by Jack Dann
"I get along," Brosmer said. "Is that how you got to the elevator memory? Do you know about that from the library?"
"You'd have to. I learned it." It was amazing how much scorn and pride were getting through the Swindle. Brosmer took it in through the buzzing in his ears.
"The story conference," he said. "I can see how you might have learned to intercut tapes of Castelvecchio, but how did you fake being a writer?"
Fortnum giggled shockingly. He wiped his open lips. "Fake being a writer." He grinned. "Fake. Writers." He stood up suddenly and pulled the covering off the chair. Underneath was a metal cabinet. "There she is," he said fondly, running his hands over the home-joined crackled panels. He peered over his shoulder at Brosmer. "This is what it takes," he said, "you know. It's just an assembly of standard logic switchboard. You give it a lot of tapes of Charlie Castelvecchio sitting in a chair and babbling his life away, and when you speak into it, it puts his face on the phone and talks in his voice. Every time it can't match a lip-movement, it shows him turning his face away from the point of view or putting his hand in front of his mouth. It makes him look like he's got the jerks, but who's gonna notice that?"
"And it does the writing for you?"
"Writing? You simple boob, all you need is a hero the audience can identify with, and you give him an immediate serious problem. Then you introduce complications that get him in deeper and deeper, but in the end he does something characteristic on his own hook, and gets out of it. The rest is just atmosphere. You think that stuff in your living room is art? Listen—" He waved his arm and dialed. Music swelled up in the room. It thrummed and shook in the air. "That's art," Fortnum said, bracing himself against the wall with one hand. "That's a little ditty called Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, by Johann Sebastian Bach, the mightiest voice in the Public Domain." He dialed it off hastily. "You know what you can do with that? You can give it an up-tempo, write a set of words that make sounds like screwing but don't use the word, and you're rich. That's how that momser upstairs makes his living," Fortnum gasped, waving at the chandelier. "And over there," he panted, pointing into the emptiness above his head, "is the woman who sculpts by dipping paper strands in epoxy and throwing them into the air just before they harden. I can be any of them. I can be all three of them and me, too, all at the same time. And what do you think of that, cop?" He turned, and for a moment his hand rested on the antique scriber. He looked over his shoulder guiltily at Brosmer. Brosmer shook his forefinger at him.
It was the woman who moved—who sprang from her place and flew to the wall, and so it developed that it was for her—for the To Be Widow Fortnum—that Brosmer had worn his suit. She gaped at him unbelievingly as his servos operated the auxiliary mesh skin over his body and gave him the speed and strength of ten, so that though she flew as a gannet, he struck as a hawk. And then it was over; she and her husband sat comforting each other with justifications, a police lock on their open phone and police locks on their door(s) as Brosmer made his way home.
Dorrie greeted him. Her eyes did not meet his. "You—you're home very soon," she said. "I haven't left yet. Do you want me to stay?"
He went over to his chair, walking around her as best he could, thinking. He thought of what would happen. Perhaps already, the libraries were being restricted in access. Only those with certain credentials, such as police buzzers, would be able to obtain certain classes of data.
"Ned?"
"What? Oh—no, no, you go ahead and do what you've promised. I've been thinking," he said. "Panorama owes me the standard rate on about seven Murder I's, and even after I give George his 25-percent commission, and pay the bill from Forensic, that's pretty good. I think maybe we should get mirrors put in. On the walls . . . maybe on the ceiling."
Dorrie put her fingertip to her mouth. "It'll make it so much sexier in here," she murmured.
"Bigger," he said. "For a while."
THE RETRIEVAL ARTIST
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Kristine Kathryn Rusch started out the decade of the 1990s as one of the fastest-rising and most prolific young authors on the scene, took a few years out of mid-decade for a very successful turn as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and, since stepping down from that position, has returned to her old standards of production here in the twenty-first century, publishing a slew of novels in four genres, writing fantasy, mystery, and romance novels under various pseudonyms as well as science fiction. She has published more than fifteen novels under her own name, including The White Mists of Power, the four-volume Fey series, the Black Throne series, Alien Influences, and several Star Wars books written with husband Dean Wesley Smith. Her most recent book is a major new SF novel, The Disappeared. In 1999 she won Readers Award polls from the readerships of both Asimov's Science Fiction and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, an unprecedented double honor! As an editor, she was honored with the Hugo Award for her work on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and shared the World Fantasy Award with Dean Wesley Smith for her work as editor of the original hardcover anthology version of Pulphouse. As a writer, she has also won the John W. Campbell Award and been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and she took home a Hugo Award in 2000 for her story "Millennium Babies," making her one of the few people in genre history to win Hugos for both editing and writing.
Here she takes us to a domed city on the Moon to introduce us to a detective who specializes in finding things that are lost—whether they want to be found or not.
