Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  The Crunch’n’ Chat is just two houses down on Fifteenth, a big place for a slice’n’fry with a shiny clean window in front. When Lacey pauses she can see the breakfast crowd going down the line, piling their trays with soy sticks, sliced onions and squash, whole sandworms, insect-meal cakes and imported fish-flake patties, taking them to round tables where a pot of oil sizzles at the ready in the sunken center. The lizzie owners rush around frantically, their scales gleaming as they refill bread-baskets and vinegar cruets, pass out napkins, and dole out meager cups of water, so busy that they never notice her looking in. Most likely they never would have noticed either if some stranger had stopped by, stalking Sally to her death.

  The stairs leading up to the apartment are just round the side from the restaurant, and the door itself is in a shadowed bay, redolent with fried starch. When Lacey rings the bell, she sees the scan light of the housecomp unit glowing above the door as it records her presence. No one answers, and she knocks hard, just in case there’s been a partial malfunction in this run-down building. Again nothing. Although she hesitates for some minutes, thinking that she might as well leave, she’s genuinely afraid that Sally is lying dead inside. She takes her portable comp link off her belt and flicks it on.

  “Hey, Buddy?”

  “I am on line, programmer.” Buddy’s voice sounds thin and shrill over the palm-sized link box.

  “Good. I have a door to open here and an unfriendly housecomp.”

  “Allow me to contact the unit, programmer, and we will change its attitude.”

  With a quick glance behind her at the street (empty, mercifully,) Lacey places a tiny transmission module on the unit flush against the door’s lock plate. She hears a soft hum as Buddy activates the other comp’s circuits; lights flash briefly in the scan panel.

  “I have erased the record of your visit. Please try the door.”

  At her touch it slides open. When she steps into the tiny entry hall, the door closes behind her, and a soft yellow light comes on overhead with the air conditioning.

  Sally’s apartment is its usual mess, a profusion of purple plush furniture, empty liquor bottles, china knick-knacks, and cartons crusted with the remains of take-out food. In the middle of the living room a dustbot mutters under its breath as it circles in a valiant fight against filth. Otherwise everything is entirely too silent.

  “Looks like she never came home this morning, Buddy.”

  “My optiscans are certainly picking up evidence of disorder. Would you place me in contact with her comm unit? There may be revelatory messages.”

  “About the end of the universe?”

  “I beg my programmer’s pardon?”

  “Just a joke, Buddy. Sorry.”

  The pale pink comm unit stands on the kitchen counter in the middle of a welter of dirty plates and glasses. Lacey places the link box over its digit pad, then gathers up her courage and goes down the hall to the bedroom door. She stops for a quick glance into the bathroom—perfumed and spotless in spite of a vast litter of cosmetics bottles. Since the bedroom door is standing open she strides in briskly—and lets out her breath in a long sigh of relief. There’s no corpse on the heart-shaped bed with the purple satin sheets, nor is there one on the lavender twelve-centimeter-long shag carpet. A pair of dirty jeans, a lavender shirt with a mini-pleated front, and a couple of plastofilm bags of Sarahian weed, about five kilos in all, are lying in front of the closet, clear evidence that Sally came back to her apartment after being in the Rat Yard.

  Evidence. Some small fact is nagging at her mind, a detail of Bates’ long recital, but she can’t quite place it. On a sudden instinct she retrieves the comp link from the kitchen and brings it back to the bedroom.

  “Buddy, set your sensors to record a visual of this room. How much can you see at one time?”

  “Only forty-five degrees of arc. If my programmer would make the necessary adjustments?”

  While they get the bedroom and bath on tape, Buddy repeats the messages recorded by Sally’s comm unit: nothing of interest, except that someone called and left no message, not so much as a single word, only forty-five minutes ago. Although it could well have been a client afraid of leaving a trace suitable for blackmail, Lacey finds this ominous, because, as she tells Buddy, she’s really beginning to think that Sally is dead.

  “Although it is a logical deduction, programmer, we have no actual evidence. In that gap between deduction and proof lies what you humans call hope.”

  “Well, so it does, yeah. Okay. I’m going to leave here now.”

