Future Crimes

by Jack Dann

"Well," she said. "I never liked him."

  I told you before; she has no sense of right and wrong. It is a serious defect in a detective. I could only wave my arms in incoherent outrage; and my protests have never carried much weight with Freya, who claims not even to believe them.

  We left the station. "What's that you were saying to Arnold about chalk?" I said, curiosity getting the better of me.

  "That's the clue you provided, Nathaniel—somewhat transformed. As you reminded me, Musgrave was pointing at the patio, and Heidi's patio is made of a block of the Dover cliffs. Dover cliffs, as you know, are composed of chalk. So I returned to the painting, and cut through the back to retrieve samples of the chalk used in the underdrawing, which had been revealed to me by infrared photography." She turned a corner and led me uptown. "Chalk, you see, has its own history of change. In Monet's time chalk was made from natural sources, not from synthetics. Sure enough, the chalk I took from the canvas was a natural chalk. But natural chalk, being composed of marine ooze, is littered with the fossil remains of unicellular algae called coccoliths. These coccoliths are different depending upon the source of the chalk. Monet used Rouen chalk, appropriately enough, which was filled with the coccoliths Maslovella bamesae and Cricolithus pemmatoidens. The coccoliths in our painting, however, are Neococcolithes dubius. Very dubious indeed—for this is a North American chalk, first mined in Utah in 1924."

  "So Monet couldn't have used this chalk! And there you had your proof that the painting is a fake."

  "Exactly."

  I said doubtfully. "It seems a subtle clue for the dying Musgrave to conceive of."

  "Perhaps," Freya said cheerfully. "Perhaps he was only pointing in the direction of the patio by the accident of his final movements. But it was sufficient that the coincidence gave me the idea. The solution of a crime often depends upon imaginary clues."

  "But how did you know Arnold was the forger?" I asked. "And why, after taking the trouble to concoct all those paints, did he use the wrong chalk?"

  "The two matters are related. It could be that Arnold only knew he needed a natural chalk, and used the first convenient supply without knowing there are differences between them. In that case it was a mistake—his only mistake. But it seems unlike Arnold to me, and I think rather that it was the forger's signature. In effect, the forger said, if you take a slide of the chalk trapped underneath the paint, and magnify it five thousand times with an electron microscope, you will find me. This chalk never used by Monet is my sign. —For on some level every forger hopes to be discovered, if only in the distant future—to receive credit for the work.

  "So I knew we had a forger on Mercury, and I was already suspicious of Arnold, since he was the dealer who brought the painting to Mercury, and since he was the only guest at Heidi's party with the opportunity to kill Musgrave; he was missing during the crucial moments—"

  "You are a liar!"

  "And it seems Arnold was getting desperate; I searched among his recent bills, and found one for three suction plates. So when we found him on the track I was quite sure."

  "He stuck himself to the track?"

  "Yes. The one on his right wrist was electronically controlled, so after setting the other two he tripped the third between his teeth. He hoped that we would discover him there after missing him at the museum, and think that there was someone else who wished him harm. And if not, the cowcatchers would pull him free. It was a silly plan, but he was desperate after I set up that appointment with him. When I confronted him with all this, after we rescued him from the tracks, he broke down and confessed. Sandor Musgrave had discovered that the Monet was a fake while blackmailing the Evans family in England, and after forcing Heidi to give him a job, he worked on the painting in secret until he found proof. Then he blackmailed Arnold into bankruptcy, and when on Solday he pressed Arnold for more money, Arnold lost his composure and took advantage of the confusion caused by the opening of the Great Gates to smack Musgrave on the head with one of Heidi's mirrors."

  I wagged a finger under her nose. "And you set him free. You've gone too far this time, Freya Grindavik."

  She shook her head. "If you consider Arnold's case a bit longer, you might change your mind. Arnold Ohman has been the most important art dealer on Mercury for over sixty years. He sold the Vermeer collection to George Butler, and the Goyas to Terminator West Gallery, and the Pissarros to the museum in Homer Crater, and those Chinese landscapes you love so much to the city park, and the Kandinskys to the Lion of the Grays. Most of the finest paintings on Mercury were brought here by Arnold Ohman."

