The Gobo Bride: A Lewis Gregory Mystery

by Mason Adgett

  So after a quarter turn of sleeping we hopped in the guide car and started on the tour we had selected, a self-paced visit to some of the more popular attractions in the city. The car, of guvian manufacture, functioned equally well in the air or on the ground but was designed specifically for the road-tunnels on Asitot.

  What I had told India – a lie I regretted but didn’t see how to avoid – was that I was going to therapy and it might take a little time. She had not seemed to think it a bad idea. In fact she had mentioned the possibility for herself. But I had left her with most everything unresolved. How we felt, what we would do, when we would discuss it again. Before we left the hotel, I saw she had sent me two messages. Neither could really be called important though they felt that way to me. One was a short but sweet hope I was doing well and maybe if I was able to let her know how things were going. The other, which I watched three times before saving, was a rambling thing where she appeared half-asleep and was trying to describe a dream she’d just had. It had featured Boldt and myself and she had woken up frightened, thinking of me.

  She was on my mind, then, strongly, during the Jebala tour but there was no being distracted – or “elsewhere,” as Charles would put it – from the array of sights and sounds we enjoyed. I was fully engaged in taking as much in as I could. How lucky was I to live in a time when mankind could see such sights as these?

  Everything is different on another planet. I had seen aboveground and it was interesting enough but honestly Asitot’s surface didn’t compare to Earth’s lush green beauty. Underground on the other hand was a completely different story. First a spectacular array of life had evolved in the caves of Asitot, much of it developed around the bioluminescence Charles had mentioned. Imagine sparkling butterflies and bat-like birds with glowing wings that hunted them. Then gobos had spent thousands of years carving out monstrous caverns deeper and deeper into the ground and their technology had developed accordingly. Unlike Earth’s in-your-face tech that had worked its way into every aspect of our lives Asitot still seemed largely natural but a lot of it was camouflage, like electric lighting that simulated the phosphorescent algae that grew naturally.

  This algae by the way came in a variety of colors, but the prevailing color overall was blue so everything had a rather cool vibe. The roads were tunnels but they frequently had viewports cut through so you could see the city inside – Jebala, a collection of connected caverns larger than anything you could imagine on Earth, a kilometer high at least for the largest one.

  Anyway, I could spend all day describing the things I’d never seen before, there was just too much of it. The car informed us it was just about the traditional time for breakfast and asked if we would like to try one of the city’s famous eateries. Sure, we said. Recommend by price, location, popularity, or style, the car wanted to know. Could we get a list of styles, please? Of course, but we didn’t recognize any of them except two: Earth-Italian, Earth-Chinese.

  “Gobo food is kind of boring anyway,” said Mike. “I tried it when we were here last time. It’s like sludge.”

  “Smoothies,” said Charles. “Yeah, it’s like slime.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Chinese?” We agreed on it and went to a nice place run by an interesting married couple, an Earthen woman of Asian descent who had married a gobo. I chatted with her a bit while I ate my steamed buns, but it was difficult, since she spoke very little anglish, mostly guvian and mandarin. But their marriage gave me an excuse to bring up Vavaka, obliquely:

  “I heard another Earthen woman is marrying someone from near here, is that true?”

  But she had heard nothing about it. I didn’t bring up Vavaka’s name, not yet, but I assumed then it was not something that the locals made a big deal of. She recommended our next site, an anonymous painting in the neighborhood – kind of what we would think of as graffiti but here in Jebala and over much of Asitot it was considered a highly respected cultural aesthetic.

  Using a guide car, she said, was not necessarily the best way to find such places but she gave us the locations of a few of her favorites.

  So we went to visit the “painting” which the locals called The Crooked One. It was impressive. It was located in the upper portion of the city on a ledge near the top of one the caverns. The image was about six meters high and much of the coloring had its own luminescence. I believe it was supposed to be a person but it could have been male or female, gobo or human. A dark red light coiled around it and somehow a crooked line pulsed within the paint, starting at what I think was the right shoulder and going down to what could have been the right foot.

