Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Synnöva Helmuth was the first to react. “Corcoran? He’s a little queer from spending so much time among The Rocks, but he’s not a murderer. His rudeness comes from not being around other people very much.”

  “Is Misha Block a murderer?” I asked her. “Is Loraine Block a murderer’s accomplice?”

  The assay officer glanced at Toombs. “No,” she said, with reasonable firmness. “I’ve never believed that, either.”

  “You still haven’t talked to Block himself,” Toombs reminded me.

  “I don’t really expect his story to be any different from his wife’s. Did you check out the suits in the observatory airlock?”

  “I did.” Toombs glanced away—up the open corridor toward both his office and the observatory. “None of them is blood-drenched inside, if that jibes with your own interpretation of events.”

  “I don’t have an interpretation, Mr. Toombs. Are any of them damp?”

  “Damp? Of course not.”

  “Skolits’s was. It still is. He washed it down not too long ago.”

  “That’s not unusual for a miner. They come in grime-coated.” But his expression altered, as if a long-legged doubt about the Blocks’ culpability was crawling across his conscience. “That’s what the utility closet is for, cleaning dusty gear.”

  “Chaish says it’s just as common to dislodge the grime with an airbrush as with a spray of water. Is that true?”

  “Maybe. Both methods are employed. That’s why the utility room is just off the shower.”

  “But an airbrush wouldn’t be your first choice if you’d gotten blood in your suit lining and on your undergarment, too. You’d want to wash away the dried material. Some of the blood on the outside would boil away from lack of pressure, of course—but whichever portions had frozen would require more than an airbrush to dislodge, and Skolits conveniently disposed of his underskin. As per custom, of course.”

  Toombs took aim at the long-legged doubt making furry footprints on his peace of mind: “But Skolits couldn’t have got down there, and the Blocks have a motive for conspiring to kill Lupozny!”

  “And you have a motive for wanting to believe it’s them who did it,” Synnöva Helmuth said, her voice quavering.

  Before Toombs could respond, Verschuur swiveled around to the communications console and raised his right hand for silence.

  “Your friends are coming in,” he told me softly. “I’m letting them into the spaceboat hangar.” He nodded at Daphne Kaunas, the dark-skinned life-systems officer, and she switched on the pumps whose function was to empty the main airlock of air. A bell-like alarm sounded in the console and in the corridors of Lupozny Station, a monstrous death rattle. No one would stumble inadvertently into the main airlock while that rattle was shaking the station—a period of four or five minutes, although, because of the persistent alarm, it seemed much longer. Finally the noise ceased, to be replaced as warning by a general dimming of the station’s lights and a flickering of red fluorescents in the corridors. “They’re in,” Verschuur said, and he again nodded at Kaunas, who activated a second set of pumps to repressurize the hangar in the main airlock. This process took another four or five minutes.

  “Somebody ought to go down there to meet them,” Synnöva Helmuth said.

  Toombs glared at her. “Go on, then. Bring them back with you.” He jumped down from the console and turned toward Chaish. “What motive did Corcoran Skolits have? Presuming of course that he could outwit the airlock alarms, the anomalies of lifeboat pressurization, and every other damn obstacle we’ve already pointed out to you.”

  **Raymond,** Chaish hailed me, ignoring Toombs, **come into the corridor with me for a moment.**

  Without a word to the new stationmaster or anyone else, I followed my dyadmate into the corridor leading to Lupozny’s quarters. Helmuth brushed past us on her way down the contiguous passage to the spaceboat hangar to greet Loizos and Rai. We watched her go.

  Then Chaish put her wide-scaled back to the three human beings still occupying the control center. In the lee of her sheltering bulk Chaish opened her right hand and showed me an object that seemed to shimmer and dance like a three-dimensional phosphene. On closer inspection I saw that it was the pendant of a necklace, but so radiant and amorphous a pendant that I couldn’t really tell either its color or its shape. First it was a kind of blood-black star, then an emerald crescent, then an utterly transparent disk—so many things in turn that I raised my eyes and waited for a cogent explanation. Chaish closed her satiny fingers around the object.

  “What is it?” I asked, sotto voce.

