The voice of the karill was low, and Ara couldn’t make out what it was saying. Ara wondered why Iris called up a Terran forest instead of the talltrees on Bellerophon. Perhaps she had been born on Earth or had spent time there.
Temm and the karill finished their business, and the karill vanished. Ara knew that once in the solid world it would doubtless begin transcribing their session, transferring letters, documents, financial accounts, diplomatic communiques, and other information into electronic or even hard copy. That was the primary function of the Silent, keeping the lines of communication open between planets and systems separated by thousands of light years and weeks of travel. All Children of Irfan were licensed and bonded, with oaths of secrecy not to reveal or share information that passed through their minds and hands. Temm would soon forget what she had seen, in any case. Short-term memory training was an essential part of the Children’s education program, including the "forget" reflex which kept transmitted information out of long-term memory.
No, Ara thought with a small shock. Iris will never be able to remember or forget anything again.
The ghostly Iris Temm stretched, stood, and glanced contentedly around her forest. Ara was about to move a bit closer when she felt a ripple in the Dream, like a distortion in the air, and Ara recognized Inspector Tan’s presence, though the other woman hadn’t created a Dream body for herself. The presence requested permission to approach.
"It’s ready, Inspector," Ara said. "Just come slowly. You’ll disrupt everything if you appear too fast."
Tan faded into existence. The forest bent and rippled around her until she got her bearings and was able to insert her mind into the scene around her without forcing her own expectations on it and thereby destroying it. She looked around the forest with a sharp, practiced eye.
"Temm’s over there. She just finished work," Ara said.
"I’m impressed at the level of detail," Tan said, and her voice was deep and mellow, like a fine wine.
"Thank you," Ara said, a bit mystified. Although Tan’s lips moved and Ara heard the words, Ara knew that it was all illusion created by her own subconscious. In the Dream, communication consisted of concepts transferred directly from mind to mind. Ara’s mind, however, expected sound and language, so it provided them for her. Thought became reality in the Dream. Apparently Tan’s conception of her own voice was different from reality.
At that moment the light level dropped, as if the sun had leaped to the horizon. The leaves lost their bright colors and fell to the ground, leaving behind black, skeletal branches. A cold breeze stirred the papery leaves with a hiss and a rustle. Dread stole over Ara like a cold hand. Temm had noticed the change as well. Confused, Iris remained still, apparently concentrating in an attempt to change the landscape back. It didn’t work.
"Who’s there?" Iris called in a frightened voice. "What are you doing to my turf?"
Another gust of air whirled the leaves around in a tiny brown tornado. From behind a tree stepped a man. His back was to Ara and Tan, and all she could see was that he was tall, with a broad, strong build. He wore loose black trousers and a dark shirt. A wide-brimmed black hat covered his hair. Like the rest of the scene, he was translucent. Temm made a little squeak and stepped back.
Run, girl! Ara thought, even though she knew how it had to end. Get out of the Dream!
"Darling," the man said. "I’m on my way. I’m coming for you."
This didn’t seem to be what Iris Temm had been expecting him to say. "Coming for me?" she echoed, puzzled. "What do you mean? Who are you?"
"I love you, you know. You’ve always known." He took another step toward her. "We’re going to make love in the flowers. The red ones."
Tan grabbed Ara’s arm. "Let’s move to the other side," she hissed. "Maybe we can see his face."
"You don’t have to whisper," Ara told her. "They can’t hear us. They aren’t really here." But she closed her eyes and gathered her concentration. A Silent’s relative position in the Dream was based solely on where she expected to be. Right now Ara was here and she wanted to be there. On the count of three, there would be here. One. two …three.
There was a slight wrench and Ara opened her eyes. She was standing less than two meters behind Temm. Inspector Tan stood with her. Distortions rippled through the forest, Temm, and the man, as if the scene were reflected in a pool and someone had thrown a pebble. The conversation between Temm and the man wavered and swooped unintelligibly. Ara cursed herself for not realizing this would happen.
"Hold still," she ordered Tan. "It’ll clear sooner if you don’t move."
After a moment, the scene settled. The man’s features, however, were shrouded in the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat.
