Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “Including refusing the advances of a man who wasn’t her husband?”

  “Talk to Misha Block, damn it! If you’re such a magician at distinguishing between our illusions and our squalid realities, he’ll topple to your magic touch in a goddamn nanosecond!”

  “I’d rather talk to Corcoran Skolits.”

  “Why?” Toombs blurted, profoundly exasperated.

  **It would be better not to tell him,** Chaish cautioned me.

  Heeding this advice, I met Toombs’s question with one of my own: “Isn’t it true that even if Loraine Block intercepted the airlock alarms, the actual functioning of the airlocks would have registered in the memory circuits of the computer?”

  “It would have, certainly—but Loraine, in turn, is smart enough to know that and to have erased the memories.”

  “But a good computer officer could either locate the alarm memory or tell if anyone had recently cleared the circuitry where those memories are stored?”

  “Loraine Block,” said Toombs wearily, “is a good computer officer, but she’s under house arrest, and she’s not likely to incriminate herself and her husband by untooling her own cover-ups for us.”

  “Then we’ll send to the Baidarka for Françoise Loizos, our own computer officer,” I told him, growing angry. “Would you have Verschuur, your communications man, ask Captain Sang to get her over here? She might as well send over our cargo master, too, so that he can supervise the loading of the ore.” I turned away.

  “Where are you going?” Toombs demanded.

  “To visit Skolits. I assume he’s back in the miners’ recuperation facility near the main airlock.” I waved a hand at the new stationmaster. “Don’t bother to get up. Chaish and I can find it.”

  “Listen—” Toombs said, rising.

  I turned back, my anger escaping me in a kind of hiss. “Listen, yourself. Whether from laziness or duplicity you’re sitting on a pet hypothesis. So tell me something, Toombs: Did you ever have anyone check out the pressure suits in the airlock near the observatory?”

  “No,” he confessed, nonplused.

  “Then why the hell don’t you do that?”

  Chaish and I exited the cluttered office. Side by side, we stalked down the dove-gray and chlorine-green corridor of Lupozny Station, a skategrace caught out in a realm of ice at least as dark as the one through which we had piloted the Baidarka.

  Corcoran Skolits turned out to be a man of fifty or so, as leathery-skinned as a baked Newhome pear. When Chaish and I entered the miners’ recuperation facility, he was sprawled shirtless across an air-divan, engrossed in an ancient vid program. Men in long-billed caps and striped pantaloons were standing half-crouched on a kelly-green field. Occasionally they lunged after a ball struck into the field by another such man wielding a bottle-shaped club.

  Without looking up at us Skolits said, “They told me I couldn’t leave until you’d talked to me.”

  “Who did?”

  “Toombs, I guess. Synnöva was the one who relayed word.”

  Skolits neither looked at us nor invited us to sit down; he continued to watch the arcane goings-on of his vid program.

  “They have a hideous crop of vids in this place,” he finally said. “Lupozny bought them wholesale from a supplier working out of the Pollux backwater. ‘Baseball,’ this one says on the filing slip. It’s really pretty amusing if you let yourself get into the play.”

  A group of people on benches behind a retaining wall suddenly began spilling onto the field where the men in pantaloons and caps were standing. One player bludgeoned an amok-running interloper to the grass with an elongated and pincerlike piece of leather.

  “This part doesn’t seem to have anything to do with scoring points,” Skolits declared. “I turned down the accompanying sound because the blather of the overvoice was truly incomprehensible.”

  I interposed myself between the air-divan and the screen. Skolits gave me a pained look, then glanced sidelong at Chaish—whose presence he had not detected until now. Pulling himself up, he turned almost respectfully toward the chode, his baked-brown face perceptibly fading a tone. I turned off the vid program. Now a solitary fluorescent lit the miners’ recuperation room, and Skolits struggled to his feet. He was wearing slippers and a pair of netherjohns with a nylon draw cord.

  “You’re a skategrace,” he said, surprised but not dumfounded. “What are my chances of riding back to Greater Bethlehem with you aboard the Baidarka?”

  “When does your contract with Lupozny’s company expire?”

