Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  Although he’s as sure as he can be without hard evidence that she’s a small-time dealer in Sarahian weed as well as being a high-priced call girl, he finds it impossible to believe that she had anything to do with the murder of Imbeth ka Gren. Sally has always struck him as entirely too prudent to be involved in any sort of violent crime. Most likely she—if indeed the woman Ward saw was Sally—was down on the Plaza on some business of her own. The trouble is that since that business was most likely illegal, she will probably deny that she was there at all, even though she might have inadvertently seen or heard something valuable to the investigation.

  Bates gets on the comm and puts out the order to bring her in, then checks with the Air Unit dispatcher to see if the sweep of the Rat Yard turned up the Embassy’s missing cook. When he comes on screen the AU man refuses to look him in the eye.

  “All right!” Bates snarls. “How did you fuck up this time?”

  “Well, uh, chief, we got the carli for you.”

  “That’s the good news, yeah. Go on. What’s the bad?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Crap. How?”

  “Well, the speeders picked him up heading out of the Rat Yard, and they followed, ordering him to pull over both with the lights and the loudspeakers, but he hit the power. So they—”

  “Wait. Did they bullhorn him in carli or just in Merrkan?”

  “Carli, course. Jeez, chief, the right tapes are standard issue. So anyway, they chased him, and I’m afraid he no was much of a driver. His skimmer hit some rubble or something and bounced over the edge of the rehydration crater.”

  “Crap. He was already dead when they reached him?”

  “Broken neck, yeah.”

  Although a broken neck is a perfectly logical result for a fall of three hundred meters in a runaway skimmer, Bates is troubled. The other carli died of a neck wound, too.

  “Is he at the morgue?”

  “Yes sir.” The AU man looks at his chrono. “Oh yeah, they must’ve gotten him there by now.”

  “Think I’ll go take a look. You tell your hell-for-leather flyboys that I want a full formal report on this incident. I mean I want to know if they picked their damned noses. Get it?”

  “Yes sir!”

  With a growl Bates punches out of comm. He is not looking forward to telling Ka Pral that another member of his staff is dead, especially since taking a job from someone in the carli world is tantamount to being adopted into his family. Although Ka Pral is of a high caste and Gri Bronno was of a low, they would both consider themselves the ambassador’s sons and thus brothers in a very real way. Bates decides that he’ll postpone that grim duty until he’s had a full report on the corpse. Whether it’s intuition or just long experience he finds something very fishy about Gri Bronno’s accidental death.

  oOo

  Carol’s bright red van is really a traveling clinic, crammed with diagnostic equipment, basic drugs and supplies, data cubes for the ignorant on every subject from birth control to Sarahian fungus infections, a big cooler of purified water, and even a small birthvironment in case she gets caught delivering a premature baby or presiding over the hatching of a sickly lizlet. Even though space is at a premium, Lacey manages to wedge Mulligan and a pair of suncloaks in the back between the medicomp and stacked boxes of synthiskin, then clears a pile of patient records and a bag of mysterious vials off the passenger seat so that she can sit next to Carol.

  “Why are we taking Mulligan?” Carol seems indifferent to whether he can hear her or not.

  “A psychic might come in handy, that’s why. Look, you sure you want to help me with this? It might be real dangerous.”

  “Hey, it’d be a helluva lot worse for you guys to go out there alone.”

  Lacey knows she’s right, which is, of course, the reason she asked Carol to take them; she merely feels that she should give her friend the chance to back out if she wants to. Even though Carol is the only doctor in Polar City who’ll go anywhere near the Rat Yard—she actually drives out there once a week to treat whoever needs her—it took her months to gain the Ratters’ confidence, and she at times doubts that she has it even now. Except for those few denizens of the Yard who are on the run and thus afraid only of being arrested, most Ratters live in terror that they’ll be dragged back to a hospital and drugged into obedient passivity with psychotropes. All it would take would be one paranoid soul with a knife to bring her medical career to an abrupt end.

