“Leave the fish with me,” said Miranda shortly.
Carioca’s mood changed so suddenly that I suspected she was only too glad to have the brute taken off her hands. “That’s so good of you, Miranda,” she cooed. “I told Joe you’d see reason. I do hope your foot is better.”
“I was forced to apply to the Ambulatory Organ Pool for a graft, no thanks to you. It seems to be taking well.”
“The Ambulatory Organ Pool?” Carioca was staring at Rosalie, who was feeding a shoal of tuna. “But you have a bonded girl. They don’t allow you the use of the Pool when you have a bonded girl. A bonded girl is supposed to take care of all such requirements.”
“It so happens that Rosalie is a good worker and I need her intact—and it also happens that I have a certain amount of influence at the state pen. The officials and I are on very good terms. Naturally, I had to wait a week or two until a suitable donor was matched with me, and I had to pay a considerable amount of money for the treatment. But then,” said Miranda Marjoribanks, smiling fondly, “no amount of money is too large when dear Rosalie’s appearance is at stake. She’s such a pretty girl.”
The bonded S. P. girl was leaning against the far side of the enclosure, chatting to a young man whom I recognized as Jonathan Bartholomew, son of Hector Bartholomew the famous artist, and himself a creator of emotion mobiles of no small merit. Young Bartholomew and Rosalie seemed very friendly, and I recalled hearing that Miranda Marjoribanks had acquired a couple of Bartholomew originals recently. There are indeed wheels within wheels, on the Peninsula.
“I question the legality of your operation, Miranda,” Carioca was saying sternly. “I also question the morality, but you know that very well. It’s bad enough that the Pool should be available gratis to freemen, but to hear that spare limbs can be bought like avocado pears is little short of terrifying. You will receive a strong letter of protest from the Foes about this.”
“I’ve no doubt I shall,” replied Miss Marjoribanks airily. “If your organization can afford the postage, that is.”
It was a difficult morning all around. When finally I got rid of Carioca and arrived back at my farm, I found Warren Rennie waiting for me.
“I’d like a word with you about the alleged sabotage at the Skipper’s Marina, Joe,” he said. “I’ve had the lab go over Doug Marshall’s harness, and I’ve made a few inquiries here and there. It seems there might be something in what Doug says. This is off the record, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Now, I’d like you to tell me again what you remember of that night.”
I hesitated. As time went by my recollections seemed to have become more hazy. I saw Dave Froehlich emerge from the factory; he was approaching us. “I’ve got to make this clear, Warren,” I said. “I was stoned out of my mind that night. Here and now, it’s difficult to remember just what did happen. Perhaps if we went along to the marina I could reconstruct it. That might be easier.”
“Fine. Are you free now?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Sagar,” Dave interrupted, holding something out. “Before you go. This letter arrived this morning while you were out.”
With an uncertain feeling in my stomach I saw the envelope was postmarked Halmas. I tore it open and read:
Dear Joe Sagar,
Sorry we had to open your letter to Marigold because our Marigold is not here since she take ship north. You say in your letter you will visit us later in the summer well this will be very nice. It is sad that Marigold is not here since she take ship, but you say she was with you. Yet we think you are saying she is now back with us well she is not and we don’t know where she is. If you know where she is will you please tell us because her mother and all of us are very worried.
Respectfully yours,
Aldo Carassa.
Rennie was waiting for me to go, but I needed time to think, to consider the implications before I discussed the letter with him.
“Something’s come up,” I told him. “Can we leave things for a while?”
He looked at me sharply. “Not too long, Joe. I’d like you at the marina just as soon as you’re free, if you don’t mind.”
12
For a few days I avoided Rennie and the club while I busied myself with very necessary work about the farm, leaving instructions with the S. P. girl nearest the visiphone to tell the policeman I was out, if he called. He did call on two occasions, and later I was forced to creep off into the bush when I saw his hovercar approaching down the track. It was a demeaning experience.
