Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  And with a cold shudder Lacey remembers Meg, babbling about the Devil’s wife.

  oOo

  Nunks is worried. Mulligan’s grief woke him out of a sound sleep, then left him as suddenly as it came. Since he’s very tired after a hard night of gardening, he’s also annoyed. Sometimes it seems that the little brother is always in one kind of trouble or another, and that no one but Nunks can pull him out again. For a while he burrows around in his bed, a huge square mattress stuffed with big, deliberate lumps, but try as he might he cannot get back to sleep. He gets up, adjusts the polarization on the window to let in a little light, then brushes his fur vigorously with a pair of stiff brushes until he feels halfway sapient again. In his tiny kitchenette he makes himself a cup of strong herbal tea while he wonders what to do next. Without words he’s incapable of simply calling a friend on the comm and asking for help. Being on a verbal planet can be frustrating in the extreme, but as a political exile he can’t go home again—not, at least, until the current ruling house on his homeworld has been toppled, an event which unfortunately lies in the distant future if indeed it will ever happen at all.

  The tea drunk, he puts on a pair of old green shorts and pads out into the garden, shaded from the burning sun by long muslin panels on computer-controlled frames. Nunks checks the angle of each one of them. Even though Mulligan translated his thoughts into Merrkan so he could tell Buddy exactly how he wanted the panels set, Nunks mistrusts the comp unit, as he would any mind with absolutely no psionic ability or deep feelings. Buddy he dislikes more than most AIs, because this particular comp unit does have some shallow emotions, such as arrogance and an entirely too strong attachment to Lacey. To Nunks’ way of thinking, if one is forced to deal with intelligent machines, they should stay machines and nothing more.

  He sits down in the deepest shade under an apple tree, leans back against the comfortable bark, and goes looking for Mulligan. Although he’s fully conscious and perfectly aware of everything around him, he detaches part of his mind, using the image of a beam of light, and sends it roving around on the track of the overwhelming sob of grief that woke him. In a few minutes he picks up Mulligan—sound asleep. By engaging his own in empathetic contact, he can tell that Mulligan’s body is curled up into a cramped position, automatically compensating for shifts and drops as some flying vehicle carries it along. Nunks reflects just how much like Mulligan it is, first to wake him up, then to go right back to sleep himself.

  There remains, however, that piercing cry of pain that now seems to have been something Mulligan was reading and transmitting rather than feeling himself. He sends his mind out farther still, following back the traces of Mulligan’s outburst. Very distant, very faint—but the grief is still resonating in another sentient, still carving deep a bitter loss into another psionic mind. Nunks tries sending a wave of sympathy only to feel the other mind shrink back in a bleak terror that carries with it overtones of despair. Why bother to fear, why bother to preserve your life, the mind seems to be saying, in a universe as cruel and horrible as this one? Nunks tries to send back hope, and love, and the joy of the coming of the light—the other mind cuts him off.

  He comes back to himself, then merely sits for a while, thinking. Not even little Maria, sold into prostitution by a drunken father and beaten half to death by the pimp she trusted, radiates a despair such as the one that mind has sent to him. As he analyses his memory of it, he reads mourning at the core, but a doubled mourning, made into twisted thorns by some ghastly...he struggles with unfamiliar thoughts, then pinpoints the feeling at last. A ghastly joke. Somehow this sentient is thinking of its loss as a hideous, warped joke played on it by the universe as a whole. Nunks feels pity rise within him until his chest aches and heaves. He begins composing his thoughts into a form that Mulligan can translate to Lacey. Somehow or other, they have to find that sentient and get it some help.

  oOo

  Just before noon Bates is sitting at his desk and reading over a stack of paper on the two murders, including the coroner’s full report, and a write-up on the Confederation Embassy skimmer that carried Gri Bronno over the cliff in the Rat Yard. Bates’ intuition that the cook was murdered has been conclusively confirmed; someone first set, then jammed, the skimmer’s autopilot all the way back in Polar City before sending the car out into the night with a dead man at the wheel. The fight, therefore, that Mulligan read from the vehicle must have happened nearly an hour before the “accident.”