  "So?"

  "So how many of those, do you think, were painted by Arnold himself?"

  I stopped dead in the street, stunned at the very idea. "But—but that only makes it worse! Inestimably worse! It means there are fakes all over the planet!"

  "Probably so. And no one wants to hear that. But it also means Arnold Ohman is a very great artist. And in our age that is no easy feat. Can you imagine the withering reception his painting would have received if he had done original work? He would have ended up like Harvey Washburn and all the rest of them who wander around the galleries like dogs. The great art of the past crashes down on our artists like meteors, so that their minds resemble the blasted landscape we roll over. Now Arnold has escaped that fate, and his work is universally admired, even loved. That Monet, for instance—it isn't just that it passes for one of the cathedral series; it could be argued that it is the best of them. Now is this a level of greatness that Arnold could have achieved—would have been allowed to achieve—if he had done original work on this museum planet? Impossible. He was forced to forge old masters to be able to fully express his genius."

  "All this is no excuse for forgery or murder."

  But Freya wasn't listening. "Now that I've exiled him, he may go on forging old paintings, but he may begin painting something new. That possibility surely justified ameliorating his punishment for killing such a parasite as Musgrave. And there is Mercury's reputation as art museum of the system to consider. . . ."

  I refused to honor her opinions with a reply, and looking around, I saw that during our conversation she had led me far up the terraces. "Where are we going?"

  "To Heidi's," she said. And she had the grace to look a little shamefaced—for a moment, anyway. "I need your help moving something."

  "Oh, no."

  "Well," Freya explained, "when I told Heidi some of the facts of the case, she insisted on giving me a token of her gratitude, and she overrode all my refusals, so . . . I was forced to accept." She rang the wall bell.

  "You're joking," I said.

  "Not at all. Actually, I think Heidi preferred not to own a painting she knew to be a fake, you see. So I did her a favor by taking it off her hands."

  When Delaurence let us in, we found he had almost finished securing Rouen Cathedral—Sun Effect in a big plastic box. "We'll finish this," Freya told him.

  While we completed the boxing I told Freya what I thought of her conduct. "You've taken liberties with the law—you lied right and left—"

  "Well boxed," she said. "Let's go before Heidi changes her mind."

  "And I suppose you're proud of yourself."

  "Of course. A lot of lab work went into this."

  We maneuvered the big box through the gate and into the street, and carried it upright between us, like a short flat coffin. We reached Freya's villa, and immediately she set to work unboxing the painting. When she had freed it she set it on top of a couch, resting against the wall.

  Shaking with righteous indignation, I cried, "That thing isn't a product of the past! It isn't authentic. It is only a fake. Claude Monet didn't paint it."

  Freya looked at me with a mild frown, as if confronting a slightly dense and very stubborn child. "So what?"

  After I had lectured her on her immorality a good deal more, and heard all of her patient agreement, I ran out of steam. "Well," I muttered, "you may have destroyed all my faith in you, and damaged Mercury'
s art heritage forever, but at least I'll get a good story out of it." This was some small comfort. "I believe I'll call it The Case of the Thirty-third Cathedral of Rouen."

  "What's this?" she exclaimed. "No, of course not!" And then she insisted that I keep everything she had told me that day a secret.

  I couldn't believe it. Bitterly I said, "You're like those forgers. You want somebody to witness your cleverness, and I'm the one who is stuck with it."

  She immediately agreed, but went on to list all the reasons no one else could ever learn of the affair—how so many people would be hurt—including her, I added acerbically—how so many valuable collections would be ruined, how her plan to transform Arnold into a respectable honest Plutonian artist would collapse, and so on and so forth, for nearly an hour. Finally I gave up and conceded to her wishes, so that the upshot of it was, I promised not to write down a single word concerning this particular adventure of ours, and I promised furthermore to say nothing of the entire affair, and to keep it a complete secret, forever and ever.