  When Carol starts up the skimmervan, it jounces into the air and takes off at an alarming speed as she squeals it around the corner and settles in over D Street. In the back Mulligan yelps once; Lacey skews around to find him rubbing his forehead.

  “You okay?” She has to yell over the noise of the engine.

  “Yeah, considering something just, like, bounced off my skull.”

  “Be careful back there, will you?” Carol calls out. “That stuff is expensive.”

  Mulligan makes a face at her behind her back.

  Since the sun is beginning to rise, a long process on Hagar since the red giant fills twelve degrees of arc, Lacey flicks the switch on the dash that controls the polarizer. As the light brightens, the windows will darken in automatic balance. They careen through Porttown, then head out on the south-eastern road, deserted except for the occasional freight train roaring along in a mini-hurricane of forced air. Although most skimmers only operate above reasonably smooth surfaces, Carol’s van is an off-roader, bought for her by bureaucrats grateful that she’d ease their consciences by doing something about both the Ratters and the poor white trash of Porttown. In about a mile she leaves the road and heads straight out through the barren hills.

  “We no want to get there too long after sunrise,” Carol yells over the grumbling, wheezing engine. “They’ll all be asleep.”

  Down brown hillsides, across the valleys that once were river beds, skewing round the beaches of dead lakes, the van whistles along at a good hundred kilometers an hour while Lacey clings to her shoulder harness and wonders if she’s going to be air-sick, a degrading fate for a veteran of zero-gee battle manoeuvres. She doesn’t even want to think of how Mulligan is doing, crammed in the back. Since conversation’s impossible, Carol sings to herself. Oh, oh, baby, there ain’t no cure, no baby, there ain’t no cure, no cure at all, baby, for the Polar City blues—looping endlessly round in her husky voice.

  At last they come screaming along to the rehydration project’s mucky red-brown crater, and Carol somewhat reluctantly slows down. The workmen are just going off-shift, strolling over to the trucks some meters away from the dirty-white ice chunks. As the red van swings by some of them look up and wave. Lacey assumes that Carol must be well known out here. Her driving style is certainly distinctive enough. About a kilometer past the work station, at the very lip of the crater, is a little clot of vehicles: a pair of police airspeeders, a big crane, and a tow-skimmer. Carol slows down to a bare crawl so they can gawk as they pass. The crane is bringing up a blue-green skimmer with its front smashed in.

  “Hey, that’s a Con Embassy car!” Lacey says.

  “Sure thing. Look, they probably got the victim out hours ago, but I’ve got to stop and make sure.”

  “Okay by me.”

  Carol lurches the van around, flings it into a patch of shade under a pair of thorn trees, and lets it drop to the ground. In the back Mulligan swears violently.

  “Ah, you’re such a weakling!” Carol says with a grin. “Know what you need? A good fitness regimen—long brisk walks, some weight-lifting, a solid vegetarian diet, and lots of cold showers. Come see me down at the clinic, and we’ll work out the details.”

  Mulligan’s reply does not bear repeating.

  Somewhat unsteadily Lacey climbs out, then lingers behind to help Mulligan unwind himself while Carol trots over to the policebeings, two humans and a lizzie, whose pale gray skin looks particularly good with the kelly-green uniform. As they stroll over to join her, Mulligan suddenly stiffens, tossing hi
s head back and arching his spine as if his lower back hurt.

  “Whathahell?”

  “Someone died in that wreck. I no want to go near it.”

  “Well, okay. We can wait here.”

  Carol is already trotting back toward them, shaking her head as sadly as if this anonymous victim had been a patient of long standing.

  “Nada. I no can do anything for the poor bastard. A carli, they say, and his body’s already in the morgue.”

  “What happened to the other one?” Mulligan says. “There was two sentients in that car. Even if only one of’em was like killed, the other must’ve been hurt pretty bad, y’know.”

  “Oh yeah?” Suddenly Carol is all serious interest. No matter what she thinks of Mulligan as a person, she respects another professional when she sees one. “The greenies haven’t picked up on that. You better tell’em.”

  “I no go any closer. I no can.”

