The One-Eyed Man

by Modesitt,, L. E. Jr.

  More than likely.

  The lichen/grass was definitely tough. If the skytubes were an organic part of the ecosystem, did they have to be so powerful to feed off the tough grass? Or was the grass so tough to avoid being destroyed by the skytubes? Another ecological question I hadn’t seen discussed. In fact, the more I looked, the fewer real questions there were that had been addressed. Another worrying factor about my assignment … and Stittara.

  I wiped off the resinous stuff as well as I could with a pocket square that would likely never be the same, then got back in the van and resumed my drive back to Stittara. Once in the vehicle bay, I turned in the van, but confirmed my reservation for oneday, and carried my equipment case back to my office.

  Since I got back to the office at half past four, I had some time to consider what I’d learned, and with the healthy lunch I’d had, I wasn’t particularly hungry.

  Among other things I’d realized was that I’d never heard anyone mention their age. Anywhere … at any time. Since that wasn’t generally an item of conversation for most people, I hadn’t thought much about it … until Ngaio had directly avoided the issue.

  Again, I was realizing that all too often, sometimes you needed to examine the assumptions and the data you took for granted. So I went looking for vital statistics for the population … and discovered there weren’t any. Not for Passova, not for Stittara. That is, populations for every city and “official” outland community were listed. Deaths were listed, as were births, but I discovered, even in public obituaries, the ages of the deceased were only listed if they died in an accident or from some medical condition that even modern medicine couldn’t handle, not that there were many of those. From what I could tell, at least in the recorded statistics, there were no statistics on life expectancy.

  So I began to check on insurance … and from what I could tell, life insurance didn’t exist, except in relation to accidents or casualties.

  How long do these people live?

  They couldn’t live forever, because I’d heard enough references to people dying and things that happened before people were born, and the death rate was close to standard for a modern world—that I could figure out, assuming the published numbers were correct, by using total deaths and total population. My calculations were rough, but rough was good enough.

  When I finished, I was feeling very isolated, and very, very worried. I wasn’t certain I even wanted to walk from my office to my quarters. But I girded my loins, so to speak, shut down my console, turned off the lights in my office, and walked out to the door from the Survey Service and out into the pedestrian tunnel. The tunnel seemed to press in on me.

  Because you’ve been outside so much and you’re realizing how depressing Passova is?

  “Paulo! Paulo!” An unfamiliar voice called my name.

  I turned and saw someone hurrying toward me. I immediately stiffened, wondering if I should run or look for a patroller. Then as the man drew closer, I recognized Roberto Gybl. I gambled that he didn’t mean me any harm, at least not immediately … and not in a monitored public place. I waited until he was closer before speaking. “Rob … Rob Gybl. What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you. I need someone to talk to. Someone from Bachman … or not from Stittara.”

  “I qualify on both counts.” I tried to make my voice light and amused. “You need money?”

  “Deep stars, no. You’re levelheaded. I’d like to tell you something over dinner and see what you think.”

  Deep stars? I hadn’t heard that expression in years, and usually those who used it were ex–Alliance Space Forcers. “Well … I don’t have dinner plans. I’ve been out in the field for the last few days.”

  “Good. We can go to Ebony.”

  “Have you ever been to Ojolian’s? We could go there.”

  “Wherever you want,” he replied.

  His rapid acquiescence suggested he really wanted to talk … or that it didn’t much matter to him where we went for whatever he had in mind.

  Gybl didn’t have much to say on the tunneltram … or while we waited for a table at Ojolian’s—it was fiveday evening after all, although we were actually there a bit earlier than many diners.

  Finally, we were seated and had been served drinks—he had red wine, and I had a Zantos, which wasn’t as good as the unnamed lager I’d had in Hobbes.

  Then he looked at me and took a deep breath. “Do you remember when I talked to you about the forerunner site here on Stittara?”

  “Yes. You said there was one controlled by a multi. You said you were going to try to get access to it and do a documentary about it.” I smiled. “Or you were going to do one about being denied access.”

  “That’s what happened … sort of.” He took a sip of his wine.

  “From what you’re saying, you were the one mentioned in the news the other day. Not by name, but I figured it had to be you after our conversation on the Persephonya.”

  “That was me, all right. Syntex picked me up as soon as I got close. I figured they’d have some sort of guards, and probably a covered site, but that…” He shook his head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh … I guess you wouldn’t know. But aren’t you investigating the multis?”

  “I’ve been to the Syntex main facility, and I’ve interviewed the environmental director. I’ve gone over their reports, and I’ve made measurements of their emissions and effluents … but none of that had anything to do with the forerunner site.”

  “It’s in a separate location. South of the main facility. It’s like a fortress. There’s nothing open to the air.”

  “I would have expected that, not being open, I mean,” I said. “If it’s a forerunner site, it’s millions of years old, and it has to be buried well underground. With all the storms and the skytubes, they’d have to have it covered or the Antiquities Commission would have long since applied to seize it.”