  But I don't suppose it will do any harm to tell you.

  TAKING THE PISS

  Brian Stableford

  Critically acclaimed British "hard science " writer Brian Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In the Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The Paradox of the Sets, The Realms of Tatarus, Serpent's Blood, The Empire of Fear, The Angel of Pain, The Carnival of Destruction, Year Zero, and The Eleventh Hour. His most recent novels are part of his ongoing future history sequence, dealing with the effect of genetic engineering on the human race: Inherit the Earth, Architects of Emortality, The Fountains of Youth, The Cassandra Complex, Dark Ararat, and, most recently, The Omega Expedition. His short fiction has been collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution. His nonfiction books include The Sociology of Science Fiction and, with David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World a.d . 2000-3000. His acclaimed novella "Les Fleurs du Mai" was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1994. A biologist and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading, England.

  In the wry and ingenious story that follows, one that introduces an entirely new sort of crime, he shows us how sometimes a Man's Got to Do What a Man's Got to Do—even in a high-tech future where some surprisingly basic things are Against the Law. . . .

  Modern town centers are supposed to be very safe places. There are CC-TV cameras everywhere, in the street as well as in the shops, all of them feeding video tapes that can be requisitioned by the police as soon as a crime is reported. Unfortunately, the promise of safety draws people to the High Street like a magnet, in such numbers that mere population density becomes a cloak sheltering all manner of clandestine skullduggery. Which was how I came to be kidnapped in broad daylight, at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, as I came out of Sainsbury's clutching two bags of assorted foodstuffs.

  If I'd had any warning, I might have been able to figure out how to handle the situation, but who could possibly expect a dumpy and lumpy peroxide blonde with a Primark raincoat draped over her right arm to snuggle up to a well-built lad beside the trolley-rack and stick an automatic pistol under his ribs? It's not the kind of situation you rehearse in idle moments, even if you have been warned that you might be a target for industrial espionage.

  "Make for the parking lot, Darren," she whispered. "Nice and easy." The woman looked almost as old and homely as my mum, but the gun barrel digging into my solar plexus seemed to me to be more a wicked-stepmother kind of thing.

  "You have got to be joking," I said, more stupidly than courageously.

  "On the contrary," she retorted. "If I weren't extremely serious, I wouldn't be taking the risk."

  I started walking toward the parking lot, nice and easy. It was partly the shock. I couldn't quite get my head together, and when your thinking engine stalls, you tend to follow ready-made scripts. I'd never been kidnapped before, but I'd seen lots of movies and my legs knew exactly how scenes of that sort were supposed to go. On top of that, it was exciting. People talk about going numb with shock, as if that were the usual effect, but I didn't. Once my thinking engine had restarted after the momentary stall, it told me that this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. In my twenty years of life I'd never been able to think of myself as the kind of person who might get kidnapped, and actually being kidnapped had to be perceived as a compliment. It was like a promotion: I felt that I'd leapt a good few thousand places in the pecking order of human society.

  Parking lots are lousy with CC-TV cameras, so I wasn't particularly astonished when a white Transit slid past the exit barrier as we approached and slowed almost to a halt as we neared it. The side door opened as it eased past us, and the blonde reached out with her free hand to force my head down before using the concealed gun to shove me forward. Two hands reached out from the dark interior to haul me into the back of the van, without the least care for elegance or comfort. The woman slammed the door behind me. I presume she walked on, a picture of innocence, as if she hadn't a care in the world.

  By the time I'd sorted myself out and got myself into a sitting position on the hardboard-covered floor, I'd taken due note of the fact that the hands belonged to a stout man wearing a Honey Monster party-mask. His ears stuck out from the sides, though, and the way they'd been flattened suggested to me that the guy had probably gone more than a few rounds in a boxing ring, maybe one of the unlicensed kind where the fighters don't wear gloves. I'm no weed, but I figured that he probably didn't need a gun to keep me in line.

  I was tempted to tell him that he must have got the wrong Darren, but I knew I wouldn't like hearing the obvious reply.

