When the River Ran Dry

by Robert Davies

  “I know about Ricky’s history, but what is your role in this?”

  “Like I said, I watch out for him. One of my contacts told me Slider hopped a freight that goes very near that warehouse compound, so I called a friend who lives out that way and had him look around, you know, quiet and in the shadows?”

  “Go on.”

  “Anyway, they seen him walking from the freight tracks just a short distance from that place. He’s a good boy, Mr. Fellsbach—he hustles and all that, but he’s not a bad kid, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Anyway, since you used to run Starlight, I figured maybe you could do something to get him out of it. Most people don’t make it through a Walk, so…”

  There was another pause and Maela looked at Ricky where he stood, eyes closed tightly against the painful reminders.

  “Thank you for alerting me, officer; I’ll take it from here.”

  “Oh, sure. Uh, you’re welcome.”

  The link bleeped to signal the channel had been closed and Jonathan pre-staged Elden’s next call.

  “Cason…”

  “Steve, it’s Elden Fellsbach.”

  “Elden! Been a while.”

  “I know, but right now, I have a problem I hope you can help me with.”

  Cason’s tone hushed suddenly.

  “I can’t get that stuff anymore, Elden, I told you…”

  “It’s not what I meant. This is something else, and much worse.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s for a friend; I need you to…”

  “What’s this about?”

  “You have a side task tonight, yes?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “An implant job for Konstantinou.”

  “You’re very informed all of a sudden…”

  “Boris has a kid they’re forcing to make a Walk.”

  “Yes, I know; a street hustler called Richard Mills. Apparently, he owes a lot of money he can’t pay.”

  “Listen, Steve, he’s not a typical Walker; Konstantinou is pissed off at him for a Starlight debt, but he’s trying to force Richard into convincing his younger sister to spend time with the Bosses, understand?”

  “You know the kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit. Okay, I’m listening.”

  “Anyway, this bastard wants to make Richard’s little sister one of his playthings, and…”

  “Yes, I can fill in the blanks, Elden.”

  “Konstantinou gave Richard the choice of convincing her or making a Walk. Of course, he refused, so they’re sending him out tonight.”

  “I understand, but…”

  “He’s a tough boy, but he won’t stand a chance out there and we both know it.”

  Another pause brought silence as Cason considered Elden’s plea. Ricky and Maela knew what Cason’s answer would be, but when he replied, it brought a strange feeling of relief to Ricky, as though the moment had returned, fraught with the same danger he endured months before.

  “This is risky as hell, Elden.”

  “I know, and I am very sorry for putting you in this position, but no one survives these things anymore; they’ll cut him down for sure if we don’t do something to give him a decent chance. Isn’t there anything you can do on your end?”

  “Well…”

  “Steve?”

  “I could probably use a modified chip instead of the usual model.”

  “What would that do?”

  “Some of the older chips can be adjusted. I do have transmitter blocks I could install, and that would give me a few moments to communicate with him without anyone else hearing, but that’s about it.”

  “How would that help him survive?”

  “Well, I could monitor his progress on my screen and maybe point him in a direction away from the Chasers.”

  “How will you know where they are? I thought they kept locations very secret.”

  “The chase units have an isolated comm channel they use to coordinate their movements, but I can listen from my monitors. Konstantinou gave me the access code years ago, but it still works.”

  “He gave you Chaser comm codes, just like that?”

  “He thought it might come in handy in case I ever wanted to put some wager money down; a guaranteed win, right?”

  “And no one will know you switched the chip?”

  “Not unless this kid screws it up and blurts out something stupid. It’s only good for a few moments because the system re-sets if it gets an intermittent signal loss. I could probably get him past the worst parts if he listens and does what I tell him to do.”

  “We’ll have to hope so; I won’t be able to get a message to him before they send him out.”

  “Okay, Elden, I’ll do what I can. No guarantees once it starts, though.”

  “Thanks, Steve—I owe you.”

  “No problem, Elden. Good night.”

  Jonathan paused the recording and sat back, but Maela watched Ricky as he relived the moments that saved his life, never knowing with certainty how they evolved. Between them, Elden and Doctor Cason found a way and without it, Ricky knew he would surely have died on that desperate, lonely night. They waited in silence, but Maela’s instinct tugged at her in a struggle to reconcile the recordings against unanswered questions. Once more, she stood with folded arms, letting her eyes scan the tiny space in flitting, indiscriminate patterns as her mind went its own way. Finally, she shook her head in clear disappointment.

  “This is all very interesting, but it doesn’t get us any closer to a motive or a suspect.”

  “None of this helps?” asked Jonathan, sullen at the prospect his labors had gone unrewarded.

  “Not really,” she replied. “It confirms what we already knew, but there’s no obvious connection beyond getting Richard through his Walk alive. Fellsbach was acting to save Richard and the doctor helped him out, but it doesn’t explain why the old man ended up dead almost two months later.”