It was Rennie’s personality which threw me, and the piercing way he had of looking at me. I couldn’t rid myself of the memory of his unpleasantness when he’d decided I’d spent the night raping an unconscious girl. It was apparent he needed only the smallest excuse to mistrust me; and if he found out that Marigold had not arrived home he would quite likely jump to the conclusion that I had her chained naked in some dungeon at the mercy of my lurid perversions.
Yet the overall situation was alarming, even suspicious. Gallaugher had assured me, one night in the club, that Marigold had been sent home with the other immigrants. Was it possible that she’d escaped in some way before the clipper lifted off—or had she in fact completed the journey but was too ashamed to face her parents?
Or maybe Gallaugher had lied to me. He was a small man and too fat for his age, and he wore extremely thick pebble lenses which made it difficult to assess the expression on his face. He drank gin. He was, in fact, an obnoxious character and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that he had retained Marigold for his own purposes. A rambling prison full of crooks and prostitutes and dope addicts would be the perfect hiding place for a kidnapee.
Round about this stage in my reasoning it occurred to me that I was allowing my dislike of Gallaugher to run away with me. Possibly the man honestly had believed that Marigold had been on the clipper; maybe he had been misinformed. I had got no further than this in my deliberations when Rennie finally ran me to ground, and I agreed to meet him at the Skipper’s Marina on the following morning.
On the afternoon before this I visited Joanne in the pen and found her in good spirits. She smiled at me warmly and I felt my heart warm too, and I ached to hold her against me. She seemed to have gained a little weight and her eyes sparkled with mischief as she taunted me, and refused to commit herself as to what she intended to do when she was released. When I watched her face—her bright eyes and pert, snub nose; her freckles and thick hair which fell to her shoulders—when I saw all this loveliness I didn’t think about her hands at all. Neither did I think of her hands as I lay in bed that night thinking of her; in my imagination she was perfect, and it seemed to me that she would come to love me, given time.
But the following morning I awoke in a gray mood and the weather matched my gloom as the rain swept the window; and I couldn’t bear to think of Joanne because it all seemed so hopeless.
After a while I dressed and went downstairs, ate breakfast, and went out into the yard. I found Dave standing in an empty slithe pen, staring disconsolately at the mud. The rain was blowing in from the sea. He didn’t look at me.
“We’ve lost twenty slithes from this pen, Mr. Sagar. They’ve disappeared overnight.”
“You must have left the gate open.”
Now his eyes met mine; there was defiance there. “I closed the gate last night.”
“Don’t talk crap. No land shark could get over this wire. It’s six feet high, man.” The slow anger was rising in me. Dave ought to know better than to take me for an idiot. I thought.
Unfortunately the pen in which we stood was near to the factory, and the S. P. girls were crowding the doorway, watching us.
“If I said I shut the gate I mean I shut the gate!” Dave’s voice was raised too. “I tell you something climbed over the top!”
It seemed as though the frustration of months was building in Dave, and for some inexplicable reason I had the urge to make things worse, to provoke him until he compl
etely lost his head. “And I tell you I don’t believe you,” I said harshly. I was sick of his attitude, sick of his shifty looks. “You’re making excuses for yourself, Dave.”
“You’re only saying that because I’m an S. P. man,” he muttered.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean you wouldn’t call me a liar if I wasn’t an S. P. man. Just because I’m bonded to you, you think you can say what you like!”
There was a chorus of agreement from the girls and one of them called out, “Quite right, Dave! You tell the bastard! These freemen seem to think they can treat us like animals! They’ve made second-class citizens out of us!”
I sighed, feeling unutterably depressed, my rage burned out. It was a new group of S. P. girls but they thought just the same as the old group. I had a wild notion of closing the whole place down, sending everyone back to the pen, then starting again with regular free employees. The profits might be less, but so would be the problems. And it would be great not to be greeted by Dave’s surly face every morning.