  “In about two and a half standard months.”

  “Then you’re probably stuck here at least until then. Were you hoping your contract expired with Lupozny?”

  Stocky and muscular, going to flab around the middle, Skolits scuffed off a few steps in his lightweight slippers. “I knew better,” he said doubtfully, plunging his hands into the seat pockets of his netherjohns. “I didn’t see any harm in asking, though.”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  “Crazy about it. This is my tenth—approaching my eleventh—year. I’ve been here since the beginning, nearly.”

  “And you’re tired?” I prompted him.

  Skolits looked at Chaish. “Bone-tired. Deep-gut-tired.” Then he smiled, a wide, glittering, disarming smile. “But two and a half months is a pretty swift sprinkle. I can stand it. It’ll go by trippety-trip. And if the Baidarka doesn’t carry me out of here, some other skater will. With some other skategrace—probably a more experienced one.”

  I stammered the beginnings of another question.

  “I can spot novices almost immediately,” Skolits interrupted. “You two don’t have the attunement of a long-standing skategrace, even with all your simulator training. You’re still just getting to know each other outside Honeymoon Instruction.” He pointed a stubby finger at me. “Am I right?”

  “This was our first interstellar crossing,” I admitted.

  “Another infallible way to tell,” Skolits continued relentlessly, “is the eyes of the human dyadmate.”

  “Skolits, we’d like to ask—” I was hoping to deflect him from his path. A vain hope.

  “And yours are still unclouded, just as clear and pretty as an infant’s. You’re not any puppy, either.”

  “No, I’m not.” I walked away, toward the lounge’s ample shower facility, its tiled walls and floors gleaming a muted and unholy maroon, then rounded on Skolits and changed the subject: “Did you like Frederick Lupozny?”

  “Like him? Hell, no. The last person who liked Lupozny was his mother, and I wouldn’t absolutely swear to that.”

  “Loraine Block says you’ve worked in the Anless system quite some time and you say since the beginning. How long, exactly?”

  “Soon after Lupozny Station was built and operations began. When my latest two-and-a-half-year contract expires, though, I’ll have been with the Lupozny enterprise a decade. Four contracts. No one else even approaches that record, Mr. Detchemendy.”

  “Ten years,” I remarked. “Considering your opinion of Lupozny, what induced you to stick it out for so long?”

  Skolits tugged sheepishly at his lower lip. “To tell you the truth, when I first came out here I was persona non grata with Ecumos mercantile authorities. Lupozny took me on when no one else would give me a job. I’d talked to him about a position when he was visiting his factory liaison on Greater Bethlehem, and he brought me back to Anless with him aboard the E.C.S. Challenger. His hiring me was contingent on my accepting a two-and-a-half-year initial contract. Once I got to work, though, I found I liked it fine—especially since a miner wasn’t expected, or even permitted, to associate much with the Boss Man. That’s why I kept re-upping—that and the pay.”

  “What first got you in trouble with Ecumos authorities?”

  “Hey,” Skolits said, waving his hand in annoyance. “That’s prehistoric gossip. I don’t even like to talk about it.”

  “I’d feel better if you told me.”
/>   “Sure you would.” Skolits glanced nervously after Chaish, who had just stepped over the threshold of the shower room and disappeared among the gaudy maroon tiles. “Let’s just say I wooleyed an Ecumos cargo master and got away with half a shipment of natural silk from Lareina II. The affair was more complicated than that, but the details don’t matter. In the end, I was apprehended peddling these exotic dry goods to the go-between of a successful clothier in Bethlehem’s southern capital. Justice was swift. After lockup and rehab, Corcoran Skolits—his debt supposedly paid, mind you—couldn’t pick up iron filings with an electromagnet. No one wanted my services.”

  “Except the Greater Bethlehem representative of the Lupozny Asteroid Mining Concern, I take it.”

  “Yeah. That was Mr. Lupozny himself. I’ve never liked the exploitive bastard, but it’s impossible not to be a little grateful for what he did.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Skolits laughed and shook his head. “Why the hell would I do that? I’ve got nearly ten years’ money in reserve, and soon I’ll be going home, back to Bethlehem. A man in my position would be an idiot to risk another lockup and rehab just because his boss had the personality of a tyrannosaurus.”