  "You could have tried bribery," I said, instead. "Kidnapping's not nice."

  "I don't do nice," the masked pugilist informed me. "But don't wet yourself yet—there'll be time for that later."

  The back of the driver's head was stubbornly uninformative, and from where I was sitting, I couldn't see his face in the mirror. So far as I could tell, though, his was also the head of a man who didn't do nice. The van was still crawling through the heavy traffic, and I figured it would take us at least fifteen minutes to get out of town. We were headed north.

  "Where are we going?" I asked.

  The only answer I got was painstakingly measured out in duct tape, with which the Honey Monster sealed my wrists and mouth as well as my eyes. I wasn't surprised. I guessed that the conversational skills of bare-knuckle fighters were probably a bit limited, and that he was more deeply embarrassed by the fact that he cared to admit.

  My head was relatively unscrambled by then, so I was able to wonder whether the dumpy blonde would actually have shot me if I'd screamed blue murder and yelled "Look out, she's got a gun!"—assuming, that is, that the gun was real.

  Maybe not, I decided, but I'd probably have been trampled to death in the shoppers' stampede. It was only a fortnight since some prion-perverted maniac had gunned down thirty-five outside a McDonald's in one of the side-streets off Shaftesbury Avenue.

  As soon as the Honey Monster's busy hands were withdrawn, I began to feel a growing need to take a piss, but that was only natural.

  Ten years ago, I reflected, kidnapping had been the prerogative of optimistic ransom-seekers and desperate estranged fathers, but the twenty-first century had arrived. Nowadays, busty women might be kidnapped for their milk, marrow-fat men for their blood, and job-creation fodder of either sex for their urine.

  It's a crazy world, I remember thinking—I'd have said it out loud if I could—but it's the one we all have to live in.

  When I'd committed myself to the job at GSKC—under threat of having my benefit cut to nothing at all if I didn't—the long list of do's and don'ts had taken me by surprise. I hadn't had a chance to think it through properly.

  Getting paid for pissing had seemed like a pretty slick idea, given that it was something I had to do anyway, but I had
n't reckoned on the measures I'd have to take to ensure that my piss measured up to the expected standard of purity.

  "No alcohol," the young man in the white coat had insisted, while he was fiddling with something that looked like a cross between a hypodermic syringe and a dust-buster. "No drugs, not even prescription medicines. No shellfish." Then he got really serious, although you wouldn't have known it from his smirk. "You have to wear the kit at all times. From now on, everything that comes out goes into our bottles."

  "Hang on," I said, way too late. "You can't mean everything. You're only supposed to be mucking about with the piss."

  "It's only for a month, in the first instance," the white-coat reminded me, mockingly. "If we renew your contract after that you get time off in between experimental runs."

  "A month!" I said. "That's not . . ."

  "Darren," he said, in that infuriating you-can't-bullshit-me-I'm-a-doctor way that the clever bastards learn in their first term at medical school. "Have you even got a girlfriend?"

  He knew that wasn't the point, but he also knew that the conversation was on the brink of becoming extremely embarrassing, and not for him.

  I'd been suckered, of course. He knew that I hadn't really listened to the interminable lecture I'd had to sit through before I signed on the dotted line. My eyes had glazed over as soon as the bastard had launched into his spiel about "the many advantages of the human bladder as a bioreactor." The science had all been double dutch, the instructions all humiliation, and as for what they had done with the dustbuster-cum-syringe . . . well, let's just say that I'd begun to have second thoughts about the whole bloody thing long before they told me to go home.

  And now, to add injury to insult, I was being kidnapped.

  Somehow, the man with the magic syringe had failed to include that in his list of don'ts. If he had included the possibility in his presentation he'd probably have fed me a line of bullshit about trying to keep track of the turns the van made, and listening out for any tell-tale sounds, like trains going over bridges and street-markets and church clocks, but I didn't bother with any of that. As far as I was concerned, if the kidnappers wanted to steal a bucketful of my piss they were more than welcome, and if GSKC plc didn't like it, they ought to have been more careful with that fucking dustbuster.