"— me alone," Temm was saying. "I don’t want you near me."
The man lunged for her. Temm gave a scream and ran. Ara and Tan turned as one to follow her. Then both of them halted and stared. The bare trees came to life. They lashed downward like stiff snakes, trapping Iris Temm in a mesh of branches and bark. The wind rose and howled like a cold living thing. Temm struggled and tore at the branches but she couldn’t get free. Ara’s stomach clenched in fear and she had to remind herself that this was nothing more than a recording, that the trees wouldn’t-couldn’t-attack her. Temm’s scream wailed on the wind as the man in the wide-brimmed hat drew close to her.
"You bitch!" he screeched, and smashed her across the face. She screamed again, and Ara noticed the branches had wrapped around her shins and forearms. "I want the flowers! Pretty flowers!"
The branches stiffened and Temm screamed again. Ara realized tears were running down her face. She wanted to run, leave the Dream, or even look away, but she found she couldn’t. Inspector Tan’s face remained completely impassive. Iris Temm’s scream went on and on, mingling with the wind and the growls of the dark man.
"I don’t want to do this," he cried to the skies. "Don’t make me do this!"
The cold air sliced through Ara’s clothes and made the tears on her face feel like rivers of ice. Temm screamed one last time like a banshee howl. With a horrible sound that Ara knew she would never forget, the branches tore the limbs from Iris Temm’s body.
The wind stopped. The branches snapped back upward with bony rattle, leaving the bloody pieces of Temm’s body behind. As Ara stared in horror, the dark man knelt beside the remains.
"Why did you make me do that?" he said in a calm, chill voice. "You make me do it every time. Every goddamned time."
He reached down and came up with a small, pink object. Ara’s gorge rose when she realized it was one of Temm’s fingers. A bit of yellow-gray bone poked out of the torn end. Temm’s sightless eyes gazed up at the black branches above them. Using the bloody end of the finger like a paintbrush, the man wrote something on Temm’s forehead.
Tan leaped forward to get a look. Ara stood frozen where she was. The man flung the finger away and put his hands over his face beneath the hat. Then he vanished like a burst soap bubble. A split-second later, so did the ghostly forest and the body of Iris Temm. Ara stood on the featureless plain alone with Tan. Whispers fluttered on the empty air all around them. It was as if the entire thing had never happened.
"Did …did you see what he wrote?" Ara asked finally. Her throat was dry and she wanted a drink with more than just water in it.
"Yes." Tan’s rich voice was flat. "It’s worse than I thought."
"Why? What did he write."
Tan looked at her. "The number twelve."
Grandfather Melthine ran a hand through his silvery hair as Ara finished the story. They were in his study, a busy-looking office lined with bookdisks and comfortable chairs. Holographic models of spaceships floated just below the ceiling. Outside, the sun was setting, and purple shadows gathered among the talltree branches. The office was a bit stuffy-Melthine preferred to keep the windows shut. Ara occupied a deep armchair, and an empty glass sat on a table at her elbow. Her hands had finally stopped shaking. Inspector Tan sat rigid in
another chair while her partner Linus Gray leaned against one wall. He was a tall, spare man, with ash-blond hair that was receding from a high forehead. Around his neck he wore a medallion of worked silver instead of plain gold, a symbol of his position as Inspector with the Guardians of Irfan. Tan, presumably, wore hers underneath her shirt.
"This opens up a great many questions," Melthine said at last. "We need to discuss them."
"You and Mother Ara are both experts in Dream theory," Gray said. "Whatever information you can give us will help."
"The number twelve is significant," Tan said, voice raspy again. "Obviously."
"You think Iris was his twelfth victim?" Ara asked.
Tan shrugged. "Could be. Or he might write the number twelve on all his victims. No way to know yet. If we assume-" her emphasis on that word made it clear what she thought of the idea "-that the number twelve means he’s killed eleven other people, and if we assume he killed the other two finger victims, that would mean there are nine other corpses we don’t know about yet. I’ve already checked the databases. In the entire recorded history we have of Bellerophon, there isn’t a single incident in which a murder victim turned up with someone else’s finger sewn on."
