by Kathy Tyers
+Dr. Lee+—before finishing the sentence, she considered, then regretfully typed the name again—+and Paul Ilizarov.+
She called up a schematic map of Axis Plantation, drew in her routes as well as she could remember, then sent the message and went for a comforting molasses cookie. She’d sandblasted a pattern of triple spirals on her apartment’s ceiling, walls, and floor. The Noetic faith used that symbol to honor humanity’s triune nature—body, soul, mind.
A new message gleamed when she returned from her kitchen. +Did any of the Gaea people mention Chairman DalLierx to you?+
She set down the dark, chewy half cookie. There was an easy answer to that one. +Discussed him, yes. With Dr. Brady-Phillips. The vote to bring her here, specifically. Assured her most of us wanted her!+
―――
When that message arrived at Ari’s terminal, Ari shook her head. Yes, most of them had wanted Brady-Phillips . . . before they knew her name. She touched her pocket memo to the screen, transferring her question and Chenny’s answer. This narrowed her personal list, eliminating Varberg.
Paul, then, or Brady-Phillips. She had little doubt who she’d rather accuse.
She typed, +That should help. Sorry to drag you into this. We hope to put something together soon.+
+You don’t think Dr. BP would have done it, do you?+
Ari ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, picturing Chenny’s innocent-looking square face wrinkled in a frown. Chenny refused to realize that EB agents could travel anywhere cross-space shuttles went.
+If she’s innocent, she’ll be cleared,+ Ari typed. +Don’t worry.+
―――
Trev fidgeted in an HMF examining room. A nurse wearing a starched expression was about to set him loose. Maybe. “I’ll want to see you in twenty-four hours,” she declared.
Trev lifted a hand to touch his jaw. The ache had dulled once the nurse gave him a shot of whatever. Bandaged from lip to Adam’s apple in white muslin, he felt more ridiculous than usual. “Yeah. Sure—okay.”
By following exit signs, he escaped the Health Maintenance Facility. A desk clerk waved him past, evidently thinking he might mean to pay for medical services.
If anyone was going to pay, it was Will Varberg.
At the hub’s far end, five small boys scattered out for a rowdy chasing game. Trev touched his bandage again, remembering that when he was a kid, this kind of battle wrap would’ve been the equivalent of military decoration. He’d been protected from tumbling with boys his own size, as if he were fragile or something.
He wasn’t fragile. Just ugly.
He found a concrete bench. There he sat, staring at walls. Near walls, far walls. A high convex skylight.
About now, his father might be learning his whereabouts. Sending a crew to pick him up. Maybe even deciding to humiliate him and send police. Blase wouldn’t think twice about inventing some offense and having Trev brought in. Of course the charges wouldn’t stick. It was just the kind of game Blase liked.
And what would he do to the colonists?
Clearwater Plantation, back on Mars, wouldn’t have clear water ever again. Blase had it reallocated to another hamlet, scattered Clearwater’s population, and hauled Trev’s host family back to Earth to stand trial for sheltering a fugitive.
Goddard was farther away. Blase was even more apt to play hardball, if Trev guessed correctly.
Should’ve thought of that before you left Earth, Trevarre.
Oh, shut up. I didn’t plan to get caught, you know. By the time Blase showed up here, he had to vanish—for everyone’s sake. Even Graysha wasn’t bad, when she could escape her perennial teacher mode.
He wriggled, seeking comfort on the cold concrete. She’d commented, when done with her relief week, how much she enjoyed the Lwuites because they didn’t coddle her. And DalLierx said Goddard observed a 20/16 voting/marriage legal-age split. An eighteener might be eligible to serve on that defense thing—at another locale. One without a spaceport.
Anything, anything, that might convince the colonists to keep him here.
Two boys spotted a black-and-white shorthaired cat under a bench and flushed it, chasing until it bounded up a corridor.
Trev stroked his aching chin. Defense group. He had to insinuate himself into some kind of position, convince someone to shelter him, if Blase was coming. Axis’s D-group could transfer him elsewhere. Didn’t military people always complain about being reassigned?
