by Simon Petrie
Something else had caught up with him, too. His handheld was showing ‘message received’. Another call must’ve come through while he was talking to Colum. Climbing aboard the flitter, he checked the handheld’s log: voice only, no callback.
The message was brief. Just five words, intoned in an ominous mechanical accent: “You will meet certain death.”
See? thought Gordon. That doesn’t sound like fun at all.
* * *
Was it too much of an exercise in blind optimism, he wondered, to hope it was simply a wrong number?
He made his way through the plastiglass dome of the Skyward ascent concourse. (Only Skyward would think to fashion its shopfront as what was, in effect, a gigantic greenhouse. Or more to the point, only Skyward would do such a thing on a man-made equatorial ‘island’ with 105% humidity, and then skimp on the air-conditioning … A good proportion of the milling prospective passengers within the concourse looked lost, which might have been true in some cases, but it was more likely they were suffering from the initial stages of heat exhaustion.)
Gordon fanned himself with his handheld, and swore as he noted that the escalator was out again. The stairs held no appeal in this heat.
Colum O’Cable’s hexagonal second-floor office had windows on four sides, which contrived to look out on the beaches, the parks, and the high-end shopping precincts with which Skyward Island was studded, and not on the elevator shafts which were its raison d’etre. It was a nice office, big, solidly constructed—remarkably well air-conditioned—yet Gordon never felt comfortable in it. A lot of that unease could be down to Colum, of course.
“So what’s the deal?” Gordon asked.
“Like I said, simple freight run. One of the tower units.” (Most of the elevator cars were six-storey, and capable of carrying a dozen guests and several staff on the three-day ascent to the Skytop Plaza; but there were a few twenty-storey units, popular for academic conferences, executive retreats, short-run reality-3V shows, and media conventions, and also used for bulky freight deliveries.)
“Carrying?”
“Ah, you’ll like this. Waxworks.”
“Waxworks?”
“Simulations of famous people—or more often infamous, I suppose—fashioned entirely from—”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” said Gordon, curtly. “I was querying the circumstance.”
“Oh. Yeah. The Iyzowt Museum’s going off-planet. Claudia herself, too.”
“Off-planet? Where? Why?”
“Moon, I think. Though we’re only tasked with the job of getting it all to Skytop, of course.”
“Why the tower block?”
“It’s a big collection. Over three hundred pieces.”
“Still, three-hundred-odd waxworks … you’d be able to fit all that on a six-floor module, I’d have thought. I mean, it’s not as though each of them would require their own room.”
“No, old lady Iyzowt wanted the space of a tall unit. Said it was important the waxworks not feel cramped, or forced into anachronistic tableaux.”
“Meaning?”
“Damned if I know. Nix on the idea of putting Ghengis in with Emily Pankhurst, or something like that.”
“She sounds a bit eccentric.”
“Did wonders for the cause of women’s suffrage, by all accounts. Though I can’t really imagine her hitting it off with Gengh—”
“Iyzowt.”
“Oh, Claudia Iyzowt’s more than just eccentric. She’s like a winter’s day on Orkney.”
“Meaning what?” Gordon asked.
“Short, grey, and miserable,” replied Col. “You’ll have a great time.”
“Me and who else crewing?”
“Nobody else on board. Apart from Claudia, and the waxworks, of course.”
“But—but surely, there has to be more than one staff member on board. Regulations. I mean, what if something goes wrong?”
“What can go wrong?” asked Col. “The waxworks aren’t going to cause you any problems. And Iyzowt keeps to herself, from what I’ve heard. You’ll probably hardly see her, the entire ascent. It’ll almost be like taking a vacation, and getting paid for it.”
I get paid for going on vacation as it is, Gordon thought bitterly. It’s called leave. It’s what I’m currently on, supposedly, right this minute. Though he knew from bitter experience—one-hundred-and-eighty-nine-jilted-keynote-speakers-bitter—just how futile such an assertion could be, in disputes with Col.Aloud, he asked, “Don’t suppose I have a choice, do I?”