  “You know about all that stuff?”

  “There are often environmental issues involved with archaeological sites. But you never said what it was that surprised you. Was it running across Sinjon Reksba? Or I guess we should say the man who was impersonating Sinjon. I heard the news reports. Were you two there together?”

  Gybl shook his head. “Not together. Oh … he might have been following me … but it doesn’t make sense. If he came back to Stittara to claim an inheritance, and he had enough money to have all the surgery and modifications to impersonate the real Sinjon, then what was he doing at the Syntex forerunner site?”

  “I can’t answer that.” That was certainly true in a literal sense. “Do you think there’s ancient forerunner technology there?”

  “There might be. Who could tell … but no one’s ever found anything at any sites before. Some scientists have speculated that they used biotech rather than mech-tech.”

  “Did the Syntex people do … did they act unprofessional?”

  “No. They did detain me for longer than they had to, I think.” He offered a rough laugh. “I was trespassing. But they didn’t rough me up. They just escorted me into the facility. They asked me a lot of questions about why I was there, and they must have made a lot of inquiries about who I was. That made sense. What didn’t make sense was Sinjon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why was he there? Why did they let me see him leave? Why didn’t they let me record that?”

  “You think that was because they didn’t want you to record anything else?”

  “I don’t know. I know I saw Sinjon drive off. That’s true.” He shook his head once more. “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced there was something wrong.”

  He stopped as the server brought our entrees. I’d skipped a salad or an appetizer because I’d had a solid lunch, and Gybl had followed my lead.

  Once the server left, Gybl turned to me. “How did they treat you? The people at Syntex, I mean?”

  “It took a while to get to see them, b
ut they were polite, and they let me take all the readings and measurements I wanted. They didn’t tell me I couldn’t go this place or that. I’m not sure they were pleased, but they didn’t get in the way. So far as I can determine, they’re well within the required standards.”

  “Hmmm. They were like that, in a way, with me.”

  I waited, taking a bite of the ravioli, with a cheese sauce that held the tiniest hint of bitterness. Was that in comparison to my lunch, or hadn’t I noticed it before? Or was it just the dish before me? How could I tell?

  “What are you thinking?” asked Gybl suddenly.

  “That it was strange that both you and Sinjon Reksba were on the Persephonya and that you both ended up at the forerunner site at the same time. That’s a little much to be coincidence.”

  “I’ve thought that as well,” Gybl admitted.

  “Did you tell him what you told me? About the forerunner site?”

  “I did. Since he was from Stittara—he said he was—I asked him which multi controlled the site. He told me it was Syntex, but I’d figured that out before. What he also said, that I didn’t know, was that Syntex was a division or a subsidiary of VLE.”

  “VLE, the Bachman multi?”

  “The same one. And VLE is angling to take over RDAEX. According to Sinjon, a lot of RDAEX projects in the Arm haven’t done that well, and they haven’t come up with a new profit stream in years.”

  “That’s rather odd. Why would he know that … or care?” I paused. “The real Sinjon wouldn’t have, but…”

  “You see what I mean, Paulo? It’s definitely strange.”

  What it told me was that someone in VLE or Syntex had leaked information to “Sinjon” about when Aimee would be visiting the forerunner site. “It is … but why would he be going to the forerunner site? If he had been hired to snoop on Syntex people, he should have targeted the main Syntex site. Even that doesn’t make sense, because if someone has a problem with VLE, why would they come to Stittara?”

  “Unless there really is old technology at the site. Or … if there isn’t … but VLE is using that as the rationale for taking over RDAEX.”

  I shook my head. “No matter how I look at it, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s what I thought. I’m glad to know you see it the same way.”

  We talked for a while longer, but I didn’t learn anything more, and I hoped he didn’t either. In the end, he left Ojolian’s going one way, and I went another. I kept my eyes open all the way back to my quarters. I still didn’t know what to think of Gybl—except that he was more than he claimed to be.

  47

  Sixday, I slept a little later than I had been, and then ran through my exercises, and the almost ancient if routine Juchai moves, then went in to the office, where I made sure all my readings were integrated into the data matrices I had created for the outland communities. That took several hours because of various predictable glitches that I had failed to predict. After that I consulted my maps and worked out the next sets of outland communities I planned to visit, alternating between “official” and unofficial locations.

  Next came the data sets made available by the Planetary Council. While there were no statistics breaking down the population by age group, with actual births and deaths being a matter of record, if only as individuals, I thought I ought to be able to take the names of those who died and track back to when they were born. If I could track a few hundred, tedious as it might be, it would at least give me an idea of life spans on Stittara. So I started with a woman named Maudl Evians. Before long I ran into trouble. All the birth and death records more than a hundred years in the past were “archived.” From what I could tell, that meant they were not available. I’d already discovered that the death notices and obituaries didn’t give dates of birth or ages unless someone died young of an accident or some form of mischance. So I started looking back at the notices in previous years. The media notices went back a century as well—before they were archived—and the same practice existed as far back as I could access.