Taking long strides in order to look tall, he marched across the hub and up the northbound corry toward the defense barn. He’d found it one evening when he went for a walk. A greasy-wheeled grader was parked across from the building’s entry.
The cavernous interior echoed back his footsteps. “Hello?” he shouted into the darkness. “Hello?” the building repeated. Pressing one hand against a concrete wall, he followed it until he met a door. He tried it. Locked.
Maybe there’d be someone after hours in the CA building.
At its entry he paused to check the directory. He felt conspicuous. The nurse could’ve at least bandaged him in browncloth instead of lily-white gauze.
Once he found the proper floor, a secretary had him wait while she asked if Ari MaiJidda was available. He sat and fidgeted, watching the communal office. These Lwuites worked weird hours. Five women and two men remained at concrete desks this evening. Heavy cables connected the desks like obscenely thick spider webs. The windows were dark, and his head throbbed. Aday felt like it’d lasted a week, but he wasn’t going back to his room till he accomplished something.
The woman called, “Sir?”
He stood up.
“Vice-Chair MaiJidda is free to speak with you now.” She nodded at a door on the waiting room’s right side.
Trev went to it, knocked, then pushed it open.
The woman he’d seen only at town meetings sat watching, resting her chin on the back of one hand. Slim but stern. Not cuddly. “Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Are there still openings in our defense group . . . ma’am?” It was time to play submissive again, but not incompetent.
“I don’t think I know you. Are you Gaea personnel?”
“No, ma’am. Well, not exactly.”
She flicked a finger toward a chair.
He sat. “I’m the stowaway, ma’am. But I’m determined to work. Can you use me in the D-group?” Start at the bottom, that’s how they all said it was done. Get into an organization however you could, then make them need you.
MaiJidda’s office had cloth hangings on the walls, dyed bundles of rough-spun rope that was woven here, braided there. The office seemed artsy for a Goddard dig.
Her eyes moved back and forth, plainly scanning his face. “What happened?”
Mentally he cursed the white gauze bandage. “I fell,” he grumbled.
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded twice. “Most people catch themselves with their hands when they fall forward.”
Blast her. “I did fall. This happened on the way down.”
“How old are you?” Her voice, achingly feminine, negated the hostile body-speak.
“Eighteen.”
“And acting like it.” She wagged her hand when he leaned forward to deny. “Oh, so did I when I was eighteen. It’s no crime to act your age.” She reached down for her keyboard. “I see we’re to call you Trev, not George.”
“Oh yes, ma’am.” Too eager. He realized it as her lips went stern and wrinkled.
She crossed her arms. “Before I consider giving you a place in my group, Trev, I want to know your full name, identity number, and place of birth.”
If she didn’t like eager, closemouthed was also out. She’d get his ID soon enough, when ExPress’s tissue typing went through. It was confession time. “Trevarre Chase-Frisson LZalle. My ID’s TL38-72812. Born on Venus, Novaya Moskva. Raised there.”
Tap, tap, tap on the keyboard, and then the woman’s eyes widened. She looked back up. “LZalle.”<
br />
Oh, chips.
“Your father’s the performer.”
“Are you familiar with his work?” He tried not to growl it. He was gambling a lot on this meeting.
“I had two of his early vidis, back on Einstein. I hated to sell them.”
Worse yet, an admirer. One who might try to ingratiate herself into Blase’s favor—and save her own skin—by returning Trev to him. What had he done? Backpedal, and make it fast! “Ma’am, he’s an incredibly talented man, but he’s not much of a father.”
Ari MaiJidda sat loose in her chair, hands roving from keyboard to supply cubby, touching her face, then returning to her lap. “You’re eighteen, you said.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve got sixty hours in as a private pilot. Planetside.” That kind of work had its compensations, including getaway-ready vehicles.
She clasped her hands on the desktop. “Trevarre, I’m not sure I would trust a stowaway with a plane . . . or a weapon, for that matter, and all our D-group squads are taking handgun training. But I do need some contract work on the side. Personal. For me—as a favor to us both.”
He slumped. This was getting worse, not better. “What is it?”
