Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

  "What's this?" Lacey called back over his shoulder.

  Ashby looked startled. He stood and peered over at where the agent knelt. "No, I told you I don't know anything about plants."

  "Not the plant, for god's sake, the box!" Lacey snapped. "You know about electronics, don't you?"

  "Certainly not. I'm an accountant, not a, a technician."

  Lacey's expression went briefly flat and his scar stood out. Then he began to chuckle. He was laughing fully, open-mouthed, as he walked past the cringing clerk and up the stairs to where his car and driver waited.

  * * *

  Level 17 was lighted and busy when Lacey got back to the State Building, though it was technically after quitting time and most of the floors below had emptied. Seventeen belonged to the hunters, and the good ones were lonely people. You couldn't take a companion under a scanner helmet with you. Some investigators worked long hours for the thrill of the chase, some because they tracked criminals by rote and had by now no other way to order their time. Lacey worked like a slave at an oar bench, driven by an overseer no one else could see. No one, at least, besides the Psycomp which had shunted his profile to the attention of Crime Service recruiters at the same time it carved away Lacey's ability ever to rape another woman.

  His Unit Chief was waiting for him, seated on Billings' chair with her legs crossed at the knees and a glass of something sparkling in her hand. She set the drink down and smiled as the agent approached.

  "Hello, Ruby," Lacey said, sitting on the edge of his own desk. "Slumming or hiding?"

  The Crime Service Net was a huge computer complex that directed its agents with more than mechanical skill, but it could not interface them with the world. That job took humans—not hunters themselves, but humans who could understand the terrible loneliness and exhilaration of the hunters, who could cushion them against the realities of housing and economics and sex. Ruby Sutter was one of them, and she was one of the best. Tall for a woman, taller than Lacey's own meter seventy, she looked slim and fragile until one noted the muscles knotting close beneath the skin; then she looked only slim. Her hair was darker than brunette, and though her normal work did not require her to use the scanners, she wore it in the tight ringlets that would be comfortable beneath a helmet.

  "Working, Jed—got your example to follow, you know." Sutter's station was on the fourth level, not the seventeenth. "Had a citizen complaint about you, as a matter of fact, and I was asked to take care of the problem. Asked from pretty high up."

  Her face was bland. Lacey frowned in genuine surprise and asked, "Since when do the high-ups care what citizens think, for god's sake?"

  "When the citizen looks a good bet to develop a matter transmitter in the next couple years, they manage to get interested."

  Lacey slid down into his chair. "Umm. Sure. Wilhoit wasn't around, but he probably had access to scanner inputs from his own building, huh? Not really supposed to, but. . . . And I don't guess he liked what he saw, either." The squat man chuckled. "That's real freedom of information, isn't it? A murderer using a scanner to track the cops?"

  Sutter took a sip of her drink. "The Net says it's an accidental death. Ninety-nine plus probability."

  "Going to pull me off it, then?"

  "Not if you say it's murder."

  Lacey felt his muscles loosen. He had not realized until then how tense he had been. "That's good," he said, running a hand across his forehead. "I was going to nail him anyway. Though I guess you knew that already."

  "You do your job, Lacey, and leave me to mine," Sutter replied. The smile left her face and she leaned forward, careful not to touch the agent or even threaten to. "But be careful, Jed. You can't push Wilhoit the way you did Ashby. Even with your past record and everything I can do for you, it'll be your ass if you go one step beyond the law with somebody with Wilhoit's clout."

  She leaned back and grinned again. "But just between us and the data banks, that was a lovely bluff you ran on Ashby. Pretending the Psycomp had scrambled your brains and you were going to tear him open unless he talked."

  "Bluff?" Lacey repeated. "Oh. Well, he was going to talk. He was the kind who would."

  Sutter reached out a hand to brush the air inches short of Lacey's arm, a caress in intent but not in execution. Ever since the Psycomp had gotten through with him, physical contact with a woman threw Lacey into vomiting and convulsions. Sutter knew that and knew why, as she knew everything necessary to the well-being of her agents. It did not keep her from caring. "You're not going to lose control of yourself, Jed," she said. "Not over Ashby. Or anybody."