“According to the sealed section on your employment contract?” Col replied. “In words of one syllable: not exactly, no.”
Gordon opened his mouth, thought better of it, closed it and then said instead, “Right. I’ll do it. Under protest, mind.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Col, smiling, and Gordon suddenly remembered why he’d chosen that ‘baaa-dum’ alert tone for his handheld.
“I need to make a call first, though,” said Gordon. “It should only take five minutes.”
Col waved him away. Audience dismissed.
* * *
Outside Col’s office, the heat had if anything increased as the sun slid slowly down the sky. The twinned elevator shafts, rising seemingly to infinity behind him across the concourse, left a pair of blinding-edged, metres-wide dark stripes that stretched unending across the tiled floor and beyond. Walking through the shadows, Gordon pulled his handheld out of his pocket and thumbed an icon.
“Gordon?” Belle Hopp’s voice sounded anxious and slightly impatient, though that might just have been projection on Gordon’s part.
“Sorry, Belle. Change of plan. Col called.” And Gordon was sorry. He’d been looking forward to this for weeks, for all that it was probably a mistake: office relationships, and all that. (Not that all relationships didn’t have their ups and downs, but …) Then a potential silver lining occurred to him. “I don’t suppose he called you too?”
“No. No, he didn’t,” said Belle. “A couple of months back I paid Sue to fudge my contact details on file. Best day’s salary I ever spent.”
“Sounds like I need to try that, too. Belle, I really am sorry.”
“Not your fault, Gord …” But there was no denying that Belle sounded disappointed, perhaps a little put out. “And … take care, huh?”
“Will do, Belle. Another time?”
“We’ll see. I hope so.”
An alert sounded. “Whoops, better go. I’ve got another call.”
But the caller had already gone by the time Gordon switched icons, leaving only a voice message: “Detective? You will meet certain death.”
Detective.
So, thought Gordon, suddenly uneasy on as many levels as a Skyward freight tower. Probably not a wrong number, then. Pity.
* * *
The twin columns of the space elevator, anchored into the seabed seven kilometres below Skyward Island, towered like a pair of too-straight giant beanstalks. They reached impossibly up to the clouds … and beyond. The sight always seemed to beguile the elevator’s passengers, arriving on the artificial island for what might well be their first trip off-Earth. But the elevator shafts, just a few metres wide but tens of thousands of kilometres high, had long since lost their magic as far as Gordon was concerned. It was just a job, and a job which involved placing a large dollop of trust in a monstrously extended and fundamentally delicate piece of engineering designed to hang upright in exactly the same way that incredibly long lengths of string don’t. If climbing one-twelfth the distance to the Moon in a lightweight, mostly well-designed, and largely airtight building with no real defence against gravity was the sort of thing you enjoyed, then all power to you …
Gordon wasn’t good with heights. Well before he’d reached the top floor of the twenty-storey freight tower, he was feeling shaky. It didn’t help that the building, though still on terra firma, wasn’t properly motionless: currently waiting in fourth place (behind three regularly-sized hotel
modules of the type he normally crewed with Belle and Sue), it lurched in step with its neighbours along the departure facility’s heavy-duty crawlway queue towards the waiting ‘up’ shaft.
He’d let himself in on the basement level and was momentarily startled to be confronted by a couple of large wooden crates and a suit of armour, until he remembered this climb’s cargo. Waxworks. He picked his way past the obstacles—they didn’t look like they’d been properly stowed, but Gordon wasn’t freight handling: he was just listed as ‘staff on duty’. He’d put through a call to Freight, in the half-hour that remained before ascent commenced. It’d only take them a couple of minutes to put things right.
Riding the escaladder up to ground level—the rampway would be ‘off limits’ until the tower was fastened to the elevator cable—he became glad of the brief scare of seeing the suit of armour … unforewarned, the diorama of vampires, werewolves, and zombies that met him in the building’s foyer could have seriously perturbed him. Now that he knew they were just waxworks, they were robbed of (most of) their shock value. Moving awkwardly between them, he took the rampway to the next level.