  There were two other humans there, a couple of older gentlemen, and Mike had no problem starting up a conversation. They recognized Charles after a few minutes but he said he was just trying to keep a low profile, enjoy a vacation, and they promised to keep his secret. From them we got a recommendation for our next visit, a nearby sparkling pool with a connected aquarium. My contributions to the conversation consisted of leading questions designed to get information about anything, anything at all.

  The aquarium was fun but didn’t help much with our case. I did enjoy the sparkling pool… Sparkling I guess referred to the clarity of the water and the way the bioluminescent fish glittered through it. I’ve always thought fish looked alien anyway and almost any of these, were they lit a little less brightly and colorfully, seemed to me could have come from Earth.

  The aquarium by the way was not done like an Earth aquarium with each creature in a separate tank. On Asitot they didn’t like keeping them captive at all so instead the “aquarium” had been built around a natural pool and the building inside allowed you to view the creatures close-up through the use of 3V cameras.

  After the aquarium I asked the guide car about U-Ship. Surely their headquarters were in the area if Vavaka owned the operation.

  But the guide came up with nothing. I checked my cell, looking up U-Ship on the wiki. Strangely enough it didn’t show up on the Asitot wiki, just the Earth one. U-Ship outlets appeared all over Earth. It was one of the most popular rental companies for transportation but I was surprised to find they didn’t operate on Asitot, or if they did it was under another name. The website didn’t list U-Ship’s owner, per se, but it did say it was an as’Tatim corporation, and when I followed that link it led to both information about the company and the as’Tatim family with some history I had not previously read. It was an old, established family in the North with Vavaka as’Tatim – who did not have his own biography in the wiki – being the lone survivor to inherit the fortune. His parents, Dolon and Beriav, had died twenty years ago but it didn’t say how.

  I returned to the U-Ship page and saw the listed address was on Earth – Houston, in fact. Surely the Phoenixes had been aware of his local affiliation and it probably meant nothing. But I thought it strange that the owner of U-Ship would live on Asitot while the company itself was headquartered on Earth unless – and the wiki site didn’t make this clear – almost all of its business was Earth-related. I wondered how Vavaka and the as-Tatims had gotten into business on Earth.

  I talked it over with Mike and Charles but neither of them had any ideas either. Except Mike wanted to call Lewis.

  “He could get those headquarters in Houston checked out,” he said.

  “Not yet,” I said. According to the wiki the location of the as’Tatim corporation was much closer. I pulled it up on the guide console. It looked to be a small building in the western lower portion of town. From the 3V map it appeared to be deep in a series of catacombs, the lower portion being less accessible it seemed than the upper portions throughout the city. According to the guide everything around it seemed like warehouses and office buildings, though the translations were a little wonky. An example: “Facility of Supply Chip Storage de’Rakna corporation.” Vavaka’s company was listed as “Private Holdings Management as’Tatim corporation” and two others in the area were described the same. Not an area, really, that three traveling Earth partiers
would have any reason to visit.

  Except looking over the map I did see one place that such a group might be interested, labeled “Imbibable Liquid Fermentation Plant Ashbom corporation.” I showed it to Charles.

  “What, a brewery?” he said. “That could be fun. Do they do tours?”

  I found their website easily; Ashbom it turned out was the opposite of U-Ship. They were proud of what they did, advertised their location, offered a large selection of drinks and were proud to have become one of the first fermentation plants in Asitot’s history to locally brew varieties introduced from other planets, including Earth ale. Did they offer tours? Indeed they did. Was an appointment required? Not at all. Free sample tasting included in the tour? Absolutely.

  Was the tour free of charge? No. But it was affordable and we all agreed it would be fun.