  Was mentioning age or life span a cultural taboo? Or was there some regulatory or legal requirement?

  I went through the Stittaran Planetary Charter. I tried a global search of the entire Stittaran legal code and came up with nothing. I tried a good twenty variations on that search. That still got no results. Then I began to go through the legal code, the codified listing of public laws, line by line, thinking that such a provision must have been worded indirectly. By seven on sixday night, when I quit for the day, I’d found nothing. Just try reading public laws one by one!

  Sevenday morning, I was up early. I didn’t see Ilsabet, but that didn’t surprise me, since she seemed to walk outside later.

  On the one hand, I felt sorry for her, with that eternal childlikeness, but I had the feeling, if only from a few gestures and words, that there was more there. Was I the only one who saw that? Or had it been there so long that everyone just felt that was the way she was?

  Once I finished a second mug of tea, I washed and dressed and headed back to my office at the Survey Service. I was the only one there.

  This time, I began by trying a search of criminal and civil court cases dealing with legal notices of all kinds. Then I tried cases against the media. Nothing about death notices … anywhere. So I went back to the legal code. When I finished scanning at four in the afternoon, my eyes were blurring, and probably bloodshot … and I’d found nothing.

  Yet … the evidence, or lack of it, was right there. No ages in the vast majority of death notices. Period.

  It wasn’t as though people weren’t dying. They obviously were. I’d even heard, in passing on the news, references to the deaths of apparently prominent people. It had to be cultural. That wasn’t unheard of. There had been some religious sect in the past, somewhere, I recalled, that had mandated a certain number of offspring for every family. That number appeared nowhere in writing, nowhere in religious pronouncements, and yet for centuries, every family had that number of children … until they overpopulated the planet, but that was another story.

  Figuratively, I threw up my hands and went back to my quarters to clean up and change to go to Aloris’s “get-together.” I did take a look out the study window before I showered and saw several skytubes in the distance, but they didn’t look dark, nor did they seem to be moving much.

  At a little before six I walked out of my guest quarters to make my way to Aloris’s when I heard a voice I really didn’t want to acknowledge.

  “Paulo! I have to talk to you…”

  I really didn’t want to see Rob Gybl again, but I stopped and waited for him to catch up. When he neared, I said, “I’m going to a get-together.”

  “I’ll walk with you. I just had some questions.” When I said nothing, he went on. “I’ve been doing some checking. You were at Syntex at the same time I was. You were even at the forerunner site.”

  While he could have tracked me to Syntex, through vehicle logs, appointments on calendars, and when Aloris and probably half a dozen Survey people knew where I’d been and when, the only place where I’d mentioned the forerunner site was to Aloris … and on the comm system. That suggested Gybl had contacts … or a way to tap into my console or the Survey Service comm lines, if not both. “How did you find that out?” There was no reason not to ask, if only to see how he avoided answering.

  “I have my ways.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I was looking at the forerunner site. What else?”

  “They let you see it?”

  “See it is about the best way to describe it. I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. I was not allowed to record any data or any visuals, and I’m bound not to talk about it, except insofar as it bears on my consulting assignment for the Ministry of Environment.”

  “But why you?”

  “Because that’s the only place where I could get even an idea of what the environment might
have been like more than a hundred million years ago.”

  “Why do you need that?” He brushed back his thick black hair, as if it were an annoyance.

  “It’s called a baseline, Rob.”

  “They wouldn’t even let me talk to anyone. How did you manage it?”

  “I was sent here at the behest of a Unity government oversight committee. If Syntex had refused to see me … or let me view something that affected my report…” I didn’t spell out the implications. I just smiled politely.

  “Well … is there any technology there?”

  “I signed a confidentiality agreement, remember?”

  “You’re telling me that there is.”

  “I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see anything that suggested that.”

  “What about that confidentiality agreement, now?” His voice turned sarcastic.

  “I don’t recall that it required me not to reveal what I didn’t see.”

  That kept him quiet—for all of a dozen long strides, almost as if he were marching. “Am I supposed to believe that you’re just here for an ecological study … and you just turned up at the site when I was there?”

  “I turned up at the site when Syntex let me come. They decided when that was. If you have a problem with my timing, take it up with them.” I let a certain amount of anger show in my voice, not at all difficult considering that I was getting annoyed by being pestered.

  “I’m sorry.” He actually sounded that way. “It’s just that none of this makes sense.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t.” In fact, the entire planet doesn’t make sense. Except, even as I thought that, I was afraid it all made too much sense. “But you’re being here suggests you’re more than you claim, and your being able to find out things I mentioned in confidential areas suggests you’re trying to involve me in something much bigger than me, and something I want no part of … and never did.”