* * *
He got another shock when, after two-hundred and seventy-five successive waxworks, he encountered Claudia Iyzowt on the seventeenth-floor landing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking a step back from her, thereby knocking a sherriff against a bandit and almost tumbling a gunslinger. “I thought you—”
“Would be taller?” Claudia Iyzowt suggested, peering up at him over her lorgnette.
“No, that wasn’t what I—uh, welcome aboard. Is everything to your satisfaction?”
“Near enough. But where do I go to get a cup of coffee?”
Iyzowt’s smile seemed genuine enough, moreso than Col’s; yet Col had sought to make out that the heiress had some form of character defect. Pots, kettles, low albedo, Gordon thought to himself, wondering if Col might possibly consider ‘humanity’ as a character defect. Aloud he said, “There’s usually a cafeteria on the second floor. But that’s—let me see, fourteen floors down. Fifteen. If you don’t mind a vending machine, there should be one on this level.”
“Would you recommend the vending machine’s coffee?”
I wouldn’t even recommend the cafeteria’s, thought Gordon. “Yes, it’s … fairly pleasant.”
“Good. Then perhaps you’d join me for a coffee?”
“That sounds—” The building shook, and a subsonic growl reverberated throughout its structure. Damn, thought Gordon, recognising the transformation that signalled fastening of the tower to the cable. Over Iyzowt’s shoulder, he watched as a wall receded, thudding shut against another surface, and then folding itself away, accompanied by other noises of architectural reshaping as the building sealed itself around the now-central elevator cable. It wouldn’t be too many minutes now until the ascent started. He’d better put through that call to Freight, to get the items in the basement properly stowed. He pulled out his handheld, activated the call. Dead.
How could there be no signal? The freight depot was just a few hundred metres away …
“Is something wrong, Mr Milkman?” Mrs Iyzowt asked, noticing Gordon’s consternation.
“Mamon,” he replied automatically. “No, it’s—why don’t we go track down that coffee?”
* * *
They were sitting on a plastiwood bench near the vending machine, each drinking a disposable mug of alleged coffee.
“I’m curious,” said Gordon, trying his best not to grimace as he tested, again, whether, like a wine or a cheese, the coffee improved with age. (It didn’t.) “Why the Moon?”
“I’m afraid I’m not really up with current theories of solar system origin, Mr Mailman.”
“Mamon. Though please call me Gordon. No, what I meant was: why are you looking to relocate a large waxworks museum to the moon?”
“Oh, I won’t deny I’m expecting the move to be financially advantageous, from a tourism perspective,” replied Iyzowt. “Though I’d like to think of myself, of the museum in fact, as a kind of cultural ambassador. We’ve had settlements on the Moon for forty or fifty years now, but don’t you think the place is still lacking in atmosphere?”
“Well, I—”
“Oh, there’s Lunar Park, in Copernicus, but not much else for tourists anywhere, really. We’ll be setting the museum up in Tycho. Make a change from all those monolithic black office blocks.”
“I hope it works out for you.”
“And it’ll provide a sense of legacy. Which is a bit of a sore point for me, seeing as I was never able to have children.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Gordon, trying to decide if he wasn’t in fact sorrier at having ordered this coffee.
“Oh, it probably would have worked, if we hadn’t had Jeffrey’s tubes tied …”
“Jeffrey?”
“My late husband,” she explained. “He had a rare medical condition. And he was wanting so much to be here, on this trip, but … he didn’t make it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Gordon said again, taking a sip and wincing. “How did it happen?”
“He was in the following aircar, and they ran into turbulence. But I’ll see him again, I suppose, up there.” She cast her eyes heavenward.
Gordon, mentally picking his way back through her words, was about to ask something.
But the building—the lift-module—shook, in a ‘Right, let’s get this party started’ kind of way. Claudia Iyzowt flinched, almost dropping her purported coffee, and Gordon swore.
“Is something wrong, Mr Merkin?”