  She leaned against Jonathan’s console, shaking her head slowly as the mystery began to build, teasing her from the shadows where all secrets live. Ricky watched her, alone with her thoughts that swirled like tiny cyclones, but clearly in her element. This was one of the moments, he thought, when people like Maela earned their keep; sorting through details most would never see and determined to unlock each door until the inevitable patterns emerged.

  At last, she pointed to the display.

  “Can you download the rest?”

  “Download?” Jonathan replied with a frown.

  “Into my comm, maybe? I want to go through them, but it’s going to take time.”

  “Are you crazy?” he snorted. “There isn’t enough room in a comm’s memory for ten of these, let alone the entire record!”

  Undaunted, she went quickly to the next option.

  “Okay, then how about the call log? That’s just an ordinary data file, right?”

  “Yes, I can give you the logs, but what good are they without the recordings?”

  “I want to see who Fellsbach spoke with over those last weeks before his death; maybe we can cross them with other events and see if somebody interesting pops up.”

  “All right,” Jonathan said, voicing a command that sent a copy of Elden’s call log to her wrist comm. “I don’t have to tell you what they would do to me if…”

  “Yes, I know,” Maela interrupted with a nod. “I’ll transfer it to an offline reader so they can’t see, then I’ll delete it, all right?”

  They waited as Jonathan locked down his system and closed the lights to the tiny chamber.

  An hour later, Maela eased her car onto Rademacher Way, steps from the alley’s entrance.

  “I’ll look through the logs tonight, Richard. If you think of anything that might help, call me immediately.”

  “I will, and thank you for arranging to meet with Jonathan; it was nice to hear Elden’s voice one last time.”

  She smiled and nodded as
the hatch swung slowly down, lifting into the darkness with a hiss as the car accelerated north. Ricky stood for a moment to watch her go and then he shuffled in weary silence to his door. The strange, unyielding sensation of finality found him again and he stood alone in the quiet, thinking of all the old man had done to keep him alive. Ricky looked upward to the gathering cloud cover and whispered, “Thank you, Elden.”

  After a week, Maela found little in Elden’s call logs to their purpose. Mostly conversations with colleagues or neighbors, nothing stood out from the files before Ricky’s difficulties compelled the old man to action. Back on the hustle, his routine hadn’t changed; orders were placed and deliveries were made, even as the memory of a vile murder lingered on the fringes of Ricky’s thoughts, unsolved and forever a reminder of what he couldn’t change.

  On an unusually cool morning, he woke to a persistent rap at his door. He wasn’t expecting Vinnie or even Maela Kendrick and a peek out from his door cam showed a stranger pacing in a tight circle. The man looked clean enough, Ricky decided, releasing the latch slowly.

  “Can I help you?” Ricky asked.

  “I’m trying to find Richard Mills?”

  “That’s me.”

  The man held out a smooth, glass-covered pad and Ricky placed his hand atop it to register his palm print and verify the identification. When it signaled the correct image, the man handed over a standard courier’s document case.

  “I was sent by Oliver Allouez with instructions that it had to be given directly to you.”

  With that, the man turned and headed briskly up the alley.

  “Thanks,” Ricky mumbled, but the man didn’t hear. He turned for his kitchen and placed the carrier on a counter, looking at it for a moment as though its contents brought an unseen risk he was hesitant to take. A small message chip had been inserted into a windowed slot on the edge of the case and Ricky pulled it free before slipping it into his wrist comm. At once, a voice spoke from the recorded note;

  “Hello, Mr. Mills. I am Oliver Allouez, agent and actuary for the estate of Elden Fellsbach. The enclosed document was found among the financial records in Mr. Fellsbach’s apartment and addressed specifically to you. It is access-protected, requiring handprint verification, which you have obviously provided. The case was unlocked in this process, and you are now free to open and retrieve the contents. Also, you will notice a sum of Novum credit tokens Mr. Fellsbach has asked me to transfer into your accounts. Simply instruct your banking facility to provide the details and I will proceed. If you have any questions, or require further information I may be able to provide, please do not hesitate to call my offices. Good day to you, sir.”

  Ricky thumbed the twin latches and pulled up the lid, revealing several data sticks sitting securely in their cradles, but another had been fixed to the inside of the case’s lid and separate from the others. He pulled it free and inserted it carefully into his reader. When it blinked to life, the words made Ricky frown in confusion.

  “Go find our old Sammy. Inside, another stick will show you the way. Follow it. No matter where it leads or how strange it may seem, follow until the task is complete. Ishmael will help, but this must be done and it must be done by you. When you are finished, they will be free. You will be free, too.”

  Ricky felt the cold fingers of worry return. Had the old man gone off in his final days? What could possibly compel him to such lengths, only to deliver a strange riddle that held no clues? He looked closely at the data sticks, suddenly grinning with a nod as he recognized them from so long before.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said out loud, pausing to code in Maela’s comm number.

  “Richard?”

  “A courier just dropped off a package; I think you need to see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure, but it’s from Elden; he must’ve made it before he was killed.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  When Maela arrived, Ricky thumbed one of the sticks into a reader.