  “I will sign off. Oh, programmer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember to wipe away all traces of your fingerprints, and please, be careful.”

  “I’ll do my best. I’m going to Carol’s clinic next. If I dunt check in from there, call the cops.”

  oOo

  It takes Chief Bates a couple of hours to arrange everything he needs for his trip to the Rat Yard: a ten-man riot squad on choppers, two armored vans, (the coroner’s van plus a laborbot to do the actual digging, his own van with Sergeant Parsons, two techs, and their equipment), and finally the exhumation order itself, signed in a scribble by a judge at breakfast. With the order in hand he stops back at his office to send a message to Akeli. He makes it as cryptic as possible, announcing that he’ll be late for their meeting due to interesting developments. As he’s leaving, he gets, through Buddy, the message that Sally Pharis left her flat some five hours after midnight and never returned.

  “My programmer is afraid that she has been killed by this assassin.”

  “I’m afraid I agree with her. Hey, Buddy, wait a sec. Explain: the word assassin.”

  “A professional killer dedicated to a specific cause or government rather than being available for hire by any unscrupulous individual. Certain obscure memory banks indicate that the Alliance has long been suspected of maintaining assassins, although hard proof is utterly unavailable.”

  “Certain obscure memory banks?”

  “I may not reveal the source. Any attempt to make me do so will cause a disabling malfunction.”

  “Okay, okay, then. Any chance that these assassins are psionic?”

  “Many sources of data indicate that the Alliance kills all psychics the moment it identifies them.”

  “I know that. What I’m wondering about are those obscure banks you mentioned. Anything different there?”

  “Not that I have found, sir. Are you working on what my programmer calls a hunch?”

  “Just that, and there’s something nagging at my mind, too, an old story or pic. I tried to find it on my comp, but it no could comply.” Bates pauses, switching off the oral input on his unit so as not to hurt its feelings. “Say, Buddy, I bet you’re a helluva lot smarter than some standard issue police comp.”

  “Specifications generally available would indicate so.”

  “Would your programmer let you do something for me?”

  “She has indicated that I am to cooperate with you as far as possible.”

  “Swell. Find me every reference you can to psionic assassins, even in fiction and the holopix. Collate these references and try to trace them to common sources that are not fictional.”

  “I will comply. The collation will take some time.”

  “Of course. I’ll get back to you later.”

  Bates switches his own comp back on, then hurries downstairs to his expedition, all lined up in the echoing gray bowels of the police garage. Sergeant Parsons is waiting in the driver’s seat of the lead skimmervan, with the techs in back. Bates gets into the passenger seat and slides the door shut.

  “Okay, Sarge, roll’em out whenever you’re ready.”

  With the roar of forced air the van heaves itself up and glides forward. On cue the garage doors slide up, and they are outside, gaining altitude fast. Bates settles back and tries to think, but by then the purple hypers are making the veins in his temples throb. Solving this puzzle would be difficult enough without them.
It’s one thing to conjure up the idea of a psionic assassin and give him/her a motive and an M.O.; quite another to put a face and name and warrant on an actual murderous sentient. At the moment, the assassin could be anyone in Polar City, whether a Republic citizen, a ’Lie, or a Con—close to a million suspects, not counting kids and lizlets. That’s the problem with professional killers of any sort, he thinks: they have absolutely no personal motive in a killing, and so you don’t have anywhere to start your investigation, no unhappy marriage, no gambling debts, no hated brother-in-law or rich old aunt. An assassin is as essentially anonymous as the knife in his murdering hand.

  And now he has still another death to investigate, one that might have an incredible political impact. If Lacey is right, and this grim event marks a first contact with a new sentient race, Polar City is going to be swarming with spies and media beings from all over the Mapped Sector. Although he hopes that he can keep the discovery secret until he’s finished his investigation, considering the larcenous mind-set of every sentient in town, he supposes that one of his own men will sell the news long before he’s ready to make an arrest. At times he’s sorry that he accepted this posting to Polar City, but he can certainly understand why the Republic prefers to staff the city’s police force with Outworlders whenever it can.

  oOo

  Carol’s clinic takes up the entire basement of a boarded-up holopix theater on the edge of the Outworld Bazaar, at least temporarily until the theater owner can come up with the bucks to have some structural repairs made to the roof and open the place up again. Although he never used the basement for anything more than storing boxes of food for the snack counter, it did have running water and a couple of toilets. When Carol let it be known that she was willing to run a clinic for street beings, a crew of charitable volunteers divided the basement up into exam rooms and a reception area while a pair of religious groups installed donated equipment. Someone even hung the waiting area with holos of assorted off-planet beauty spots in an attempt to add a note of cheer.