  The most troublesome report is a quick call-in from a squad car to let him know that Sally Pharis doesn’t live at her currently listed residence any more; theoretically all patrols are on alert, looking for her, but after the miserable job they did finding Gri Bronno, Bates has little faith in them. He wants to see her more than ever, because the lab report on the brown boot shows that the blood on them is indeed Ka Gren’s, and it was found about where Ward saw Sally walking.

  The most interesting file is the write-up of Sergeant Parsons’ interrogation of the personnel at the Confederation Embassy. Although as Chief of Police Bates is willing to supervise an important case like this, he sees no reason to waste his time doing the routine field work. As usual, Parsons’s report is meticulous. With the help of two other officers, he has uncovered and collated an amazing amount of detail, including the link Bates has been hoping for. As under-assistant cook, Gri Bronno was taking out the garbage after dinner at the same time that Imbeth Ka Gren was leaving the building by the back door. Another servant happened to be looking out a window at the time and noticed Ka Gren speaking to the cook, although she couldn’t hear what was being said. Bates is willing to bet that it was some innocuous remark that just happened to indicate where Ka Gren was going.

  Parsons draws the logical conclusion that the murderer must be someone in the Embassy who knew that Ka Gren had spoken to Gri Bronno, but Bates refuses to jump to any conclusions. He calls up a map of the embassy grounds on his comp unit and sees confirmed what he’d been suspecting: the recyclers are right by the back gates, which would have been standing wide open. Since those gates front onto one of the main streets in the neighborhood, it’s quite possible the murderer could have been hanging around, unnoticed in the crowd of sentients on the move-belts or sidewalks, watching his victim leave. If so, he might have also seen Ka Gren speak to the cook—and thus hand him his death sentence. On the other hand, Bates remembers the look on the murdered carli’s face, his lack of any real terror. He must have known the murderer, must have had no reason to think he was about to die.

  At that thought, something that’s been nagging at Bates falls into place. The carli’s throat was deeply slashed. He must have seen his murderer not only draw a knife but swing hard. Why didn’t he run, or scream, or at the least look frightened? It occurs to Bates, too, that since the veins in a carli’s throat are as big as the ones in a human’s, the murderer must have been practically bathed in reddish-purple blood. Even given that the plaza was nearly empty at that time of day, surely someone would have noticed if a sentient dripping carli blood strolled by. Or is that why Sally Pharis is missing?

  “Crap. If he killed Gri Bronno over some small-time remark...”

  Bates punches into comm and practically screams an all-points alert to every officer on duty. This time he emphasizes that the subject’s life is bound to be in danger. Once he’s a little calmer he realizes that he’s back to thinking that the same sentient murdered both Ka Gren and Gri Bronno. After all, if someone was clever, a professional, even, what would be easier than to fake an amateur-looking job? A professional. For a long time he sits at his desk, staring out the window, letting his mind roam through his memory as he tries to dredge up the fact or facts that nag at him, just out of reach.

  He is considering hanging it up and getting something to eat when the comm unit buzzes. He flicks it on.

  “Bates.”

  “Hello, Chief.” It’s Akeli from the PBI. “Have you any data of moment to impart?”

  “I no was
aware that you’re my superior officer.”

  Akeli’s fat face smiles on the viewer.

  “My official designation is, of course, only that of a liaison between you and the President.”

  You got to rub it in, don’t you, you bastard. Aloud, he says:

  “Well, you’re going to have to tell her I got nothing new on my end. What about yours? Anything on the Alliance Embassy or Ka Gren’s contact?”

  “Nothing I have gleaned is suitable for transmission over a comm line. Perhaps you might appear at my office around eight tonight? Adios.”

  And he powers out before Bates can say another word. For a few minutes the chief sits at his desk steaming over the multiple layers of insult in that brief exchange, particularly the implication that any facts he gathered would of course be so trivial that they could be said openly, unlike Akeli’s deep secrets. Then he forces himself to be calm and leaves the office, shutting the door quietly behind him instead of slamming it as his heart desires.

