by John Barnes
Of course, since Annabeth Trinidad had been killed more than two years before, and media attention had begun to focus after Heart Reno’s death, both the cops and the media had traced the Hardware Store Killer’s victims back to Moloch College—it was now common knowledge for every newspaper reader that most of the women had worked together—but a narrow focus of victims was not unusual in serial killers. “I’m sure Susan Glasgow had more than figured it out,” Kermit said. “She was incredibly careful about not letting anyone know exactly where she was, and she only rarely slept alone or in any predictable place. There were bodyguards all around her, both human and pTh’tong n’Wi, all the time. I’d been trying for nine months to get a clear shot at her. So I suppose I gotta give props to whoever did. I sure didn’t manage it.”
Jake had been sitting and brooding; he looked up and said, “You know that you probably got Lena killed. They’re gonna find her any minute with Hardware Store Killer shit done to her, because Lena being murdered will just make the case against the pTh’tong n’Wi contract better, and—”
“No.” All Thumbs was decisive. “If she has been murdered, and her transponders have not notified me, it has to have been a non-human agent doing this to her. Which would not make the case. If someone had murdered her to make the case against the contract, they needed to use human hands alone.”
Jake drew a long, shuddery breath. “So you think she’s still alive?”
“I think that the evidence is much too thin for me to think anything. I feel in four ways that she is still alive and feel in two that she is dead and feel in one that she is in immediate danger, on the average, but they are not the strong clear feelings that one has rationally. But two more things seem relevant somehow. You are no doubt aware of the disappearance of a million cubic meters of sand from Great Sand Dunes? That would be characteristic pTh’tong n’Wi sampling, and perfectly legal, but extremely presumptuous, so normally they would refrain—so as not to irritate the judges—but they might do it if they feel very sure of winning the case. Perhaps that provoked the Third Force, which now exists, whatever it might have been before, into killing Susan Glasgow.
“Secondly, the appearance of vital clues in the Gaudeamus webtoon is consistent with certain other facts, which include the following. One, Brown Pierre makes the Gaudeamus sexual telepathy pill at his home and lab in Crestone, and two, it is not developed from any naturally occurring material on Earth, and three, your science of molecular design is far too rudimentary to have come up with such a molecular-level machine as the molecules of the Gaudeamus pill, so it must be concluded that Brown Pierre has access to alien technology, which leads us to four, he has or is close to someone with Gaudeamus technology, which leads to—”
“Shitfire,” I said. “Sorry, All Thumbs, but here’s the big thought, I think. Brown Pierre is the Third Force. To be getting non-human tech in the quantities he does, he has to have sold the Earth, which means he built, or was one of the builders of, a Gaudeamus machine. And he wouldn’t sell the Earth for personal advantage, and he wouldn’t sell it to benefit humans either. He wants the Earth preserved, but he doesn’t want it run by humans, either … which is sort of a third position between Lena’s and Glasgow’s, and why he never approached our side or joined theirs. Because he is his own side, see? And he’s found some aliens who will go along with it.” I whacked my forehead; thoughts were coming much too fast now. “And all the references to Xegon and to every other step we take, that we find in Gaudeamus the webtoon, are perfectly explainable if you assume the person talks to one of Lena’s group—didn’t Elvis make all the buys?”
“But it was Lena’s original contact,” Jake said. “She said she got Gaudeamus pills from the guy who introduced her to them, and then after that she sent Elvis up to make the buys, because she wasn’t very attracted to the guy. So he might even have had a little telepathic connection to Lena …”
“Plus knowing me … jesus, he’s probably followed everything we’ve done for years.”
“Oh, wow,” Kermit said, which might have been as smart as any of us was sounding right then.