She sat back in her chair, as if exhausted by the long speech.
"Which means the killer came to us from another planet," Melthine said.
"No," Tan groused. "It only means we’ve made a lot of assumptions. He might be a native and he hid the other bodies. Or he dropped them off a balcony, fed the dinosaurs. But it looks like we need to operate on the theory that the same person killed all three women and that he’s going to do it again."
"I’m not Silent," Gray said, "and I’m nowhere near an expert in Dream theory, but doesn’t a Silent’s landscape disappear when they leave the Dream or if they die while in it? Temm-and her forest-should have disappeared the moment she died. Why did her Dream body hang around after this hat guy killed her?"
Ara picked up the glass. She could still smell the scotch. "I imagine it did vanish. But he recreated her body and her turf long enough to …do what he did. That scares the hell out of me."
"Why?" Gray said intently.
"Because he did it without a noticeable break in the scenery. There should have been a flicker or something between the time Iris’s Dream ended and he took it over. There wasn’t. That means he’s highly skilled in the Dream, in addition to being frighteningly powerful."
"Powerful because he could kill her, you mean?" Gray said. "There’ve been other Dream murders over the centuries, and in all cases the killer had to be more powerful than the victim."
"It’s more than just the amount of power." Ara set the glass back down and turned her gaze to the darkening window. "First, he was able to wrench control of her own turf away from her and change it. That means his mind was stronger than Iris’s. Second, he was able to disrupt her concentration enough that she couldn’t leave the Dream to escape. That isn’t easy to do because every Silent knows that the Dream is just that-a dream. You can wake up whenever you want. He scared Iris so much that she forgot this fact. Third, he was powerful enough to convince Iris’s mind that she was being torn limb from limb. The human survival instinct is very strong, Inspector. It takes a lot of power to convince someone that they’re dead. This guy is both potent and skilled, and the idea that I myself might run across him in the Dream makes me shake."
"What’s the official cause of death?" Melthine asked.
"Mental trauma," Gray said. "The patterns of bruises on Temm’s body are consistent with being wrapped up and partially crushed by something with an irregular surface, such as a tree branch. Her body created the bruises in psychosomatic response to what happened to her mind in the Dream. Being torn to pieces, however, is more than your average human brain can pull off, so to speak."
Tan pursed her lips. "We need to discuss the finger angle." When the others didn’t respond, she continued. "Medical examiner confirmed that Temm’s finger was severed and replaced post mortem. Less than an hour after Temm died, in fact. Means that the killer murdered her in the Dream, came into her house afterward, cut the finger off, sewed Wren Hamil’s finger on, and left. We’ve interviewed the neighbors. None of them saw anyone."
"What about her boyfriend?" Melthine said. "Is he a suspect? The neighbors wouldn’t think anything of him going inside."
Linus Gray shook his head. "He’s not Silent. Genetic scan confirms. He couldn’t kill anyone in the Dream. And he has an iron-clad alibi for the time before and after she died. He’s a monorail engineer and he was driving one all day. Plenty of witnesses."
"He kills them," Tan mused aloud, "tears off a finger in the Dream, writes a number on their foreheads. Then he goes to their house, cuts a finger off, replaces it with a finger from the last victim."
"Whose finger was sewn onto the first victim-Prinna Meg?" Ara asked. "Do you know?"
"The finger’s DNA isn’t in any computer records," Gray said. "All we know is that the thing came from a woman and she was Silent."
"So maybe the killer does come from off planet," Ara postulated. "The killer brought the finger with him from somewhere else."
"That would seem to follow," Gray agreed.
"What do all the victims have in common?" Tan said. "That might give us a clue, too."
"They’re all women," Gray said, ticking his fingers. "They’re all Silent, and they’re all Children of Irfan."
"Wren Hamil, the second victim, was a student," Melthine pointed out. "Not a full Child."
"But they’re all associated with the Children in some way," Gray said. "They were all between eighteen and forty. Hair and eye color are all different. So are height and weight. None of them knew each other as far as we’ve been able to tell. We’ll have to do a deeper comparison just to be sure, but I’m not optimistic."