“My private greenhouse is being neglected, and that’s a crime. I grow ferns and other tropical plants I brought over as spores. My professional position is requiring more and more of my time. If I had an assistant, my hours there would be more efficiently spent. And I’d enjoy having someone to talk with.”
About Blase LZalle, he understood. He could tell her touring stories that would curl her short hair, and he might gossip about the other entertainers who’d been in and out of his Venus home all the time he was growing up. Probably the closer he stuck to rigid, swear-to-the-earth-gods truth, the less she’d admire his father.
Then—hopefully soon—he’d have to make the second confession. “Certainly, ma’am,” he said. “That would be helping the D-group, wouldn’t it, freeing you from other concerns?”
She stroked her keyboard again. “Tell me your Gaea schedule so I can dovetail it with my own.”
“One more thing,” he said, screwing up courage. “Ma’am, it will be awkward for me—and for Goddard—if Blase finds out I’m here.”
She eyed him sharply, as if trying to drill holes in his skull with her dark eyes. “What did you do?” she demanded.
Blast. He never should’ve tried this. “He’s . . . hmm . . .”
“Are you saying,” she asked, “that the only safe thing I can do is send you back?”
He thought fast. “No! He’s just not . . . sane,” he said carefully. “Lots of talented people don’t look good up close. It’d be better for everyone if he just didn’t find me.”
“I will not be used.” She stared back at him, letting both hands rest on her keyboard. “I will do nothing that endangers my people.”
“But I’m here.” He set his jaw. “You can’t just hand me over to him. It wasn’t good enough back at Mars, anyway.”
“You pulled this once before?”
He nodded.
Glaring, she poised her fingers over the keys. “In that case, you’re probably right. The best thing you could do is disappear.”
Trev’s throat tightened. He didn’t like the sound of that.
―――
Yael GurEshel rearranged her patient schedule so she could report to MaiJidda the next morning, and she felt small and dumpy as she stepped up to the Coordinator’s desk. “He’s recovering,” she opened. “I assume you want my help with the investigation.”
A message light blinked on MaiJidda’s screen, but she ignored it. “We have circumstantial evidence against two persons at this point, both of them Gaea personnel,” she said. “Can you furnish any possible connections between DalLierx and either Dr. Paul Ilizarov or Dr. Graysha Brady-Phillips?”
“We’d rather suspect Gaea than our own, wouldn’t we?” Yael declined MaiJidda’s extra chair, preferring to stand. Her back, never strong, had been bothering her lately. “As a matter of fact, the HMF receptionist says Dr. Brady-Phillips attempted to see Mr. DalLierx late yesterday afternoon.”
“Really?” MaiJidda arched her eyebrows and half pursed her lips. “The criminal, revisiting the scene of her crime?”
“If she’s guilty,” Yael said, “it would be more accurate to accuse her of returning to finish the job. Particularly if she’s a Eugenics Board agent.”
“Yes,” said MaiJidda, “the notion occurred to me.”
“It’s probably occurred to a lot of people.”
Ari shrugged. “Have you heard anything that might implicate Dr. Ilizarov?”
“I’ve never met the man.” Yael clasped her hands behind her back. “I dislike him on principle, though. He’s been accused by two of our teeners of sexual harassment.”
Ari MaiJidda’s hands stiffened on the desk’s surface, turning her knuckles white. “Which teeners?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. MaiJidda. That information is confidential, on a need-to-know basis.” Mind your own business, Coordinator. You’re already too involved in our lives.
“Why did you tell me about the harassment claims, then?” MaiJidda asked, scowling.
“They might have a bearing on the case. If Mr. DalLierx threatened to discipline Dr. Ilizarov, Ilizarov might bear him a grudge. We must not exclude any suspect from scrutiny.”
“Gaea people,” Ari muttered so softly Yael barely caught the words. “If one of them did this, she should be sent naked into the wild on Dropoff.”
“She,” Yael answered, “or he. Have you eliminated Dr. Varberg from your suspect list? After all, he—”
Ari’s fingers jerked spiderlike on the desktop. “We must act first, I think, to ensure Dr. Brady-Phillips does not constitute a threat. Evidence against her is beginning to come in.”