  Carol is about to grab his arm and drag him along when the lizzie cop comes over, all squat, stocky 2.8 meters of him hurrying along with the shuffling walk of his less-than-limber species. In the hot sun he’s almost manic-lively, his long snout creasing in a toothy grin as he holds out his hand, the claws at the tips of his fingers all nicely polished a dark blue.

  “Hey, Mulligan, you came along at the right time, huh? What have you got to tell us? I’ll make sure you get paid the going rate.”

  “There was two beings in that car before it went over.” Mulligan’s voice is very soft, and he looks away with unfocused eyes. “They hated each other. They fought. I no can read no more than that from here, and I no going to try. Last time I did a job for you guys I ended up in Central Emergency.”

  “Yeah?” The cop’s third eyelids, the transparent ones, slip down over his bright yellow eyes, then flicker—a sure sign that he’s puzzled. “Well, it’s a free planet, huh? I’ll get you some bucks for that information, anyway. Two guys, huh? Bet the chief’ll be interested in that.”

  oOo

  Bates is still at the morgue when Office Zizzistre’s call catches up with him. He listens with great interest to Mulligan’s insights, has Zizzistre repeat them so he can record them into his belt comp unit, and then adds a note to himself to get Zizzistre a commendation for quick thinking.

  “Only one thing, Izzy. What in hell was Mulligan doing out there, anyway?”

  “I no savvy, chief. He was with Doctor Carol. I guess someone needs a psychic out in the Rat Yard, huh?” He allows himself a small hissy chuckle at his joke. “Oh yeah, and that Lacey woman was with’em.”

  “Jeez. Now that’s really gonzo! Well, no problem of yours, Izzy. Thanks for the good work. Signing off now.”

  As he leaves the grimly gray morgue building and walks back to his skimmer, Bates is feeling rather smug. His intuition about Gri Bronno is being handsomely confirmed on all sides. The coroner’s report is perfectly clear: most of the bruises on the corpse were inflicted after death, not before, which is court-worthy evidence that he was dead long before the skimmer hit the crater bottom. Whoever murdered him, then, is a clumsy amateur, unaware of the most basic forensic techniques. Mulligan’s evidence about the fight between two sentients amplifies that bare fact nicely. All at once it occurs to Bates to wonder if the two murders are related after all. Whoever killed Ka Gren was no amateur. On the other hand, the likelihood of there being two random cold-blooded murders of Embassy personnel on the same night is improbably low. Two murderers, maybe—but there has to be a connection.

  Bates climbs into the skimmer and punches in the co-ordinates of the Embassy. It’s time he faced Ka Pral and told him this latest piece of bad news.

  Chapter Three

  The Great Psionic Mutation, as they call it, happened about three hundred years ago in, as far as historians can tell, the Old Earth nation called California. All through humanity’s history a few persons carried the naturally occurring though recessive genes for psionic powers, and here and there the occasional couple who both were carriers got together and produced a child with some degree of talent. Usually these psychics ended up being persecuted by one dominant religion or another in the old days or dismissed as charlatans by scientists in more recent times. Even those who survived rarely developed their talents, because, isolated by fear and long distances as they were, they had no way of pooling their experiences and thus of learning how to control and expand their skills.

  At the end of the century called the twentieth in the old dating system, however, California was a densely populated place, settled by immigrants from quite literally all over the planet. As you might expect, with so many gene pools to draw from, the pairing of recessive genes became more and more common, until by the middle of the 21st Century a respectable percentage of its people had developed psychic talents. Since this country was one of the most tolerant in history, these psychics could work openly, meet others of their kind, and finally begin exploring this long-neglected human potential. Although there were plenty of frauds and self-deluded souls, the genuine talents tended to sort themselves out and migrate to the northern region, particularly to a mountain named Shasta and a city called San Francisco.