“Oh wow you said it, and god and jesus and that whole crowd besides. No wonder Brown Pierre showed up right after that accident with Robodeer. And you know what Lena Logan is doing right now? She’s helping produce Gaudeamus—the webtoon I mean—and that’s how she tucked in that little message. Brown Pierre must know Richard Reno—”
“He might have known him,” Hale said, “but according to a report I had done after the Robodeer story ran, not lately. It didn’t seem important at the time that Richard Reno wasn’t the actual author of the webtoon—”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Because once we started looking seriously, the Richard Reno who drew the college paper panel cartoon at Moloch College was surprisingly easy to find; the Richard Reno that signs the webtoon, and uses many of the same characters and some of the same settings, isn’t him. The real Richard Reno was killed in a motorcycle crash four days after he graduated, in 1981, oddly not far from an Air Force test area in Nevada, while riding cross-country to take a job as a political cartoonist at a small north California paper where he was also going to cover high school sports and write obituaries. Whoever is producing Gaudeamus, it’s not him.”
All Thumbs said, “It’s Brown Pierre. He would need considerable computing capacity to do the Gaudeamus webtoon, and a very large amount to operate the micromachines required to make the Gaudeamus drug … and Lena Logan was going to his house in Crestone at the time that she disappeared. I’m officially requesting Travis Bismarck and Nathan Hale, our two experienced human detectives, to go to Crestone and find out what’s going on.”
“All we need is to identify a good place nearby to land a flying saucer,” Hale said.
“I’ve been to Crestone,” I said, “and you can probably park it in front of Curt’s gas station without anybody saying a thing.”
“One last thought,” All Thumbs said. “Or feeling. If we are right, and Brown Pierre is actually ‘Richard Reno’ and the Gaudeamus pill maker and the Third Force—be very careful. Don’t forget that when we were looking at Susan Glasgow’s murder, one reason that it looked like the work of the Hardware Store Killer was that the murderer must have been exceptionally large and strong.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Nathan Hale?” I asked, as our flying saucer lifted off from behind the Xegon facility at Kirkland. We had a nice loaded Range Rover in it, the safari package that’s intended to get you to and from an African war on dirt roads, the sort of thing that the people who actually write and photograph the news, as opposed to reading it aloud on TV, would love to have if anyone would spend that much money on people who don’t appear on camera. Ours was presplashed with mud and came with tinted windows plus one huge guard dog, Beeper, a big-ass Rhodesian ridgeback with more training than the Army had ever given me and Hale combined. Possibly more brains, too.
“Nathan Hale,” Hale agreed. “No middle name, either, so I had nothing else to fall back on. Unfortunately my grandfather was a China Hand, one of the ones that had to leave even though he didn’t get caught out as a comsymp. Getting bounced that way and seeing what happened to all his old friends turned him even more progressive, and he sent my father to a very progressive private school. Dad knows lots about building things with popsicle sticks, and probably knows every union song Pete Seeger ever wrote, saw Allen Ginsberg recite Howl three different times, knew where to get marijuana in Vermont before 1960, and gets every joke on Elaine May and Mike Nichols albums. But he doesn’t know when the War of 1812 was or who the Washington Monument is named after.
“Dad met Mother at that little private school, and she was the daughter of Hollywood people, producers I mean, so she’d been raised in the kind of world where if marketing needs Krakatoa to be east of Java, it is. So neither of them knew there had ever been a Hale that said ‘I regret that I have but one life to give for my country, ’ or that the ori
ginal Nathan Hale had been a spy. Given that Mother grew up culturally Jewish in Beverly Hills, among girls whose idea of cultural attainment was a British boyfriend, I’m not sure she was even aware that there’d been an American Revolution, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have approved. Dad had less of an excuse, because according to a huge history in the library at Grandpa’s house, that first Nathan Hale apparently was some kind of blood relative. But then so are half the white people in northern New England, Yankee inbreeding being what it is.”
Well, John, I couldn’t help laughing, and the sonofabitch grinned back at me, and annoying as it was, I was friends with chinless New England old money. Despite whatever the fuck he might think about Texans.
“How do two old progressives feel about your line of work?”