“Listen to me, Dave,” I said tiredly. “Doesn’t it occur to you that I’d ball anyone out if I thought he’d left a gate open, whether he was a freeman or an S. P. man?”
“I know what I think,” he mumbled, face sullen. The girls scowled at me from the factory door. They were all united in hatred of me—just because I hadn’t served time, just because I was honest.
The rage surged up again, quick this time, and maddening. “Well, you know what I think?” I shouted. “I think you’re a lot of stupid bastards! You’re too goddamned stupid to stay out of the pen! You say I treat you like animals—well, maybe that’s because you are animals.” I tried to recover my composure before I hit someone. “Now get back to work, all of you, and let’s hear no more of this crap. The next one who brings up this second-class citizen thing will be reported to the warden.”
The fattest and oldest S. P. girl—incidentally the least efficient—stood her ground, arms akimbo, while the others ranged themselves uncertainly behind her. “You’re the one who’s going to be reported to the warden, Mr. Goddamned Sagar. You’ve gone too far this time, speaking to us like that. You’ll get no more work out of us.”
“Dave!” I snapped. “Ship them back to the pen. Bring me a fresh batch.”
“You won’t get any more girls here!” shouted the fat one. “Not when Mr. Lambert hears what we’ve got to say!”
I turned away. “Dave,” I said, “you’re still my bonded man. I’m directing you to deal with this situation—I have to get along to the marina. Now get these cows out of here. I’ll expect to see new faces when I get back, and I’ll expect to see them smiling, for Christ’s sake. I want no more trouble-making from anybody—and that includes you.”
As I drove to the marina to meet Warren Rennie I knew for the first time that the Foes of Bondage were right, all along the line. If it hadn’t been for the Foes’ composite personality I’d have realized it before; but the sight of a crowd of screaming women is naturally prejudicial to a man’s attitudes. But now I knew. The theory of the Penal Reform Act was fine, but in practice it couldn’t work—people aren’t made that way. Bondage created tensions between principal and servant and was wide open to abuse. Compulsory labor by hired prisoners held connotations of slavery which were never far below the surface, and again clouded the whole relationship between employer and employee. And as for the Ambulatory Organ Pool … that was abhorrent, no matter what Heathcote Lambert said.
It was a pity, but it seemed to me the only answer was to go back to the old system of locking prisoners away at public expense. Maybe the real problem was people; and the real answer, the abolition of crime. Whatever the solution, there was nothing I could do about it.
Except, maybe, to disassociate myself from the whole business, release Dave from his bond, hire free workers, join the Foes of Bondage and see if I could bring a leavening of common sense into that benighted organization. Joanne would like me to do that.
Rennie was already waiting at the marina slipway when I arrived; as I walked down the slope I saw him bending over a heap of scrap metal, poking about with a stick. He straightened up, greeted me, and immediately wanted me to identify the position of the boat on which the party had been held.
I looked around. The boats were all gone from the slipway now, riding at anchor in the bay or tied up to the marina floats. The muddy concrete was bare of reference points from which I could begin my reconstruction; just a few dinghies lay around, and a scattering of smaller objects: odd lengths of rope and cable, broken lengths of whip, timber offcuts, cotton waste, wooden chocks. “Look. I’m not sure,” I said. “Everything looks different now.”
He produced a large sheet of paper. “I’ve been able to get hold of something which may help you,” he said. “This is the winter slipway plan from the marina office. All the boats are marked. Now, take a close look and tell me where that party was.”
I pondered, then pointed at the plan. “I think it was on this boat. Presdee’s. That’s two boats away from Marshall. You could ask Presdee; he might remember.”
“I already have.” He smiled thinly. “It seems everyone has the same problem as yourself. There were so many parties on so many nights that they have become confused in people’s minds. For the time being, we’ll have to assume it was Presdee’s boat. Now. Let’s stand over there.”