  **The forty-ninth character,** Chaish replied. **Or, rather, a chode artifact representing that character. A piece of Essencialist jewelry for those among devotees of the sect who have achieved to the highest spiritual status.**

  Stymied by this “explanation,” I shook my head.

  **I am not of the Essencialist creed, Raymond. If I were, I would not have shown this to you. The forty-ninth character is the ineffable phosphene. It is not for mere human beings to look upon. Nor should chode infidels like myself haul about a replica of this phosphene as if it were nothing but a grimy piece of currency. Simply holding it, Raymond, I defile both the character and myself. Or so our Essencialists believe.**

  “Where did you get it, Chaish?”

  **It was in one of the pockets of Corcoran Skolits’s spacesuit, and it marks him indelibly as the stationmaster’s murderer.**

  “Why? And where would Skolits lay his hands on a necklace like that?”

  Chaish handed me the artifact representing the ineffable phosphene. **Conceal it, Raymond. I don’t wish to carry it any longer. Conceal it on your person.**

  The pendant and its gunmetal-blue chain felt alternately icelike and blistering hot. I slipped them into a tunic pocket.

  “What does it stand for, the forty-ninth character?”

  **God. Cosmos. Essence.**

  “None of those things is ineffable, Chaish. You’ve just expressed all three of them, in a few of the forty-eight phosphenes by which you ordinarily communicate with me. I don’t understand the sacred or forbidden aspect of the character.”

  **No,** Chaish agreed, **you don’t.**

  Confused, I looked back down the perpendicular corridor to the spaceboat hangar. Synnöva Helmuth was leading the Baidarkas’s computer officer and cargo master toward us. Neither had yet had time to unsuit. As a consequence, Rai and Loizos, both relatively graceful people, lumbered toward us in their boots. A bigger surprise was the sudden emergence of Corcoran Skolits from the recuperation facility beyond the hangar. Wearing a tunic, he hurried past Helmuth’s party, careened forward, and abruptly pulled up in front of Chaish and me, his chest heaving and his nostrils dilating cavernously.

  “What are you going to do now?” he demanded. “Your dyadmate’s stolen something of mine!”

  **Tell Mr. Skolits we’re going to demonstrate how and perhaps why he murdered Frederick Lupozny,** Chaish declared in hard-edged phosphenes.

  I told him.

  Ten minutes later I was fully spacesuited, except that I carried my helmet in the crook of my right arm. Françoise Loizos was at work in the hub on the main computer, rummaging its memory circuits to determine if Loraine Block had intercepted an airlock alarm. Chaish thought her own presence aboard Lupozny Station superfluous now, but I had to put her to work to achieve a thorough investigation. Krishna Rai, meanwhile, had installed himself near the lifeboat bay in Lupozny’s quarters—on the explicit but secret instructions of my dyadmate, who would no longer brook any argument from me. The immediate demonstration of Skolits’s guilt seemed to obsess her.

  Five of us—Skolits, Toombs, Helmuth, Chaish, and I—had entered the hangar containing Skolits’s crusty mining craft and the two oversized spaceboats from the Baidarka. The hangar was commodious, but no space was wasted. In the control center I had observed that it took only four or five minutes to evacuate this chamber of air and a similar length of time to rest
ore its pressurization. But Chaish led us through the main airlock to an auxiliary corridor leading to the miners’ recuperation facility. Above this tiny corridor, accessible by a set of narrow metal stairs, was a lifeboat bay. Chaish believed that Skolits had used the lifeboat in this housing as an escape hatch to the station’s hull.

  The lifeboats on Lupozny Station were remora craft—unlike the larger dinghies by which first Chaish and I, and then Françoise Loizos and our Hindi cargo master, had arrived from the Baidarka. And unlike, too, the mining craft that Skolits had piloted in from the outermost asteroid belt. These were cruising vessels incapable of docking with the station; they had to enter the hangar of the main airlock in order to unload and take on cargo or passengers.

  A remora, however, is designed for escapes, hull-inspection tours, short jaunts among the station’s cargo canisters, and brief visits to nearby asteroids. It takes its name from those free-loading marine creatures, native to the waters of Earth, that attach themselves to whales, sharks, and sea turtles by means of a sucking disk on the tops of their heads. Each boat is a tubular creature not too different in design from Lupozny Station itself—if you mentally cut away the perpendicular pseudopod containing the station’s spaceboat hangar and its access corridor.