  When the grav platform takes Lacey down, she finds a smaller crowd than she’s been expecting. Usually Carol has a lot of work in the early evening, but tonight there’s only a couple of human male hookers with lime-green hair and skin-tight shorts and one young lizzie who looks like she’s ingested a very peculiar chemical substance indeed, because all three of her eyelids flutter repeatedly, and she keeps yawning and stretching her snout as if she’s trying to get something unstuck from the corners. Over the entire room hangs the smell of old sweat, disinfectant, urine, and cheap perfume. At the far side, behind a panel of safety plastic, the receptionist, a human female, is staring into a portaviewer.

  “Carol here?”

  “It’s you, huh, Lacey?” She never looks up. “Yeah, in her office. She’s been tryin to call you. Know that?”

  “Dint. Can I just go in?”

  She nods, watching as on-screen a couple in perfect evening clothes cavort in a fountain, the water splashing up and sheeting luxuriously onto the green, green lawn around them.

  Carol’s office is almost as crowded as her van, a jumble of supplies and outdated equipment with a rickety comp desk in the corner and a couple of plastofoam chairs nearby. She is working the comp at the moment, muttering long medical names in a tense voice, staring at the screen, then growling in disgust and trying again.

  “Lacey, thank God! You get my message?”

  “No. I’m going to call Buddy from here. Que pasa?”

  “It’s Little Joe Walker. He’s got to go to the hospital, and he’s raising hell. I mean, she-it, bloody hell. I was hoping you could maybe talk him into it.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I dunt know. That’s the problem. C’mon.”

  Carol leads her down a dingy passage way between pink movable walls. From behind one door Lacey can hear Little Joe yelling and screaming, begging to be let out. When Carol opens the door Little Joe charges, but since he’s wearing only a pink disposable-film exam gown that opens all the way up the back, his effort at escape is feeble and brief.

  “Lacey, jeez,” he says. “You got to talk some sense into Doctor Carol. I no can go telling no hospital where I picked this up.”

  At that he holds up his right hand. When she looks closely, she can see that his entire palm, the skin between his fingers, and a jagged stripe down the inside of his wrist look as buffed and leathery as polished vinyl. Around his hand hangs the faint scent of vinegar, a slight echo of what she smelled out in the Rat Yard pit.

  “It no looks like much now,” Carol says. “But I dunt know what it’s going to do next. It’s a bacterium of some kind, all right, but I no can find it in the Perez catalogue or in any other databank that I can get online. Skin sample under the micro shows it eats any dead cells it comes in contact with and toughens up the walls of the living ones till they’re kind of like cork.”

  “Where did you get it, Little Joe?”

  “The Rat Yard. I touched something on that bug-man’s grave, stuff like a piece of wrapping or cloth. I no can go telling no cop why I was out in the Yard!”

  The fear comes as a little stab at the base of Lacey’s spine and ripples upward. She too was in that pit, she too touched something from that grave site, the mysterious box with the cryptic symbols. Surreptitiously she looks at her hands: normal so far.

  “Then you got to think up a good lie,” Carol snaps. “Look, I already called Central Emergency. They’re sending an ambulance.”

  “Ambulance?” Joe wails.

  “Yeah, a sealed-environment van. Hey, man, you no get it, do you? I dunt know what in hell that stuff is. It’s no responding to any tests; it’s no filed in any databank. Like I say, it no look like much now...”

  “It itches like hell, doc!” Joe sounds utterly indignant, as if he feels his affliction is being dismissed.