“Mamon,” replied Gordon. “Uh—no, this is how the ascent always commences.” And indeed, there was a slight augmentation of weight, as the freight tower started to haul itself ponderously up thirty-five-thousand-odd kilometres of a heavily reinforced cable that had never broken yet. “It’s just that I’d been meaning to contact Freight, to get them to secure the load in the basement.”
“Basement?”
“Yes. The waxworks on the main floors all looked secure, and there’s a job sheet on each floor confirming the work’s been done to standard, but the items in the basement were loose, and could well be damaged in transit. Plus the load’s supposed to be balanced, to minimise wear on the cable. I’d better go tend to the job myself.”
“Well, that sounds sensible. But what are these items in the basement?”
“Just a couple of crates, and your suit of armour.”
“I don’t have a suit of armour.”
“Yes, you do,” protested Gordon. “It’s down in the basement.”
“Mr Marlin, if I had a suit of armour, I’d know it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Do I look like the sort of person who wouldn’t know if I had a suit of armour?”
“Well … uh, what does that sor—”
Claudia was warming to her topic. “I can assure you, there’s no suit of armour in the collection. Waxworks is all about the challenge of presenting the inanimate as living. Where’d be the challenge in a suit of armour?”
“Oh. But if it’s not your …” Gordon felt a sinking sensation, completely overriding the rising sensation of the lift-module as a whole, as the gravity of the situation struck home. That ‘you-will-meet-certain-death’ voice message on the handheld. “Listen, Mrs Iyzowt,” he said, trying not to sound alarmed. “I’d better go and check on this. And I’d suggest you please wait in your quarters, and not open the door until I get back.”
“Is there something wrong, Mr Ma—?”
“Please. Call me Gordon. And I hope it’s nothing. But I really do need to check this.” He excused himself, and moved rapidly to the downward rampway.
* * *
When he reached the basement, he found only the two crates. The suit of armour was missing.
And when he returned to the vending machine, then checked in Mrs Iyzowt’s quarters, she was missing, too. As was most of her door.
* * *
Gordon wasn’t sure what kind of damage would be inflicted on a plastimahogany door by a rampaging villain in a suit of armour, but he was fairly certain that the damage before him was exactly that damage. And of the heiress to the Iyzowt fortune herself, there was no sign. She’d been in the room, though. The cooling mug of vending-machine coffee stood undisturbed on an occasional table near the room’s viewing window.
He pulled out his handheld, switched it to ‘Forensic’ mode, and waved it around the room in an attempt to find clues, DNA, fingerprints. The handheld took a minute to announce the detection of traces of five humans: Gordon himself, Iyzowt, and three long-time members of Skyward’s cleaning detail. Which, regrettably, made a certain kind of sense: suits of armour didn’t have fingerprints.
No extraneous blood, nor skin cells. Not even a length of hair.
A sudden sway in the freight tower’s motion momentarily unnerved Gordon, and he turned to check the doorway behind him: nothing. Probably just turbulence: they weren’t yet clear of Earth’s atmosphere, and the space elevator’s braided filament was not immune to a little atmospheric push-and-shove. But the scene of the crime was never a good place to loiter.
And, obviously, there was the small matter of Claudia Iyzowt herself. As the only staff member in the 20-storey freight tower, he plainly had a duty-of-care towards her. It wouldn’t do to cower meekly in some hidey-hole, while she was in the hands of … who?
He took the escaladder down two flights, and let himself into a dimly-lit storage room with three connecting doorways and a disconcerting conclave of waxwork pirates in sundry menacing poses. After sweeping the room, and those adjoining, for signs of life and detecting only himself, he applied his mind to the tasks at hand, which were, as he saw it: (1) to not get killed, (2) to locate and rescue Claudia Iyzowt in some manner commensurate with task (1), and (3) to apprehend or otherwise immobilise whoever might be the occupant of the suit of armour, provided that this could be effected without breach of (1) and, if possible also, (2). Viewed in this way, the problem constituted a puzzle, and Gordon liked puzzles. (Though he generally preferred them when they didn’t involve all this pain-of-death-or-serious-injury stuff.)