  Visualize it this way: The nose of the remora craft slips into a housing that extends from the station’s hull and clasps the forward third of the lifeboat. The housing collar creates an airtight seal as soon as the remora has nosed into docking position. Inside this collar are three airtight hatches, and anyone climbing toward the lifeboat from the station must pass through each hatch in turn. None of these hatches will open unless the atmospheric pressure is the same on both sides. The final door is the hatch in the nose of the remora craft itself, positioned so that it need not line up exactly with any other hatch; it remains unblocked even should the remora enter the docking sheath catty-wampus. This hatch, like the others, will not open unless bookended by areas of equivalent air pressure.

  Chaish helped me put my helmet on. **Go into the remora, Raymond. Climb out onto the hull through the aft escape hatch and proceed over the station to Lupozny’s quarters. Try each of the lifeboats connecting with the bay in his room.**

  “They’re pressurized,” I protested. “I won’t be able to get in.”

  Skolits, Toombs, and Helmuth were standing below the metal platform giving onto the lifeboat bay. Looking down through my faceplate, I could see them discussing the likelihood of my gaining entry to the dead man’s cabin. Their voices—once Chaish had sealed and locked my helmet—were virtually inaudible. I knew with certainty only that Skolits had been kibitzing our experiment from the beginning. How could we put so much credence—even a degree of credence—in the accusation of a chode, a species about whose intellectual and spiritual lives we knew almost nothing?

  Chaish had still not shown the necklace she had found in the miner’s spacesuit to anyone but me, and Skolits’s endless stream of self-justifying chatter had finally led me, willy-nilly, to wonder if she were not indeed maliciously persecuting him for something other than Lupozny’s murder. Was the simple possession of a chode artifact a crime? And was Chaish setting my own life at hazard to indict Skolits for the violation of an alien taboo?

  **Try to get in, Raymond. If none of the remoras at Lupozny’s end of the station permits you entry, you’ll still be able to come back aboard through this lifeboat. There’s no real danger.** My dyadmate had sensed my uneasiness; she had also discovered its cause. Her melting, mirrorlike eyes gave me back my own distorted reflection, an ugly thing, and I turned away from it to the first hatch of the lifeboat bay.

  Entering the remora proved rebukingly easy. Each door opened at a crank and a tug. Passing through the last one, I found myself in a narrow fuselage designed for two passengers—three or four in a pinch—and equipped with its own small gravity generator and life-support systems, including provisions, oxygen-recycling gear, and air pumps.

  Getting out of the remora onto the station’s hull would be equally easy. I sealed the nose hatch, double-checked this seal, and then slid back and sidelong into the pilot’s couch. Here I began to pump the air out of the remora into the storage compressors mounted aft on the fuselage. This took less than two minutes. When the interior of the lifeboat was at the same pressure as space itself, I slipped away from the instrument panel and pushed myself aft. Because the craft’s gravity generator wasn’t in operation now, I floated the length of the lifeboat. I braced myself beneath the escape hatch and pushed it open effortlessly. A rime of stars hung in the night overhead.

  As soon as I had squeezed through the hatch onto the remora’s cold, gray back, I kicked the cover shut and clambered over the docking collar to the hull of Lupozny Station. The remora would remain depressurized until someone inside the station activated its pumps from the emergency control near the stairs by which Chaish and I had climbed to the bay—or until I reentered the lifeboat and switched on its pumps from the forward instrument panel. It was imperative, however, that anyone exiting a remora through its rearward hatch pause long enough to close its cover—for the sake of those inside the station—and I had scrupulously done that. Afterwards, I turned and made a cautious beeline toward the station’s hub.

  Anless 32 bathed everything in a dull red glare. Where shadows fell, however, the integument of the station was so black as to be nearly indistinguishable from the backdrop of space itself. I felt like a man walking over a precarious suspension bridge.

