And you ought to go home to your mother.”

  I am sure that I said those words. They sound as though I was faint-hearted, or suffering second thoughts. The reality was more complex. I wanted to believe, at some level, that Paula was my accomplice in what I planned to do, that it was her desire as well as mine. It would be, after all, to her ultimate benefit.

  “She won’t care where I am,” she said. “Big Maury Wellstone comes around Sunday nights, and she always needs her sleep before him.”

  “Is it Sunday?” I said. “I didn’t realize. When I’m working hard I lose track of the days.”

  I was well aware that it was Sunday; in fact, I was counting on it.

  The bright weather of the September morning had turned nasty. The early breeze had strengthened and scudding low clouds threatened rain. No Scantling performs any kind of work on the Sabbath, so the streets were almost empty as I and Paula-she with a short coat of mine over her blouse and skirt and a scarf wrapped around her head-made our way to the Institute for Probatory Therapies. When we passed Paula’s apartment building she gave it hardly a glance.

  The side door of the institute was locked, but I had a key. We entered the long ground-floor corridor. We then had to walk the full length of it, because the elevators and stairs were both at the other end. This was a critical moment. Occasionally others would work on Sundays, but even then it was a day for catching up on experiments and data analysis. People stuck closely to their own labs and had no interest in socializing or wandering the corridors. Paula and I met not a soul in the corridor, or on the way to my lab on the sixth floor.