  I followed Chaish toward the shower room, peripherally aware that Skolits was tagging along. “Then who aboard this station had the best motive for killing Lupozny?”

  “You’ve got me, Mr. Detchemendy. I kept my nose out of the hair-pullings and petty scandals aboard this floating tin can. Sooner or later, though, Lupozny cheated, hurt, or humiliated just about anybody he had dealings with.”

  Skolits enlarged upon his accusation against the dead stationmaster. He explained that when Lupozny had first opened up the Anless 32 system, after visiting it firsthand aboard the Ecumos survey ship, he had hoped to get “robber-baron rich” mining The Rocks and shipping the ore back to the refineries and mills on Greater Bethlehem. He and his two partners had formed a co-op that they believed would prosper because of the relative ease with which heavy ore can be lifted away from the surface of an asteroid and, of course, because of the sheer abundance in the Anless system of these orbiting rocks. Unfortunately, many of the asteroids proved to be “dry cows,” great tumbling cinders of no real economic promise. Although Lupozny’s visions of robber-baron wealth were blurred by this discovery, he capitalized on the circumstance by buying out one of his partners.

  “What happened to the other partner?” I asked. Chaish was nowhere in sight, but across the shower room was another tiled threshold, another room.

  “Almost a year later, just before I took my problems to Lupozny on Bethlehem, the second partner had a bad accident prospecting a real ‘dairy herd’—you know, ore-rich rock—in the innermost asteroid belt. He would have died if someone hadn’t been with him. As it was, he lost his right leg and completely sickened on everything connected with Anless 32. Sold out to Lupozny as cheaply as the first fellow had, even though he’d seen a flash of promise in close. Went home to Earth for regeneration therapy. That’s all he got out of his association with Lupozny—just enough to foot his refooting and maybe a bit extra for his initial investment.”

  “You proposing him as a suspect?”

  Skolits laughed again. We were walking through the shower room, and his laughter reverberated eerily from the tiles.

  I halted and faced the miner. “What about Misha and Loraine Block? You think they conspired to kill Lupozny?”

  “It’s possible, I guess. But how the hell should I know?”

  Phosphenes formed in my field of vision: **Come in here, Raymond. There’s something you should see.**

  “That’s a utility and laundry closet,” Skolits said, apparently deducing from my expression that Chaish had just sent me a message. “We clean our suits in there, rack our helmets and air-recycling equipment—not much to look at, I’m afraid.”

  I stepped over the closet’s tile threshold, and Skolits crowded into the opening behind me. Chaish was running an iridescent finger down the flank of the spacesuit hung from a detachable bar spanning the upper rear of the room. The arms, thighs, and chest of the suit all had pockets with adhesive fasteners. Skolits’s helmet sat on a shelf above the bar, blank-faced and imposing. Air-recycling equipment dangled from a hook to the left of the empty suit.

  **It’s damp, Raymond, inside and out—as if its owner has only recently hosed it down.**

  I reached for the suit. “You do your own washing, Mr. Skolits?”

  “Of course I do. We all do. Nobody else is going to do it for us. Have you ever seen one of these things after a miner’s just come in from The Rocks? They’re coated with dust, and if you don’t get the stuff off, it can work its way through your suit and leave you wide open for a hematic boil-off the next time you clear an airlock. That’s all the incentive I need to do my own washing.”

  “Where’s your vacuum-suit underskin?”

  “The lining garment? It stunk, Mr. Detchemendy. I’d been wearing it a long time and working hard. So I put it in the waste-conversion hopper in the lounge. That’s also standard procedure.”

  **Many miners use an airbrush to clean their suits,** Chaish told me. **Of course, that’s only suitable for grime on the outside.**

  I tried to disguise the fact that Chaish had just communicated with me. “I’m sure it is,” I said, responding to Skolits’s last remark. “Let’s go back to the lounge.” I led the miner and my dyadmate through the shower room and into the rest-and-recreation area. Because Chaish was slower than Skolits, however, he kept looking back to see what was delaying her. When at length she joined us, the miner relaxed perceptibly.