"Did the forensics team find any clues at Iris’s house?" Melthine asked.
"Not yet," Gray replied. "But it doesn’t look good either. No fingerprints, no blood or other body fluids except the victim’s. We’re looking into fibers, but since there wasn’t a struggle where any would get rubbed off, we aren’t hopeful."
"Why does he do it?" Ara blurted.
Tan shrugged again. "Been doing some reading, but I’m not an expert on serial killers. Maybe he hates Silent women, or just the Children. Hope we can figure it out. It’ll bring us one step closer to catching him." Her face hardened. "We will catch him."
They discussed the case further, but brought nothing new to light. Ara walked home, jumping at every shadow and every fluttering leaf. She regretted passing up Tan and Gray’s offer of an escort. The warm summer breeze only reminded her of the cold one in the Dream, and it seemed like she could hear Iris Temm’s final heart-rending scream in the far distance. Once, a dinosaur roared below her and she nearly leaped off the walkway in panic.
When Ara got home, the house was dark. Fear clutched at her and she ran inside. Ben’s door was shut. Shakily, Ara opened it and peered inside. Ben lay face-up on his bed in a puddle of silver moonlight. The sheets were tangled around him, leaving his bed as messy as the rest of the room. His skin looked like marble, and she saw with relief the gentle rise and fall of his breathing.
She almost ran into the room to gather him close to her but stopped herself. Ben wouldn’t appreciate being woken up, and the logical part of her knew the killer wouldn’t come for him. He was male and not-
— not Silent.
Ara looked at her son for a long time, then gently closed the door and went to bed.
CHAPTER SIX
You can’t buy friends. You can only shop for them.
— Yeoman Daniel Vik
Kendi Weaver woke with a small start and wondered where he was. The walls and ceiling were white plaster and they smelled of fresh paint. There were no high beams above him, and his pillow wasn’t filled with-
Memory returned in a rush. Mother Ara. Bellerophon. The monastery. His room.
His room. Kendi
had never had his own room, not in the tiny apartment back in Sydney and certainly not on Mistress Blanc’s farm. He sat up. His window faced east, and the sky outside, barely visible between the tree branches, was just beginning to lighten. The cool morning air was scented with damp summer leaves and carried only a fraction of the breath-stopping humidity he had hated back on the farm.
Kendi stretched luxuriously, and his skin slid over smooth white sheets instead of a rough pallet cover. The room was, he supposed, fairly small by most standards, barely five meters by three. It contained only a bed, night stand, desk, chair, and wardrobe. The white walls were bare except for a darker patch that would become a vid-screen. A set of narrow French doors next to the window lead out onto a shared balcony. Birds began hesitant morning song outside.
Kendi had arrived in the room fairly late last night. The paperwork he’d had to fill out at the spaceport had lasted quite a while, and Mother Ara had left the little group in the care of a man named Brother Manny with the explanation that she wanted to get home and see her son. A hasty supper and a whirlwind monorail ride to the dormitory had followed. It had been too dark to see much of his new home, and the exhausted Kendi had fallen almost instantly asleep. A glance at the clock set into the vid-screen told him he had only slept about five hours, but three years of waking at dawn for work were hard to shake. He shoved aside the covers and stood up to stretch. His wrist and ankle felt gloriously bare. Time to get dressed.
The only thing Misstr-that is, Giselle Blanc had permitted him to take was the knee-length white tunic she had sold him in. Brother Manny, however, had scrounged up a spare shirt, shorts, and sandals. Kendi pulled them on and trotted up the hall to the community bathroom, which sported individual sink and shower stalls. Not as luxurious as the bathroom he had briefly shared with Pup, but a far cry above the barrack-like facilities of the slave barn, especially since he didn’t have to rush through his shower. It did take him a moment to figure out that the box set into the wall was a sonic cleanser that would launder his clothes. Afterward, he went back to his room. The sun had just cleared the horizon, but it was high summer and the hour was therefore still very early. Kendi stood next to the bed and realized he had no idea what to do next. His stomach rumbled.
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