  “What have you got there?” she asked, looking over Ricky’s shoulder.

  “Data sticks; the man handling Elden’s estate sent a courier just now.”

  “What’s on them?”

  “I don’t know. Mister Anthony, the man who showed me how to run the hustle, used to get them for Elden once in a while. It was years ago, and he spent a lot of money for them, too, but whatever it was, he didn’t want anyone up there knowing about it—especially the Regulators.”

  Maela’s brow furrowed at the thought, but she nodded for Ricky to continue.

  “Mister Anthony would get a call from Elden, and these sticks were what he wanted.”

  Maela moved to inspect the label closer.

  “Ex Libris?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yeah. I don’t know what that meant, but…”

  Maela blurted out a laugh, catching herself when Ricky stared in confusion.

  “Books, Richard! It’s an ancient language called Latin they used a thousand years ago; it means ‘from the library.’”

  “The ones they used to print on paper?” Ricky asked.

  “They were everywhere back then,” Maela continued. “Jonny’s parents told him about stories they heard when they were very young—from great grandparents, I think. Anyway, they kept books in huge buildings before the Fall, right out in the open. People could go there and read anything they wanted and no one said a word.”

  “I always thought that stuff was made-up,” said Ricky with a smile.

  “It sounds like your friend bought transcriptions of old books copied over into these data sticks.”

  “Goddamn it,” Ricky said as the terrible truth became clear; “if the Regulators ever caught him with those things…”

  “Yes,” Maela nodded, “and that’s why Elden needed people like you and this other guy, Anthony, to find them. I’ve heard about underground operations where people bring and sell them and then other people speak the words into an ordinary text program so the Regulators won’t know. It’s risky, but they make a fortune doing it; these might be some of those narrated copies.”

  Ricky looked at a stick where it lay in the palm of his hand.

  “I guess there’s only one way to find out, right?”

  The stick snapped into place and its text appeared on his monitor in seconds, but the words were alien and cryptic.

  Oedipus and Antigone.

  Ricky advanced the reader to the next file.

  How Green Was My Valley.

  He looked close and read another aloud.

  “To Kill a Mockingbird?”

  Maela leaned close, mesmerized by the words. She recognized some of them, but most could only hint at their true meaning. She continued the list at a near whisper.

  “And Quiet Flows the Don; The Tale of Genji; Moby-Dick; Lord of the Flies; Atlas Shrugged; The Good Earth…”

  “These are all old book names?” Ricky asked.

  “They’re made-up stories from long before the Fall,” Maela replied.

  “You recognize them?

  “A few,” Maela replied, “but Jonny’s mom and dad would probably know them all. When we were first dating, he worried I would tell the Regulators, but after he figured out I don’t like those assholes any more than he does, we talked about books and he told me what they said inside. Well, some of them, anyway.”

  Ricky smiled again, speaking also in hushed tones as if reverent to the meaning he knew each title held for Elden.

  “All this time, I imagined they were some secret code fragments, or processes he wanted to develop and sell. Mister Anthony insisted it was wasted money, but I didn’t believe it; Elden didn’t waste money. He was reading these old stories!”

  “Dangerous,” Maela said at last. “This shit would’ve gotten him indicted in ten seconds; the Regulators don’t tolerate crimes like this.”

  “Crimes?” said Ricky suddenly. “They’re that bad?”

  “Jonny said his parents never talked
about them with strangers, and he was always sent to his room when they discussed them with his aunt and uncle. It scared him, worrying somebody would break in and take his mom and dad to the cylinders.”

  They looked at more titles while the list scrolled through, but after a while, Maela wanted answers.

  “This isn’t getting us any closer. We don’t have anything to go on except that strange note; let’s start with that and see where it leads.”

  Again, they read the odd sentences, but still nothing made sense.

  “Run a search,” Maela said at last. “Try ‘Ishmael’ first and see if it finds something.”

  Ricky inserted the first stick and set the program to look for Elden’s words, waiting only seconds before it finished scanning the vast collection, holding at the beginning of the Moby-Dick text. There, the reference appeared, but the bizarre narrative that followed brought only more confusion. Maela tapped in the rest of the note and again, the scan did its work, stopping to highlight a single passage and she read it aloud:

  “‘It was a shocking bad wound,’ began the whale surgeon; ‘and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy…’”

  Maela looked at Ricky.

  “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No,” he replied, his face screwed up into a mask of confusion.

  “Well,” she continued, “your friend seemed to think you’d recognize it, and he wouldn’t have left all this shit for you to read unless he wanted you to find something.”

  She looked at the words again, as though re-reading them would somehow force them to a revelation. A moment later, Ricky smiled and rose quickly, nodding his head with the surety of one who understood after all.

  “Elden, you son of a bitch!” he declared with a laugh.

  “What?” Maela asked.

  “Read the next part.” He grinned.

  She narrowed her eyes at the following paragraph, mumbling the passage quickly.

  “‘Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,’ interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; ‘go on, boy.’”

  Maela sat back with a nod.