  She stood and walked away.

  Lacey was humming to himself very softly as he pulled down his scanner helmet and began running data on the victim. Silvers had spent four nondescript years driving Coeltrans delivery trucks before being picked as Wilhoit's personal chauffeur after the suicide of the previous driver. The data bank showed no reluctance to release information on the boy. Unlike the electronics magnate, Silvers was one more out of billions and his file was open to anyone with access to the computer. There was not even need to show cause.

  But the life stats were as uninteresting as they were open. So, with a careful precision that combined years of practice with a knack beyond any experience, Lacey began to dig into the scanner records which stored Silvers' whole life.

  "Death site minus 30 seconds," he ordered, using his mastoid implant to control the scanner helmet. Silvers' lounging beauty flashed up obediently, one hand on each of two quarter-circlets of railing that would soon be lethal. Lacey flicked the CS Net to attention again. "Tracer request."

  "Go ahead," the computer link said.

  "Terrence Oscar Silvers. Template as currently on screen."

  "Ready." In a microsecond the Net had analyzed Silvers as he appeared moments before death, taking into account not only externals but details of height and bone structure subject to change only by trauma or the most extensive surgery.

  "Same camera, same template—scan to death minus one week," Lacey ordered.

  Using the analysis it had made on the victim during life, the Crime Service computer ran the past week's input from the Coeltrans scanner Lacey had made his vantage point. It quickly found and marked congruent subjects. A man could have made the same check—but only if he had a week to spend. Computer review was labor saving, though in the same sense that a power drill saves labor—per hole. It does not mean that a miner at the rock face works less hard than his grandfather did, only that he cuts out more ore.

  "Two samples," the implant reported.

  "Run the latest," said Lacey.

  The scene in the scanner was visual proof of the story Ashby had told. Silvers was arriving in his blue and smoke livery, a stim stick between his gum and cheek to diffuse its alkaloids into his bloodstream. His walk missed being a swagger only by its fluidity. Wilhoit was aware of him as of nothing else in the room, but he kept his head bent down and only the tension of his hand on the desk edge was a communication.

  The chauffeur sidled between desks, watching with bored superiority as clerks tapped figures into the displays across their desktops. Some stumbled under his gaze. Once Silvers spoke to an employee, a blond boy whose bones must have been translucent to give him so ethereal an air. Lacey switched to another camera for a view of Silvers' lips, but the words were a bland question about how long the other had worked for Coeltrans. The embarrassed clerk only muttered, "Sir, a week is all," but his eyes followed Silvers until the driver left, alone, as suddenly and inexplicably as he had come.

  Lacey sent his left ring finger the message to curl. The rerouted nerve triggered his implant. "What's Silvers' home address?" he asked.

  "Suite 12, Level 3, 184 West Mangum Street."

  "Suite" sounded plush, "Level 3" sounded plush—a low walk-up but high enough to be clear of the noise and odors of the inevitable stores on the ground floor—and the street address was in the middle of a very good neighborhood indeed. "Same template, same scan fr
ame, Level 3, 184 West Mangum Street," Lacey directed.

  "Five samples."

  "Run the latest."

  By law and in practice, every room in the State of over five cubic meters was covered by the interlocked fields of three scanning cameras. The law did not regulate minimum size or occupancy for rooms, but the staggering use-tax linked to every required camera guaranteed that space—and the scanners covering it—would be efficiently used. Silvers' rent was indicated by the fact that his apartment level was planned into fifty suites when many middle-class levels would have held five times as many units in the same area. Lacey's helmet showed him a late-evening scene: Silvers entering from the lower staircase and sauntering along a serpentine corridor to his own suite. He was out of livery, wearing instead a cape and jumpsuit cut conservatively but from lustrous material that flowed through a range of colors. Because the scanners worked on infra-red in the darkness, the precise shades were doubtful; the cost of the garment was not.