  As the situation on Old Earth worsened during the twenty-first century, these psychic communities had warnings of the coming disaster long before the biosphere was finally destroyed. After the First Contact, when young humanity learned the secrets of star travel from the pre-existing alien cultures in the Mapped Sector, a good number of them managed to qualify for interstellar immigration, often in unified groups, and when the final disaster came most of the true psychics were safely off-planet in the various territories of the human-dominated Republic, which needed immigrants badly enough to take these psychics in when the alien-controlled Alliance and Confederation turned them away. Since ordinary people tended to shun them, those with the talent generally married among themselves, especially at first, thus strengthening the blood lines—but not all psionic children have psionic parents. Mulligan’s father and mother, for instance, have never shown a trace of any talent, and neither have his four brothers. Apparently he inherited the recessive genes in the old-fashioned way.

  There’s no doubt, however, that his talent is first class. Even crammed into the back of Carol’s skimmervan, with his stomach twisting itself into ropes of nausea, he is receiving a strong amount of what he calls “background signal,” vague visual impressions, touches of emotion, snatches of voices, and occasionally a strong pictorial image or sudden stab of feeling: terror, mostly. Although he wishes that he’d never come along, he also realizes that he doesn’t want Lacey out there alone, that in spite of Carol’s low opinion of his usefulness he would rather be around to offer what help he can than go off somewhere in safety. Yet even so, his fear remains, so strong that he finally decides he’s picking up the emotions of another psychic as well as merely being frightened himself. As he focuses in, he gets a strong impression of a blurred, dual mind—or perhaps two minds closely linked? He can read that one of them seems to be very hungry; then the skimmer swerves and dips, breaking his concentration. When he tries to pick up the twinned minds again, the signal’s lost, faded into the general background.

  Near the center of the Rat Yard, the cracked gray remains of a runway stretch out like a scar through the vast strew of garbage and rubble, shimmering with heat in the mid-morning sun. When Carol finally sets the van down there, near a rusty metal light standard, Mulligan hears Lacey sigh aloud in relief.

  “This’s where I always put down,” Carol says. “You have to establish a routine when you’re dealing with people like this. They no like surprises, and some of them just plain no can remember if you change the pattern.”

  At that Mulligan’s sense of relief turns to dread. Being around mentally ill people is very difficult for him, simply because he can feel their pain and fear like a stab at his own heart. When Carol and Lacey get out, squabbling vaguely about what to do next, he crouches in the van and wishes that he was good at karate instead of base
ball.

  “Hey, Mulligan!” Carol snaps. “Don’t just sit there on your narrow ass! Get out the sun cloaks, will you?”

  He hands over the blue cloak Lacey brought, looks around and finds Carol’s, white with a red cross, that ancient symbol of healing. He gives it to Carol along with her medical kit, then hesitates, merely watching while they duck into the stiff helmets in the middle of the cloaks and drape themselves in the long flow of reflec cloth.

  “I brought one for you, too,” Lacey says. “It’s right there by your feet.”

  This is the moment. He could announce that he’s having nothing to do with this crazy idea, that he’s staying in the van with the doors locked, but Lacey is looking at him quizzically through the polarized face plate in the helmet of the cloak. If he cops out now, she will despise him just that much more.

  “I’m on my way, yeah. It’s just kind of like cramped in here. Hard to move, y’know?”

  “You can sit in front on the way back.”

  “No, I dint mean that. You can sit in front.”

  “Would you two stop bickering and come on?” Carol says. “I want to lock the van. I no want anyone trying to steal the drugs. Some of these dudes and donnas will swallow anything that even looks like a pill.”

  Dragging the voluminous cloak with him Mulligan jumps out.

  He finds the stiffened, cylindrical helmet and slips it on in a hurry. Hagar’s sun can blister fair skin like his in only a few minutes. Once he has the folds of white reflec properly arranged all the way down to his feet, he flicks on the power switch just inside the helmet. As soon as the solar packs that run in strips down the back of the cloak are charged up, the mini-fans switch on and keep the air circulating inside the helmet. For a minute or two, though, the moisture from his sweaty face fogs the face-plate.

  “Mulligan, come on!” Carol snaps. “Dunt just stand there, will you?”

  “Hey, lay off him!” This time Lacey sounds genuinely annoyed.