  Here in the middle of the day shift the station building is nearly deserted. Although the cafeteria’s open, it’s serving only synthicoffee, stale sandwiches, and soy sticks in a gravy left over from the midnight main meal. Bates gets a couple of eggo-paste sandwiches and the big size on the coffee and sits down near the door while he watches the human attendant wiping down the servobots with a wet rag that’s probably less sanitary than any spilled food could be. He’s just finished the first sandwich when he’s aware of someone watching him in turn. He slews round in his chair to see a young woman in the doorway, slender and pretty with deep bronze skin and jet-black hair, done up in severe corn rows. She also looks vaguely familiar.

  “Chief Bates? I dunt mean to disturb you, but I’m so worried, and I no can find anyone else.”

  Her soft voice jogs his memory: Cindy something-or-other, Corporal Ward’s fiancee, and he met her at the annual Independence Day picnic last winter.

  “No trouble. What’s wrong?”

  “Well, I no can find Baskin. He took the exam today, and he was going to go home and change, and then call me. Y’know, we’ve been seeing each other for two years, and he’s never missed calling me before when he said he was going to. So I thought maybe the exam went overtime, and I came here to look for him. The exam’s been over for hours.”

  The sandwich he’s just eaten turns to an indigestible lump in Bates’ stomach. Shoving the plate away he gets up fast.

  “Come with me. We’ll put out an all-points on him, and then drive over to his place. I no suppose his lock just happens to be keyed to your palm, too?”

  Her complexion turns an ashy gray, but she tries to make a brave little joke.

  “It sure is. Just don’t tell my mama, will you?”

  “You got my word on that. Vamos.”

  In the end, though, it turns out that Ward never made it home. A beat cop finds him in an alley about ten blocks from the station, shoved under a debris box with his throat slit from side to side exactly like Imbeth Ka Gren’s. While the medics wrap him up, Bates stands in the blazing sun and swears revenge. In the squad car Cindy weeps quietly, her shoulders heaving as if she’d been running a long long way.

  oOo

  By the time Carol drops them off at A to Z Enterprises, late in the afternoon, Mulligan is so tired that he can barely stumble after Lacey as she leads the way inside to the shady-cool garden. She’ll have to let him sleep there for the rest of the day, she supposes; after all, she’s the one who’s been running him so hard, and the least she can do is give him a place to recover. Although he hasn’t actually said so, she’s beginning to suspect that his landlord’s thrown him out again. With Nunks’ help she gets him upstairs and settled onto the sofa, then pours herself a drink while Nunks hovers restlessly by the door.

  “Something you need to ask me?”

  He nods his head yes, his enormous hands working in frustration.

  “It’s so complicated we’ve got to wait until Mulligan wake up.”

  Another yes.

  “But it’s so urgent it no can wait.”

  Exactly. She should have known. Although she’s tempted to shake Mulligan awake, he’s dead-pale and snoring, twisted round a cushion as usual in what looks like a hideously uncomfortable posture. She yawns, tired herself after a day without sleep.

  “Well, you’ll know when he wakes up. Want to wait up here with me? We can maybe find a replay tape of an off-planet ball game on the screen.”

  With a negative shake of his massive head Nunks clumps out of the room and down the stairs so loudly that she knows something’s severely wrong. Sipping the drink she wanders over to her desk to find Buddy’s message light blinking wildly. She settles into the armchair with a sigh of pleasure for the comfort of sitting down in something other than Carol’s van and flips a couple of toggles.

  “I am very pleased to see you back, programmer. We have had an influx of data.”

  “Triage, then lay it on me.”

  “Subject headings in chronological order so that my programmer may triage data. I have found a possible cause of the Mulligan unit’s pain. Chief Albert Bates of the Polar City Police Force called. Sally Pharis’s life is quite probably in danger. Mulligan’s life may be in danger. The security of the Republic is just possibly threatened.”

  “Jeezchrist! Start with Mulligan’s life, then Sally’s life.”

  “Both lives are threatened because of their connections with the murders of the carli Imbeth Ka Gren. The Mulligan unit attempted a psychic reading over the corpse. The Sally unit was most likely an innocent bystander at the scene of the crime.”