  The corridors and suites were divided by double floor-to-ceiling sheets of vitril, sound-deadening but kept visually transparent by an expensive static cleaning system. Silvers palmed his lock plate, entered, and began fixing a meal in the kitchen.

  "Who's paying for this?" Lacey asked.

  The CS Net cleared its throat with a click, then said, "All charges are paid through Personnel Accounting, Coeltrans."

  "On whose request?"

  "That information is not available."

  A written or verbal order, than, not one punched directly into the corporation's accounts from a high level. Available to Lacey when he began running scanner images and questioning clerks. He didn't need the knowledge yet, and it would still be waiting for him when he did.

  Lacey swung away his helmet and rubbed his eyes. The level was almost empty and the sky beyond the windows was black. "Late," he thought, then glanced at the clock hands illuminated over the doorway and realized that instead it was early—and not all that early. He did not feel tired, only light and insubstantial and happy in a way that drugs could never leave him. There was one more matter he could clear up through the helmet while it was still dark outside.

  "Same template, same scan frame—Level 9, 304 Corcoran Street," Lacey ordered, shrouding himself with his helmet again.

  "One sample."

  "Run it."

  On the screen flashed a moving image of the anteroom of Hell. In a nation without privacy there can be few statutory crimes. This is neither altruism nor liberality, simply economics. Since every human activity was scanned and the inputs monitored by computers which would ring alerts on every instance of activity they were programmed to find unlawful, there had to be sharp limits to make actual enforcement possible by a police force of acceptable size. In earlier decades, patrolmen could be writing parking tickets within twenty feet of a mugging or rape in progress. Now no crime was ignored and, without the lubricant of ignorance which made the old system work, the statute book itself had to be streamlined into the realm of possibility by a ruthless paring of minor offenses and victimless crimes.

  To the State, no form of consensual sexual activity was a crime. Society, however, had a separate opinion.

  When poverty becomes the norm, everything is for sale somewhere; but ascetic religion becomes the only real anodyne for the masses. If present squalor is only God's furnace to purify men for posthumous glory, what matter the lack of food and energy, the endemic diseases and the evidence that all over the world Man was staggering down a slope which he was unlikely to rescale. Purity is not a physical fact but a religious state of mind.

  Level 9 was the entrance to the accommodation house, the time house, on the floor above. Clients paid for use of one of the hundreds of canvas-walled cribs, each with a single scanner unit mounted in the ceiling above it. You could not shut out the cameras, but the cameras did not care what—consensually—you did or to whom.

  In the helmet screen, on the next to the top level of the sleazy residence building, Terry Silvers stood hipshot as his date, a wizened, balding man in a suit of natural silk, paid the attendant to be allowed to climb to the cribs.

  "Cancel," Lacey said. He did not need or want to follow Silvers into the accommodation house.

  No law of the State had been broken there. If Society wished to stigmatize homosexuals as brutally as had Victorian England, if riot squads not infrequently were called to put down the spontaneous violence offered by mobs of the upright to uncovered paederasts, it was no business of Lacey's.

  No one in an accommodation house is upright.

  "Death site minus 30 seconds," Lacey ordered. Silvers' doomed, smiling face appeared with Wilhoit and the rest of the room beyond it. "Tracer request."

  "Go ahead."

  "Robert Sawney Wilhoit, template as currently on helmet screen."

  "Ready."

  "Level 9, 304 Corcoran Street. All samples in the past six months."

  "Twenty-seven samples."

  "Run the latest."

  Another night on the screen but the same guard and Silvers with the same haughty expression as he waited. This time Citizen Robert Wilhoit, inventor and executive, was paying for the crib. He had the rigid look of a man whose legs were being amputated without anesthetic. There were other customers coming down the stairs, a middle-aged man and a woman too plainly garbed to be a prostitute. They avoided looking at Wilhoit just as he did them.

  No one was upright in an accommodation house.