“I spent a lot of time with Grandpa when I was young. And really, as far as my parents are concerned, I just went into the family business. Like being a Bush or a Kennedy, you know—what other kind of job could I get anyway?”
“Must’ve been hell going to a real school as Nathan Hale.”
“Not really. I was known as Sparky. A fact which you will now forget …”
“Old Jedi mind trick,” I said, “I can’t remember a thing you just said. So, what do you think about all this business, aliens and flying saucers and all?”
“Well, I like my planet, I like humans, I’ve got a wife I love and a child on the way, and after so much talk with All Thumbs, I guess I trust him. And Lena Logan is not a bad sort once you get to know her, though I don’t think I’ll be introducing her to my family. Besides, I did swear an oath to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States, which, to my way of thinking, does extend to cover saving the planet that the United States is located on. And since all this happened and the guys in the black suits took over Xegon, I know my paycheck, coming as it does direct from the Treasury, is more secure. So, uh, it’s a job. How do you feel about it?”
“It’s a job,” I agreed. “There’s a serious crush and some personal revenge involved, too, but I’m always glad to have work.”
We had waited till after dark, and now we flew high above the Front Range, the crumpled-newspaper topography of the mountains to our left, the long flat smear of eastern Colorado and Kansas to our right. Directly below us there were swarms of bright dots winding through the pools of dark—traffic on I-25.
Beside Hale, Beeper whined and growled softly to himself. “Hey, it’s okay, fella,” I said.
The huge dog looked up at Hale, who solemnly said, “It’s okay.”
“He checked with you.”
“We’ve worked together before. And yes, he’s that smart. Until he knows you a little better, you’re only a provisional good guy, or member of the pack, or however Beeper thinks of you. That’s why he keeps checking—to get you placed in his scheme of things.”
Beeper made a little contented grunt, as if agreeing, and curled up beside Hale to sleep.
Anyone who has ever heard of Crestone usually pictures something different from what it is. In fact you can go there a lot of times, John, and you’ll still picture something different from what it is. It’s never going to have that kind of Christmas-card quaint that ski towns like Aspen or even Crested Butte do, which they get from their World War One railroad-and-mine-town architecture, because Crestone doesn’t have much that’s all that old left standing. It’s not going to look all Norman Rockwelly and small-town Christmas-card pretty like the older parts of Gunnison or Montrose or Salida, because those were built back in the picket-fence days, when there was some money in those towns, and when you mostly filled up your lot with house. Naw, the best thing that snow does for Crestone is hide most of it, because what it is, is a scattering of houses and buildings, most of them trying to hide away from the dirt streets—most of them needing to hide. The houses are usually surrounded by collections of gear, stuff, and junk that would look right at home around a Houston mobile home park. Crestone is really just a scattering of houses, not too laid out, around a few rectangles of dirt streets, way, way up in the mountains, looking out west across the San Luis Valley. It’s real pretty, with those long views of the valley and breathtaking sweeps of the mountains, as long as you never look anywhere near where you’re standing.
And yet if you just think of it as a collection of just-above-shacks among the pines and aspens, way high up, you’ll totally miss what the place is all about—the fact that Curt’s, besides being the gas station, is an art gallery and a bookstore, or that right out back of it there’s a New Age and Third World art store, or all the Buddhist flags and New Age symbols and the fact that that town has a couple liquor stores but probably twenty places you can buy crystals, more people who think they can levitate than people who think they can golf (and trust me, John, since you don’t golf, the percentage of people who are right about either, no matter where you are, is pretty much the same).
It’s the kind of place where everyone is spiritual and where nobody has a religion, where all the churches seat fewer than a hundred but there are big new Buddhist and New Age worship centers up any dirt road you care to take into the hills. Good luck finding a guy to fix your truck—and if you do, it’ll be some nice old hippie who does the work under a tree, back of his house, while ten kids run around him and scream—but if you need work on your aura, you can shop all day and still not cover all the possibilities.
Probably two-thirds of the folks who were at that Skin2Skin performance in Saguache that I dragged you to had driven down from Crestone.