I
I had just come off a difficult case, and the last thing I wanted was another client. To be honest, not wanting another client is a constant state for me. Miles Flint, the reluctant Retrieval Artist. I work harder than anyone else in the business at discouraging my clients from seeking out the Disappeared. Sometimes the discouragement fails and I get paid a lot of money for putting a lot of lives in danger, and maybe, just maybe, bringing someone home who wants to come. Those are the moments I live for, the moments when it becomes clear to a Disappeared that home is a safe place once more.
Usually, though, my clients and their lost ones are more trouble than they're worth. Usually, I won't take their cases for any price, no matter how high.
I do everything I can to prevent client contact from the start. The clients who approach me are the courageous ones or the really desperate ones or the ones who want to use me to further their own ends.
I try not to take my cases personally. My clients and their lost ones depend on my objectivity. But every once in a while, a case slips under my defenses—and never in the way I expect.
This was one of those cases. And it haunts me still.
II
My office is one of the ugliest dives on the Moon. I found an original building still made of colonial permaplastic in the oldest section of Armstrong, the Moon's oldest colony. The dome here is also made of permaplastic, the clear kind, although time and wear have turned it opaque. Dirt covers the dome near the street level. The filtration system tries to clean as best it can, but ever since some well-meaning dome governor pulled the permaplastic flooring and forgot to replace it, this part of Armstrong Dome has had a dust problem. The filtration systems have been upgraded twice in my lifetime, and rebuilt at least three times since the original settlement, but they still function at one-tenth the level of the state-of-the-art systems in colonies like Gagarin Dome and Glenn Station. Terrans newly off the shuttle rarely come to this part of Armstrong; the highspeed trains don't run here, and the unpaved streets strike most Terrans as unsanitary, which they probably are.
The building that houses my office had been the original retail center of Armstrong, or so says the bronze plaque that someone had attached to the plastic between my door and the rent-a-lawyer's beside me. We are a historic building, not that anyone seems to care, and rent-a-lawyer once talked to me about getting the designation changed so that we could upgrade the facilities.
I didn't tell him that if the designation changed, I would move.
You see, I like the seedy look, the way my door hangs slightly crooked in its frame. It's deceptive. A careless Tracker would think I'm broke, or equally careless. Most folks don't guess that the security in my little eight-by-eight cube is state-of-the-art. They walk in, and they see permaplastic, and a desk that cants slightly to the right, and only one chair behind it. They don't see the recessed doors that hide my storage in the wall between the rent-a-lawyer's cube and my own, and they don't see the electronics because they aren't looking for them.
I like to keep the office empty. I own an apartment in one of Armstrong's better neighborhoods. There I keep all the things I don't care about. Things I do care about stay in my ship, a customized space yacht named The Emmeline. She's my only friend and I treat her like a lover. She's saved my life more times than I care to think about, and for that (and a few other things), she deserves only the best.
I can afford to give her the best, and I don't need any more work, although, as I said, I sometimes take it. The cases that catch me are usually the ones that catch me in my Sir Galahad fantasy—the one where I see myself as a rescuer of all things worthy of rescue—although I've been known to take cases for other reasons.
But, as I'd said, I'd just come off a difficult case, and the last thing I needed was another client. Especially one as young and innocent as this one appeared to be.
She showed up at my door wearing a dress, which no one wears in this part of Armstrong anymore, and regular shoes, which had to have been painful to walk in. She also had a personal items bag around her wrist, which, in this part of town, was like wearing a giant Mug Me! sign. The bags were issued on shuttles and only to passengers who had no idea about the luggage limitations.
She was tall and raw-boned, but slender, as if diet and exercise had reduced her natural tendency toward lushness. Her dress, an open and inexpensive weave, accented her figure in an almost unconscious way. Her features were strong and bold, her eyes dark, and her hair even darker.
My alarm system warned me she was outside, staring at the door or the plaque or both. A small screen popped up on my desk revealing her and the street beyond. I shut off the door alarm and waited until she knocked. Her clutched fist, adorned with computer and security enhancements that winked like diamonds in the dome's fake daylight, rapped softly on the permaplastic. The daintiness of the movement startled me. I wouldn't have thought her a dainty woman.
I had been cleaning up the final reports, notations, and billings from the last case. I closed the file and the keyboard (I never use voice commands for work in my office—too easily overheard) folded itself into the desk. Then I leaned back in the chair, and waited.
She knocked three times before she tried the door. It opened, just like it had been programmed to do in instances like this.
"Mr. Flint?" Her voice was soft, her English tinted with a faintly Northern European accent.
I still didn't say anything. She had the right building and the right name. I would wait to see if she was the right kind of client.
She squinted at me. I was never what clients expected. They expected a man as seedy as the office, maybe one or two unrepaired scars, a face toughened by a hard life and space travel. Even though I was thirty-five, I still had a look some cultures called angelic: blond curls, blue eyes, a round and cherubic face. A client once told me I looked like the pre-Raphaelite paintings of Cupid. I had smiled at him and said, Only when I want to.
"Are you Mr. Flint?" The girl stepped inside, then slapped her left hand over the enhancements on her right. She looked faintly startled, as if someone had shouted in her ear.