“What have you found?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. GurEshel.” She smiled coolly. “That information is also confidential. On a need-to-know basis.”
Yael stepped back, irritated. Lacking Jerusalem to fight over, the majority of her people had coexisted well enough with MaiJidda’s after they left Earth. Still, the woman’s personality grated on her. She seemed determined to fight her own small holy war, and she’d baited Yael into asking that question. Work with her, Yael told herself. We must work together or fall separately. “She has a medical condition, of course. I can call her to the HMF at any time, where she could be questioned.”
“I know about her syndrome.” Ari MaiJidda tilted her head. “We may be able to use it. Be ready.”
Yael started to turn away, then remembered a thread of conversation that had slipped past. “One other thing,” she added. “The HMF greenhouse and distillery have only a limited amount of gamma-vertol available.”
Ari MaiJidda leaned back on her desk chair. “How limited?”
“One dose available, a second under distillation for use within a month or two.” Gamma-vertol was the “truth drug” used most often in police investigations, a precious commodity here.
“That’s unfortunate. It must be a slow, inefficient process.”
Yael inhaled, determined to ignore the insult. “We can only do so much to accelerate green-plant synthesis, Vice-Chair MaiJidda.”
―――
Ari sat and stared after GurEshel shut the door. If Paul had tried to kill Lindon DalLierx, whatever his reason, she wouldn’t mind. Let them have at it, man to man, and may the better man win.
But if Graysha Brady-Phillips had begun an assassination campaign, Ari could be the next target, as the vice-chair who posed an EB agent the greatest risk.
Clenching both hands, Ari worked them against each other. Innocent or guilty, the elimination of Brady-Phillips would be no great loss to Goddard . . . and accusing her would distract attention from Paul, giving him another chance at Lindon.
Then there was Blase LZalle’s son. She could use him, too, she guessed. One move at a time, she must arrange pu
zzle pieces.
―――
Graysha had plenty to keep her from reading that morning. Engineering delivered a modified incubator for checking transgenic bacteria—newly created organisms—for survival under different levels of wind stress. Trev dubbed it the “wincubator.” Yesterday, she’d had Libby plate three subspecies of genegineered azotobacter, a free-living nitrogen fixer, and she’d set them inside to dry. Opening the door, she wrinkled her nose. Yesterday, this steel contraption smelled clean and metallic. Now, somewhere between earthy and foul, it was at home here in the micro lab.
No wonder she never bothered mixing perfume for work.
On her way back from the clean room, she poked her head in at Jirina’s lab. “Good morning, Black Goddess.”
“Ho, Blondie.” Jirina pulled off a black fabric hood that connected her with a high-contrast low-light microscope. “Has tight-lipped Libby told you the latest about DalLierx?”
Graysha leaned against a wall, drawing a deep breath. “Please don’t tell me he died.”
“Haven’t heard that. They’re not telling Gaea nuthin. But there’s a great rumor. One of us is supposed to have done it—a Gaea person, probably micro. Use of insulin—it was an infection.”
Graysha blew out the breath, wondering if she should tell Jirina her admittedly farfetched suspicions about Varberg. “Where’d you hear that, from a tech?”
“An HMF virologist. Techs aren’t answering questions. Nice to know we’re trusted, isn’t it?”
“Go away,” Graysha said.
“Go away yourself. You’re in my lab.”
“I’ll bet there are other rumors, too.”
“Six to ten of them. My money’s on the woman who challenged him to a fresh election.”
“It couldn’t be one of us—do you think?”
“I doesn’t think, honey. I listens, I waits, and I watches. And I keeps my mouth shut. ’Cept to friends.” She winked.
Graysha winked back, then slipped out into the hall and back into her own lab next door. Near the bright window, Libby sat hunched over the scanning scope, balancing one hand on a colony counter. Trev’s schedule had him feeding yabuts. Graysha waited until Libby stopped counting and pulled her head away from the eyepiece, then said, “Libby, what do you hear about Chairman DalLierx?”