  Off to my left rode the reassuring bulk of the E.C.S. Baidarka, a spidery colossus becalmed in an invisible web. Storage canisters floated dreamily along with the station as it circled its star, and I regarded these tumbling tag-alongs as companions and familiars. My fear of Chaish’s motives had begun to evaporate. It was easier—and far more reasonable—to fear the vast, indifferent night.

  In my unwieldy magnetized boots—the station’s gravity generators don’t service the hull, of course—it took me several minutes to reach the hub and make my way to the lifeboat bays at Lupozny’s end of the station. When I did arrive, I climbed gingerly over the housing collar of the first of three remora craft and tried to pry open its hatch. The thing wouldn’t budge. Nor did its failure to open surprise me. I half believed that for unknowable reasons of her own Chaish was buying time: My presence on the hull was a complicated bit of misdirection whose purpose was to let her scrounge about inside for the hat with the rabbit in it. What hat? What rabbit?

  I stalked noseward, mounted the housing collar, and climbed atop the second of the three lifeboats. After shuffling over the remora’s hull, I bent at the waist and pulled indifferently at the hatch. Nothing, I told myself—whereupon, amazingly, the damn thing opened!

  Dependent for traction on my magnetized boots, I was almost catapulted into space.

  I saved myself by clinging to the hatch cover. When my boots were again safely clamped to metal, I eased them over the lip of the opening. After descending bodily into the remora, I pulled the hatch to and peered about. I expected Lupozny’s killer—not Misha Block or Corcoran Skolits, but someone infinitely more brutal and bloodthirsty—to spring out of the darkness to slash my suit and leave me crumpled against a bulkhead. That didn’t happen. I freed my flashlight from my belt and poled it about in a satisfyingly vain search for my imaginary nemesis. Then I went forward and activated the pumps to restore cabin pressurization.

  Had Skolits, after his trip across the hull from the bay near the recuperation facility, also found an airless remora awaiting him? It didn’t seem likely. What, exactly, were Chaish and I demonstrating then?

  As soon as the lifeboat had attained full pressurization, I unlocked my helmet and removed it. Anxious to learn what Chaish and the others were doing, I duck-walked into the lifeboat’s nose, opened the hatch, and eased myself into the docking collar. Two more such doors lay ahead. The final one admitted me to the corridor mouth off Lupozny’s room. I had made it. No alarms had sounded, and the trip, if you
discounted the bugaboos of my imagination, had been uneventful.

  “Hello, Mr. Detchemendy. Very good to see you.”

  I jumped sideways. A pudgy brown face was staring at me from the corridor entrance. It was Krishna Rai, the Baidarka’s cargo master. I remembered, belatedly, that Chaish had dispatched him to the site of the murder without the others’ knowledge. But why?

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “Letting you in,” Rai informed me. “Your dyadmate instructed me so to do, using hand signs and whatnot. While you were putting on your suit.”

  “This proves nothing,” I said, shaking my head, disappointed. “You let me in.” I sat down on a bench outside the lifeboat bay but just inside the dead stationmaster’s cabin. Disgustedly, I began pulling off my suit. Rai shrugged and sat down beside me.

  A moment later Chaish, Toombs, Helmuth, and Skolits entered the room from the main corridor. Toombs evinced some real surprise at seeing me back inside, but Skolits quickly deduced that Rai had evacuated the remora from the interior lifeboat bay so that I could enter it, restore its pressurization, and so come aboard the station through the hatches in the docking collar.

  “They’re wasting your time,” Skolits told Toombs animatedly. “Of course he was able to get back in. He had an accomplice.” The miner gestured contemptuously at Rai, who favored Skolits with a shy, benign grin. “But the only accomplice the murderer could have had was Lupozny himself, and it isn’t a damn bit likely that Lupozny would evacuate a remora just so his killer could have undetectable access to his person.”

  I stared at the floor. About two meters from my right boot was the yellow-green chalk loop delineating the spot where Lupozny had dropped his miniature telescope. I carried out some formless computations in my head, and these provided me with a symmetrical insight:

  Lupozny had not dropped the telescope as a clue to the identity of his murderer. No, he had simply been venting, even in his death throes, the volcanic pressures of his temperament. He had tried to throw the telescope at his fleeing assailant, and it had landed where it had because the guilty party had been heading for the lifeboat bay.