  “Was this the substance of Bates’ call?”

  “You have deduced correctly. He also desires a meeting before eight this evening if at all possible. He did not say why.”

  Lacey feels a prickle of irritation. If Bates were only something other than a police officer, she would like him, but like all Fleet personnel, most of whom supplement their meager pay with smuggling, she has an instinctive dislike of on-planet police. On the other hand, she knows that she has to do something about the murdered sentient out in the Rat Yard.

  “Call Bates for me.”

  For a few moments Buddy hums and clicks.

  “I have reached his comm unit. He himself is unavailable.”

  “Leave this message. Lacey is home and will see you whenever you drop by.”

  “Completed, programmer.”

  “Good. New command. Check with the Port and see if the merchant ship RSS Montana has arrived in-system yet. If so, contact Sam Bailey—you remember him, don’t you?”

  “Of course. A friend of yours, admirably efficient as well as clean in his personal habits.”

  “Coming from you, I suppose that’s a compliment. Anyway, ask Sam if he’s noticed anything unusual in-system, particularly anything that could be construed as evidence of an alien ship. If he has any data, tell him to send it immediately in Green-oh-four. And tell him I’m looking forward to buying him a drink.”

  “Your command is entered, but may I remind my programmer that code Green-oh-four is fifteen years out of date.”

  “That’s why I’m having Sam use it. We know it by heart, but anyone listening in will have to use the code keys, and what do you bet they dumped them out of comp years ago?”

  “That is a logical assumption, programmer.”

  All at once the last of her energy deserts her, and she yawns hugely, shaking her head to stay awake.

  “Jeez, Buddy, I got to sleep. Put a sensor beam on Mulligan and sound alarms if he tries to leave before I wake up. Wake me when Bates gets here.”

  “As my programmer desires.”

  Buddy sounds vaguely disappointed. It’s not until she’s falling asleep that she remembers that he had other news to tell her. By then she’s too tired to get up and hear it.

  First Interlude: The Hunter

  Wherever he walks, rage walks with him. Rage is the prime reality of Tomaso’s life, no matter how tightly c
oiled he keeps it, no matter how deeply drowned in the dark ocean of his night-time mind. Rage will never make his hand tremble at a killing moment, nor drive him to a curse when he hides in absolute silence, nor twitch his lips in any revealing ghost of a snarl, but when he walks abroad, it strolls beside him and turns cold eyes on the passers-by, marking them for possible victims, enjoyable victims, if only his work would allow. At times it tries to speak to him, but he always refuses to listen, because he hates its voice, the high, shrill whine of a frightened child. He would prefer to think that the child was chewed, swallowed, and subsumed into the man he has become, not that it is alive and whole, still whining and begging for its mother, still crying and spitting at the news that its mother is dead, killed by the same hands that drag it along cold corridors and throw it into a locked room, still banging on a metal door and screaming hatred in a venomous stream. The room is still there, too, in his mind, and the bloodstains on the door from the small hands that banged and banged and banged as the voice howled terror.

  The room had a frayed blue carpet on the floor and no window, though on one wall was a big holo of a mountain view with a waterfall, the white foam pouring down endlessly in illusionary motion just as the white clouds endlessly rippled through the sky without ever really changing their position. There was nothing else, no bed, no three-dee viewer, no chair, not a book or tape, nothing. Once he stopped screaming a servobot slid through a slot in the door and brought him a tray of food. Although it turned its sensors on his bloodied hands, no one ever came to bandage or tend them; eventually he washed them in the sink in the bathroom attached to the room and wrapped them in toilet paper. It was the first time that he had to heal himself, but not the last.

  The food was a chunk of bread, a bowl of soup, a glass of watery white liquid that he couldn’t name. It wasn’t quite enough, but since he’d never been hungry before, he assumed that the servobot would give him more when he asked. It merely took the empty tray away and slammed the door-slot shut behind it. Although he waited by the door for some time, there was no more food until approximately the next day. All night, as he tried to sleep on the floor, his stomach growled and tormented him. When he did sleep, it was only to dream of his mother, and he would wake in tears.