  “I know, man. That’s what’s worrying me, comprende? If we no find out how to cure it, we got an epidemic on our hands—oh she-it, sorry, I dint mean to joke.”

  “Look,” Lacey forces her voice calm. “Tell’em you were scavenging artifacts. People do it all the time. Antique dealers on Sarah pay big money for old colony stuff.”

  Little Joe lets out his breath in a hiss.

  “Why dint I think of that?”

  “Cause you’re scared sick and I no blame you. Hey, Carol, I was out there too.”

  “Yeah, I savvy. I’m going to do a skin test on you in a minute. Now look, man,” this last to Little Joe. “Think. I need the names of everyone—I mean everyone—you either touched or handed something you touched since you were out in the Yard.”

  Little Joe nods his agreement.

  “Say, Carol,” Lacey says. “That databank’s up to date, right? And real complete?”

  “Yeah. Quaker Hospital let me bootleg theirs straight off. Why?”

  “Any chance this bacteria stuff comes from off-world? I mean, like totally alien?”

  “Chance? Chance?!? Whathahell else would it be?”

  oOo

  Mulligan and Nunks sit in the garden under one of the apple trees, while Maria, taking an unwilling rest, crouches some meters away and watches the flaming sky. In the shadows by the door Rick keeps watch, laser in hand. Mulligan can tell, just from the proud set of the kIDs shoulders, that he finds guard duty a lot more to his taste than turning compost. Mulligan himself is terrified.

  Little brother >be calm.

  Can’t. Killer want>find me>>slit my throat.

  Rick guard>I guard> you>>be calm. No/wait. >We do work>>distract.

  Garden work? [gladness]

  Not garden work. Mind work.

  [pain, irritation, reluctance]

  Little brother! [annoyance] >must learn> control talents OR >go crazy.

  Too late| crazy already.

  [extreme annoyance]

  [submission]

  It turns out that Nunks wants to trace the sentient mind that he picked up earlier that day. By using Mulligan’s cort
ex as a sort of booster, he can range much farther, get a better picture of this alien mind, and communicate with it much more clearly if indeed the other being is willing to communicate at all. Since any psychic adept at thought-transference can transfer the knowledge of a language over whole to an equally capable mind, Mulligan supposes that they can come to some sort of understanding with this sentient provided that their mind-structures are at all compatible—and he can only hope they are. After all, there are a number of races in the Mapped Sector that cannot communicate with any other, even though they have natural psychics among them, because they have conceptualized the universe in such radically novel ways that they share no general categories of thought with any other species, not even, for example, the distinction between general category and specific thought. Still, that both he and Nunks could pick up this particular sentient other’s pain does indicate that they share at least some mutual ground.

  In this, as in so much of their mental communication, Nunks is the definite leader. All Mulligan has to do is sit very still and let images and emotions sweep through his mind. Although he’s dreading feeling that blood-chilling grief yet once again, he agrees with his mentor that they have to help the being whom he’s labeled Mrs. Bug for want of a better name. As far as he can tell, anyway, the sentient is female, and Little Joe’s story seemed to indicate a certain insectoid cast to the race. Even though Mulligan knows that one should never draw strict analogies between widely disparate life-forms, he cannot help thinking of the victims of the Rat Yard’s paranoia as Mr. and Mrs. Bug. Nunks has picked it up, too, as a convenience.

  Little brother: readynot ready?

  Ready.

  The signal begins to filter in, a distant hiss and cackle at first, the mad thoughts and disturbing images of the Rat Yard, mostly hatreds and resentments: the mother who never loved me, the father who beat me, the doctors who drugged me, a grief-struck whispering litany of betrayal and loneliness, looping endlessly in well-worn paths through a hundred minds. Nunks wades through it like a swimmer in shallow water, hauling Mulligan behind him as they search for another, harsher voice. At one point pictures wash over Mulligan’s mind like colored light playing on a wall: a beautiful woman, vastly pregnant, sits in a rose garden; a huge flaming sword hangs in mid-air; seven golden cups swirl by, and out of each one peers a deformed and simpering little face. Then he recognizes the touch of Old Meg’s mind and realizes that he’s seeing more of her cards.