  “What brought you in to Lupozny Station at this precise time?” I asked Skolits, who had thrown himself onto the divan again.

  “Fatigue. Simple fatigue.”

  “Did you have a full load of ore in your mining craft’s tender?”

  “No.” Skolits rubbed his face with both hands. “It was more like half a load, really.”

  “How did Lupozny feel about miners coming in with less than a full load, especially here?”

  “He disapproved heartily. But I was worn out, you understand, and it was either here or the fetch station. Here was closer.”

  “You seem to be all right now. Have you slept?”

  “Slept? With everything that’s happened since I came in?”

  “You went with Toombs and Helmuth to see why Lupozny couldn’t be roused?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “What did you do—yourself, I mean—when you discovered the body?”

  “I leaned over to see if he was really dead. He certainly seemed to be, blood as thick as jelly on the floor. I didn’t touch the bastard, though.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Toombs eventually nudged him over a bit, to see the wound. Synnçva hung back, and after looking at Lupozny …”

  “What?” I urged him.

  “Well, I guess I hung back, too. That’s really all there was to it. Afterwards we waited for the Baidarka to arrive, me in here and the others in their places.”

  I was out of questions, and Skolits was obviously ready for us to go. Suddenly, though, he smiled winningly and jabbed a forefinger at the vid player opposite the air-divan.

  “How about turning that back on for me? I think I’m on the verge of figuring out that game.”

  Chaish moved glidingly to the electronic box and touched it to life. The men in duck-billed caps and striped pantaloons were still watching members of their former audience cavort and caper on their playing field. The entire scene was so removed from the insular realities of Lupozny Station that I stared at it as intently as did Skolits.

  **Come on, Raymond.**

  The bright violet strips of Chaish’s respiration ribbons fluttered silently. They turned my attention away from the videoplayer, and I sheepishly followed my dyadmate out of the miners’ recuperation facility.

  Back in the control center we found Sinclair Toombs with the remaind
er of the station’s other personnel, excepting only the Blocks. Hans Verschuur, Daphne Kaunas, and Synnöva sat languidly at their cubbyholes in the hub. Françoise Loizos and Krishna Rai had not yet come over from the Baidarka, although Verschuur acknowledged that he had sent for them and they were probably on their way. It was a glum little gathering we confronted, Chaish and I.

  “What did you find out from Skolits?” asked Toombs, perched on the edge of one of the hub’s metal and plastic consoles.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  **That he is the murderer,** Chaish interjected.

  But of course I was the only one who registered this accusation. Puzzled and surprised, I turned to my dyadmate. The chode, who do not kill their own kind, usually enter into the emotional affairs of humanity solely within the framework of the skategrace relationship, which is so special that only a minute fraction of their number ever become even vaguely familiar with the human mind. Of course, the same is true of human relationships with the chode. That we do not yet refrain from killing one another must strike them—if even a rough translation of their attitude is possible—as symptomatic of a species-wide malaise. Still, I was shocked that Chaish had singled out Skolits as the murderer on the basis of what had seemed to me an inconclusive interview. Further, her message to me pulsated with … well, anger, outrage, and a host of other negative emotions, all of them disproportionate to her personal stake in the death of an opportunist and bully like Frederick Lupozny.

  “What makes you think that?” I asked her, undoubtedly bewildering the others in the control center. “The damp spacesuit?”

  **In part, yes.**

  “But that doesn’t convict him, Chaish. There seems to be no way he could have got from the recuperation area to Lupozny’s room.”

  **A lifeboat near the main airlock gave him an exit from the station. Another in the bay just off Lupozny’s quarters provided a means of reentry. There’s no alarm circuit to tell when anyone enters or exits a lifeboat.**

  “Chaish, Mr. Toombs has already told us that none of the lifeboats attached to the station is depressurized. No one could have entered the stationmaster’s room through a fully pressurized remora craft.” I turned to Sinclair Toombs. “Chaish thinks Skolits killed Lupozny.”