He paced out the slipway, found the imprints of Presdee’s hydrofoil legs still showing deep in the mud which covered this area, while I tried to remember what had happened after I’d departed from the remains of the party. “There was just a girl left, asleep,” I said. “God knows who she was. I climbed out, down the ladder. It would have been about … here.” I pointed. Rennie placed a small red marker on the ground.
“Which way were you facing, after you climbed down?” he asked.
“That way.” I pointed up the slope and to the right. “I started to move away, toward where I thought my car was, and I tripped over a whip … that’s right. It must have been Presdee’s whip. It made one hell of a noise. I lay on the ground for a while—I think I may have been sick—then I heard the noises.”
“Where from?”
“Up there.” I indicated the approximate area and Rennie consulted his plan.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s just about the place where Marshall’s harness was, on a box, so he said. Now, let’s take it from there.”
I was finding that the memory was becoming more vivid and I could even recall the direction of the retreating sounds—probably because I’d been so scared at the time. We followed my recollections up the slipway, across to the right where I’d heard the clattering of cans—and sure enough, there the cans were, abandoned and encrusted with solidified paint. Then onto the grass some distance above the slipway, among the scrub; at that time the alleged saboteur must have been searching, for his car in the dark. Then across to the left, near the marina office, from which direction I’d heard the slam of the car door and the eventual departure. Rennie and I traced the route, and every so often Rennie placed one of his red markers.
Finally we were finished. We made our way to the clubhouse for coffee. “What’s next?” I asked. “You bring the bloodhounds to sniff around?”
He smiled his mirthless smile. “We’ve progressed beyond that, Joe. We use a little brute from Altair called a land lamprey. It’s not very pretty, but it can sniff out anything touched by a human being within the last few weeks. It’s a pity about all this rain, but at least we have some idea of where to start looking.”
“There may be nothing to find.”
“Possibly not. But our man was in a hurry—and it’s surprising what traces a man will leave behind when he’s stumbling through the dark.”
We finished our coffee in silence; then, as he was leaving, I asked him as casually as I could if he’d got any further in his investigations into the brain behind the illegal immigrants.
“No,” he said shortly,
and I had the impression he’d rather I hadn’t asked.
Life went on much as usual for a while, although my latest bunch of S. P. girls refused to work for me after the first week, on the grounds that I abused them physically. Then, on the next day, occurred the spectacular incident which is still talked about on the Peninsula whenever the name of Miranda Marjoribanks comes up.
I happened to be present at Pacific Kennels at the time—as were Carioca Jones, Miss Marjoribanks herself, the girl Rosalie, the artist Hector Bartholomew, and his son Jonathan. The incident served to remind us that in creating pets and playthings for ourselves out of living sea creatures, we do not thereby alter the basic nature of those creatures. The incident is legend now, and the reasons behind it complex, so there is no point in repeating them here.
Briefly, the land sharks in the enclosure at Pacific Kennels went into a feeding frenzy.
Wilberforce started it. For reasons known only to himself and possibly Hector Bartholomew, he sprang from his cage at the enclosure perimeter and attacked Rosalie. There was a large recent shipment of sharks lying around the place,’ and they smelled the blood and became excited. The next thing we knew, they plunged into the fray, attacking Rosalie, Wilberforce, and one another indiscriminately. Eventually we drove them off Rosalie and got her to safety, but not before a few of our reputations had suffered in the panic. The only good to come out of the whole terrible affair was the death of Wilberforce.
The ambulopter was called and Rosalie was flown to the hospital. Jonathan Bartholomew went with her, and Hector went home. Carioca and I accompanied Miranda Marjoribanks into her mock-Tudor house.
“I trust you realize I propose to sue you for every penny you own, Miranda,” hissed Carioca, still trembling. “When I think of the way those savage brutes attacked poor Wilberforce and actually ate him before my very eyes, I feel sick to my stomach.”
The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers Page 12