  To get there, the guide car had to drive right in front of the as-Tatim headquarters. It was a small enclosure cut out of the rock of the cavern just like many of the other Jebala dwellings, with a closed gate-like door in front and no signage or identifying markings of any kind. For all we could see it could easily have been empty. There was nothing to indicate it even used electricity, though that didn’t mean it didn’t since the typical guvian style was to camouflage such things. Anyway its appearance told me nothing useful.

  We enjoyed ourselves tremendously at the brewery, which seemed very cosmopolitan despite the fact it didn’t seem to do a whole lot of tours. They seemed a little surprised when we showed up without notice but were very happy to see us. The clerk who greeted us spoke anglish decently and was quick working with his translator app when he struggled so we had no trouble communicating.

  Like the as-Tatim establishment the brewery was cut into a portion of the cavern, specially placed, we were told on the tour, to best allow the carbon dioxide to vent to the surface. The outside of the brewery made it appear smaller than it was. Inside it extended deeper and deeper into the cavern and contained a number of large fermentation barrels. At the back they had access to a delivery tunnel, something that hadn’t appeared on our guide map. I wondered how large as-Tatim might prove to be on the inside and if it had unlisted tunnels behind it as well.

  Ashbom made a variety of beverages, we were told, teas, beers, something called dibur made out of the fermented urine of some guvian rodent. I didn’t try that one but Mike did and said it was delicious. Their most popular beverage was more than just a drink, more like a liquid meal, they said. The way they advertised it, it was practically a food staple on Asitot, made from what I gathered from the description to be fermented worm milk. I didn’t try that one either and promised myself I would look it up on the wiki later. I hadn’t been aware worms could lactate but that seemed to be exactly what he was describing.

  We enjoyed ourselves, we got a little tipsy, we learned only a very little bit about Vavaka. After my third sample I loosened up enough to ask about him directly. The clerk, Shashasha, was as friendly, open, and extroverted as you could hope for. The infectiousness of his smile made up for the distinctly inhuman eyes. It was the eyes that made humans often wary of gobos. They were unreadable unless you could make sense somehow of the flickering rhythm of the shatia. But Shashasha had such a natural, engaging manner that we all felt comfortable right away.

  When he asked why we chose Asitot for our party tour I used it as an excuse to bring up India – not that we knew her but we were all fans and followed all her feeds. When we had seen on Lewis Gregory she was marrying a gobo we decided to check out the home world. It was a thin and shabby cover story but it was accepted without hesitation.

  “The human bride, yes,” Shashasha confirmed. “As-Tatim keeps to private self, most, but we too have seen the India Phoenix.” Something about his tone gave the impression he wasn’t impressed and I somehow took this personally, lessening my appreciation of him just a little bit.

  “Big news around here then I guess? As-Tatim getting married?”

  Shashasha waggled a hand which I had learned was the gobo equivalent of a shrug. “Not so much. As-Tatims are not such news anymore. The son Vavaka is not friendly to Jebala, he – this expression is correct? – lords in his castle?”

  “Seems to fit,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Shashasha. “He not really seem – seem, yes? – not seem like he like gobo even. He talks to no one.”

  “Doesn’t like his own kind?” I said.

  Shashasha clapped his hands. “Yes it is strange, yes? Weird? “You say – kookoo?” I laughed and he backed down a bit. “Maybe kookoo too far.”

  “Did you hear about her abduction? Someone taking her?”

  “Yes! Makes worries for us, the gobo. Not civilized. We are civilized please understand!”

  “Of course,” I said, making sure Charles and Mike also voiced their solidarity. I didn’t want to insult Shashasha who had indeed been more than civilized. We thanked them for a great time and left.

  Now I felt like I had learned something but I didn’t know what to make of it. So the people of Jebala thought Vavaka didn’t like gobos. Then his marrying a human – or perhaps some other alien – wouldn’t have been a surprise. But why did he feel that way? He kept to himself, he didn’t like gobos, his corporation listings were practically blank pages. His decision to broadcast his wedding on a reality show certainly seemed out of character, though I guess our being human was at least acceptable to him.