We came in over the high peaks, still in the dark, about four miles south of town and up the slope to the east. We were displaying no lights, and the nearest human lights, visible in the valley below, were twenty miles away, but the stars were so bright and numerous that everything was in clear deep blue light.
As we topped the peaks and descended westward over the mountain, we were almost skimming the treetops, and Hale had the cloaking effect turned on, so at distances of more than a couple hundred yards, to anyone on the ground, we were just a blur in the stars. Up closer they might pick out the saucer shape, so it was always possible that someone was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her mountain cabin (which she and twenty friends would have built—some unearthly contraption clinging to a mountainside by a few big logs and the beneficence of the goddess) and happened to see us, but if so, she was no doubt working real hard at calmly accepting everything she saw, and didn’t call anyone about it, except maybe one of her spirit guardians.
Of course, she only existed hypothetically, but I hoped we seemed like a good omen to her, and made her think the day would be a nice one.
We set down in a bitty turnaround among tall trees, at the end of a dirt road from town that was pretty far and snaky but unlikely to have any other traffic for a few hours. Beeper hopped into the Range Rover as soon as I opened the door, eyed me once, decided to be a good doggy and not call shotgun, and mashed between the bucket seats to get into the back.
“Does he like his ears scratched?” I asked.
Before Hale could answer, Beeper’s head was resting on my shoulder. “That would be a yes,” he said. I gave Beeper a good head-scratching and some special attention to the spots under the collar where it gets itchy. He made noises that I hoped were bliss, rather than contemplating taking me apart.
Hale lowered the ramp and drove onto the dirt road. He left the cloaking on as the door closed up behind us, so that in the dark, the saucer became an indistinct blob of gray-blue fog behind the bushes by the trailhead sign.
In the winter, those dirt roads are used mostly by people taking supplies to and from all those spiritual centers. The typical “center” is a big house somewhere back from the road, and usually contains about as many people as a big family; if All Thumbs or one of his cronies were passing through here, they might not notice it was any different from a road lined with affluent homes near any recreation-industry small town in Colorado.
Being a native Earthman and
all, I noticed the differences—all the rings of stones, the wildly eclectic collections of religious statuary, the false gateways hung with symbols, and so on, to my right, and the vast sea of dark emptiness that was the San Luis Valley far below to my left. There were swarms of partial washouts and ice-filled spots in the road, and Hale drove carefully, but I could tell he was a good hand with a four-wheel and figured I shouldn’t joggle him by making suggestions, not when his judgment was at least as good as mine.
The town of Crestone itself had a few lights on here and there, presumably people who were staying up late to find themselves or getting up early to go work in Salida or Alamosa. The nice folks that run the Shambala Coffee House, which is where everything and everybody meets, had just fired up their wood heat, and the dirty, not-yet-hot smoke was just oozing out their chimney and heading up towards the stars as if it really didn’t care; there was one light on inside, and I saw a slim, pretty lady starting to load up an espresso machine.
We turned right, passed the laundry-lumber-grocery place, and headed up the badly rutted mud road, slipping a bit on the snow and ice. “You’ve been here before,” I said to Hale.
“My sister Raynande does crystal healing. She was up here for three summers,” he explained. “Given how much weirdness is happening here, I’m kind of glad that she’ll be in Bhutan for the next two years, even if I do miss my little niece.”
“Her name is Raynande Hale?”
“People pointed out how funny my name was to my parents, so they gave my kid sister a name to make it look like they’d done it to me on purpose. But no, Sis is not Raynande Hale anymore. As soon as she was sixteen, she quit high school, hitchhiked west to UCLA, found a nice grad student in chemistry who was obviously going to make a good living, and jumped his bones so devotedly that after a while he proposed. Her name is Raynande Dubrowski now. And my niece is Tei-shan Celeste Dubrowski, named after two of Grandpa’s favorite colleagues. I occasionally feel sorry for the genealogists of AD 2100.”