  "Cancel," Lacey repeated and swung the helmet away. Wilhoit had, perhaps, enough power to escape the Mob's censure, but he could not have escaped his own upbringing. A self-made man rather than an aristocrat raised to believe in the propriety of whatever he chose to do, public exposure of his homosexuality would have horrified Wilhoit as surely as it would have the clerks in his office. And he had been willing to kill to keep it . . . not secret, but unproven. The scanner image was evidence of motive for the computer. Lacey had already known it, of course, because he had a sharp memory for faces. He had remembered Wilhoit and the victim from a night some months previous when he had seen them together, leaving the accommodation house as Lacey entered it for his own private needs.

  Morning was bright in the windows and the room had begun to fill with returning agents. It remained to learn where Wilhoit was at the moment. Using the scanner helmet once more, Lacey checked the magnate's office and found him seated at his desk speaking into a face-covering hush phone.

  Lacey stood. "Ready me a car," he ordered the computer. "I'm going to visit an apartment while its owner's away."

  * * *

  The palm lock set in the clear panel of the suite's door was impossible to pick by conventional means. The flat pouch over Lacey's left hip, balancing his needle stunner, held an electronic pick that was by no means conventional. Itself a terminal to the Crime Service Net, its face was a mesh of microscopic beads that raised, lowered, and changed their conductivity under the direction of the computer. If a pattern was on file, the pick duplicated it instantly, if not, the computer ran a random search certain to open any palm lock within a minute.

  It took Lacey a little longer than that to get in, because instead of picking the lock he summoned Wilhoit's live-in house staff to admit him.

  There were two of them, both men in their forties. One wore the livery Silvers had died in, a burly, smooth-stepping man, obviously a human watchdog and obviously angry. Lacey had announced his presence by having the CS Net override every sound unit in the suite, ordering the occupants to unlock immediately or face arrest. As the door swung open the guard snarled a quick curse, but he backed off from Lacey's lifted brow and the threat in the eyes beneath it.

  The other man was the one Lacey had come to see. He had thin hair and a worn tunic whose loops and pockets held a score of scrupulously clean tools. The light reflected from the myriad plants filling the suite gave the man's pale complexion a greenish cast, and it seemed to fit. He blinked at Lacey with the same mild interest that he might have display
ed toward a cafeteria server.

  "You're Charles Dornier, Citizen Wilhoit's gardener?" Lacey asked, as an opening rather than because the matter was in doubt.

  "Why yes, do you have a delivery for us?" the wispy man responded.

  Lacey grinned with something close to humor. "Not exactly," he said. "I'd like to see Citizen Wilhoit's plants, but I'm a Crime Service agent." He turned back to the guard. "You can wait outside in the hall," he said. "And I mean wait. Take three steps away from the door and there'll be a Red Team on you."

  Dornier had ignored the words, ignored also the glowering and slammed door with which his companion exited. "It's really a splendid collection," he was saying, "and though I must admit it lacks a certain . . . focus, I suppose, I think the variety makes it far more interesting. Don't you?"

  Lacey had already found what interested him. Amid the waist-high rows of foliage were six geraniums with gray boxes like the one in the Coeltrans Building clipped to them. "What're these?" he asked.

  Dornier knelt beside Lacey, warming with pride. He traced a circuit with his index finger. "It was my own idea," he said, "but Robert has gotten very deep in it himself and that's—well, he's a very brilliant man, you know, very brilliant. I've attached electrodes to different portions of the same plant to measure the resistance across the current path. That depends on the number of ions in the veins and the volume of fluid—and that can depend on outside stimuli, including thoughts the plant's owner directs at it."

  "Oh, god have mercy!" Lacey spat. It had been a rough search already and he didn't need a load of silly dreck to fuzz the edges further. "You're telling me that plants think?"

  "No, I'm not telling you that, Citizen, and you're not listening to what I am saying," Dornier snapped back. The gardener's eyes flashed with anger and an affronted dignity that Lacey could appreciate. He suddenly realized that there was a core of ability in Dornier as real as that within him—that there had to be, or Wilhoit would never have hired him in so personal a capacity.