Actually, my security system had cut in. Those enhancements linked her to someone or something outside herself, and my system automatically severed such links, even if they had been billed as unseverable.
"You want to stay in here," I said, "you stay in here alone. No recording, no viewing, and no off-site monitoring."
She swallowed, and took another step inside. She was playing at being timid. The real timid ones, severed from their security blankets, bolt.
"What do you want?" I asked.
She flinched, and took another step forward. "I understand that you . . . find . . . people."
"Where did you hear that?"
"I was told in New York." One more step and she was standing in front of my desk. She smelled faintly of lavender soap mixed with nervous sweat. She must have come here directly from the shuttle. A woman with a mission, then.
"New York?" I asked as if I'd never heard of it.
"New York City."
I had several contacts in New York, and a handful of former clients. Anyone could have told her, although none were supposed to. They always did though; they always saw their own desperation in another's eyes, figured it was time to help, time to give back whatever it was they felt they had gained.
I sighed. "Close the door."
She licked her lips—the dye on them was either waterproof or permanent—and then walked back to the door. She looked into the street as if she would find help there, then gently pushed the door closed.
I felt a faint hum through my wrist as my computer notified me that it had turned the door security back on.
"What do you want?" I asked before she turned around.
"My mother," she said. "She's—"
"That's enough." I kept my tone harsh, and I didn't stand. I didn't want this girl/woman to be too comfortable. It was always best to keep potential clients off balance.
Children, young adults, and the elderly were the obvious choices of someone trying to use my system for the wrong purposes, and yet they were the ones most likely to contact me. They never seemed to understand the hostility I had to show clients, the insistence I put on identity checks, and they always balked at the cost. It feels as if I'm on trial, Mr. Flint, they would say, and I wouldn't respond. They were. They had to be. I always had to be sure they were only acting on their own interests. It was too easy for a tracker to hire someone to play off a Retrieval Artist's sympathies, and initiate a search that would get the Disappeared killed—or worse.
The girl turned. Her body was so rigid that it looked as if I could break her in half.
"I don't find people," I said. "I uncover them. There's a vast difference. If you don't understand that, then you don't belong here."
That line usually caused half my potential clients to exit. The next line usually made most of the remaining fifty percent excuse themselves, never to darken my door again.
"I charge a minimum of two million credits. Moon issue, not Earth issue—" which meant that they were worth triple what she was used to paying "—and I can charge as much as ten million or more. There is no upper limit on my costs nor is there one on my charges. I charge by the day, with expenses added in. Some investigations take a week, some take five years. You would be my exclusive employer for the period of time it takes to find your—mother—or whomever I'd be looking for. I have a contract. Several of my former clients have tried to have the courts nullify it. It holds up beautifully. I do not take charity cases, no matter what your sob story is, and I do not allow anyone to defer payment. The minute the money stops, so do I."
She threaded her fingers together. Her personal items bag bumped against her hip as she did so. "I'd heard about your financial requirements." Which meant that one of my former clients had recommended me to her. Dammit. "I have limited funds, but I can afford a minor investigation."
I stood. "We're done talking. Sorry I can't help you." I walked past her and pulled open the door. Security didn't mind if I did that. It would have minded if she had.
"Can't you do a limited search, Mr. Flint?" Her eyes were wide and brown. If she was twenty, she was older than I thought. I checked for tears. There were none. She could be legit, and for that I was sorry.
I closed the door so hard the plastic office shook. "Here's what you're asking me," I said. "If the money runs out, I quit searching, which is no skin off my nose. But I'll have dug a tr
ail up to that particular point, and your mother—or whomever I'm looking for—"
She flinched again as I said that. A tender one. Or a good actress.
"—would be at more of a risk than she is now. Right now, she's simply disappeared. And since you've come to me, you've done enough research to know that one of six government programs—or one of fifteen private corporations—has gone to considerable expense to give her a new life somewhere else. If the cover on that existence gets blown, your mother dies. It's that simple. And maybe, just maybe, the people who helped her will die too, or the people who are now important to her, or the people who were hidden with her, for whatever reason. Half an investigation is a death sentence. Hell, sometimes a full investigation is a death sentence. So I don't do this work on whim, and I certainly don't do it in a limited fashion. Are we clear?"
She nodded, just once, a rabbit-like movement that let me know I'd connected.
"Good," I said and pulled the door back open. "Now get out."
She scurried past me as if she thought I might physically assault her, and then she hurried down the street. The moon dust rose around her, clinging to her legs and her impractical dress, leaving a trail behind her that was so visible, it looked as if someone were marking her as a future target.
I closed the door, had the security system take her prints and DNA sample off the jamb just in case I needed to identify her someday, and then tried not to think of her again.
It wouldn't be easy. Clients were rare, and if they were legit, they always had an agenda. By the time they found me, they were desperate, and there was still a part of me that was human enough to feel sympathy for that.