  We got back into the guide car in a great mood but it disappeared almost immediately. I had seen several message notifications pop up during the tour and ignored one call from Lewis. Now I opened one of the messages and my heart dropped into my stomach.

  “This is Lewis,” he said, stating the obvious, but I didn’t like the look on his face. “You need to answer your phone when I call. There is an emergency. Call me back immediately.” He paused dramatically but at least he didn’t hang up before letting me know: “India has gone missing.”

  ····17····

  Everything halted for me for a moment as I struggled to accept the reality of what I had just heard. “Shut up,” I said to Charles and Mike, though neither were talking, both were looking through their messages like I was. I called Lewis immediately and he answered in kind.

  “You need to come back right now,” he said. “I need you and Mike here.”

  “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  “You got my message? India has disappeared. Of course everyone thinks she’s been kidnapped again. Maybe murdered.”

  “Is it Boldt?”

  “Boldt is still in prison,” Lewis said, “as of an hour ago. If she’s been kidnapped he didn’t do it.”

  “Vavaka,” I said.

  “I just spoke to Vavaka on the phone,” he said. “He’s on Asitot. There’s no way he could have done it either.”

  “He knows I’m here?”

  “No, I haven’t said where you are yet. But that’s the problem. Maybe she was kidnapped. Maybe she ran away. Either way your name is the one the Phoenixes are throwing around. I guess you were at her house yesterday?”

  “Obviously I have nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course,” he said. “You’re on Asitot just like Vavaka. The problem is they don’t know that because I’m still trying to keep your cover. If they keep leaning on this civilization authority will probably have to release your location.”

  “What is civilization enforcement doing about it? Are they looking for India?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Also they’re leaning on me to find out stuff.”

  “I’m trying,” I said. “I’m trying to do that.”

  “You need to get back to the solar system.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s Vavaka. I know it is, it has to be. If he’s here then so is she.”

  “Impossible,” he said. “How would he get her there without registering on the Space Machine?”

  “I don’t know, Lewis. Maybe he used aliases like we did.”

  He frowned. “Civ
ilization authority aliases?”

  “Before we come back there,” I said, “we’re going to check in on Vavaka. I know he’s involved. I’ll let you know what I find.” I disconnected before he could mount an argument.

  I didn’t have to tell Charles and Mike what had happened. Each had received their own messages. Mike of course was of the opinion we should listen to Lewis and head back. Charles agreed with me that we were going to the as-Tatim estate. I programmed the pedto into the guide instead though to consider how to approach Vavaka.

  Mike: “We should just walk right up to the door. Tell him we’re on Asitot. We should be able to tell if he’s got something to hide.”

  Charles: “For once I agree with Mike. Let’s just walk up and demand answers. About his gaming history if nothing else.”

  Me: “We’ll see when we get there.”

  Meanwhile I tried to pull up as many maps of the area as I could, especially the guvian underground ones, wondering if there was a way to sneak onto the estate. Confronting Vavaka was a fine idea, I thought. I really did. But I wanted to know what was going on first. I wanted to catch him at it, whatever it was, red-handed.

  “It’s Vavaka,” I mumbled. “Why, I don’t know. How, I don’t know.”

  “What?” said Charles.

  “Never mind. Look at this with me.” I showed him three maps I had pulled up, each from different times over the past ten years. “Look at these,” I said. “Do you see any differences?”

  Charles nodded. “Several. Here you’ve got added tunnels. Here you have one and here one is missing, see that? But the missing one is later. That tunnel could still be there, you think?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But also look at it on the horizontal view. Do you see how much deeper it’s gotten?” I pointed to the deepest part of Vavaka’s estate which over the past several years appeared to be getting larger. “Still expanding, see that?”

  “Right,” said Charles. “Curious. But nothing rich folks like more than adding real estate.”