In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns
by Elizabeth Bear
Originally published in Asimov’s, January 2012
Police Sub-Inspector Ferron crouched over the object she assumed was the decedent, her hands sheathed in areactin, her elbows resting on uniformed knees. The body (presumed) lay in the middle of a jewel-toned rug like a flabby pink Klein bottle, its once-moist surfaces crusting in air. The rug was still fresh beneath it, fronds only a little dented by the weight and no sign of the browning that could indicate an improperly pheromone-treated object had been in contact with them for over 24 hours. Meandering brownish trails led out around the bodylike object; a good deal of the blood had already been assimilated by the rug, but enough remained that Ferron could pick out the outline of delicate paw-pads and the brush-marks of long hair.
Ferron was going to be late visiting her mother after work tonight.
She looked up at Senior Constable Indrapramit and said tiredly, “So this is the mortal remains of Dexter Coffin?”
Indrapramit put his chin on his thumbs, fingers interlaced thoughtfully before lips that had dried and cracked in the summer heat. “We won’t know for sure until the DNA comes back.” One knee-tall spit-shined boot wrapped in a sterile bootie prodded forward, failing to come within fifteen centimeters of the corpse. Was he jumpy? Or just being careful about contamination?
He said, “What do you make of that, Boss?”
“Well.” Ferron stood, straightening a kinked spine. “If that is Dexter Coffin, he picked an apt handle, didn’t he?”
Coffin’s luxurious private one-room flat had been sealed when patrol officers arrived, summoned on a welfare check after he did not respond to the flat’s minder. When police had broken down the door–the emergency overrides had been locked out–they had found this. This pink tube. This enormous sausage. This meaty object like a child’s toy “eel,” a long squashed torus full of fluid.
If you had a hand big enough to pick it up, Ferron imagined it would squirt right out of your grasp again.
Ferron was confident it represented sufficient mass for a full-grown adult. But how, exactly, did you manage to just… invert someone?
The Sub-Inspector stepped back from the corpse to turn a slow, considering circle.
The flat was set for entertaining. The bed, the appliances were folded away. The western-style table was elevated and extended for dining, a shelf disassembled for chairs. There was a workspace in one corner, not folded away–Ferron presumed–because of the sheer inconvenience of putting away that much mysterious, technical-looking equipment. Depth projections in spare, modernist frames adorned the wall behind: enhanced-color images of a gorgeous cacaphony of stars. Something from one of the orbital telescopes, probably, because there were too many thousands of them populating the sky for Ferron to recognize the navagraha–the signs of the Hindu Zodiac, despite her education.
In the opposite corner of the apt, where you would see it whenever you raised your eyes from the workstation, stood a brass Ganesha. The small offering tray before him held packets of kumkum and turmeric, fragrant blossoms, an antique American dime, a crumbling, unburned stick of agarbathi thrust into a banana. A silk shawl, as indigo as the midnight heavens, lay draped across the god’s brass thighs.
“Cute,” said Indrapramit dryly, following her gaze. “The Yank is going native.”
At the dinner table, two western-style place settings anticipated what Ferron guessed would have been a romantic evening. If one of the principals had not gotten himself turned inside out.
“Where’s the cat?” Indrapramit said, gesturing to the fading paw-print trails. He seemed calm, Ferron decided.
And she needed to stop hovering over him like she expected the cracks to show any second. Because she was only going to make him worse by worrying. He’d been back on the job for a month and a half now: it was time for her to relax. To trust the seven years they had been partners and friends, and to trust him to know what he needed as he made his transition back to active duty–and how to ask for it.
Except that would mean laying aside her displacement behavior, and dealing with her own problems.
“I was wondering the same thing,” Ferron admitted. “Hiding from the farang, I imagine. Here, puss puss. Here puss–”
She crossed to the cabinets and rummaged inside. There was a bowl of water, almost dry, and an empty food bowl in a corner by the sink. The food would be close by.
It took her less than thirty seconds to locate a tin decorated with fish skeletons and paw prints. Inside, gray-brown pellets smelled oily. She set the bowl on the counter and rattled a handful of kibble into it.
“Miaow?” something said from a dark corner beneath the lounge that probably converted into Coffin’s bed.
“Puss puss puss?” She picked up the water bowl, washed it out, filled it up again from the potable tap. Something lofted from the floor to the countertop and headbutted her arm, purring madly. It was a last-year’s-generation parrot-cat, a hyacinth-blue puffball on sun-yellow paws rimmed round the edges with brownish stains. It had a matching tuxedo ruff and goatee and piercing golden eyes that caught and concentrated the filtered sunlight.
“Now, are you supposed to be on the counter?”
“Miaow,” the cat said, cocking its head inquisitively. It didn’t budge.
Indrapramit was at Ferron’s elbow. “Doesn’t it talk?”
“Hey, Puss,” Ferron said. “What’s your name?”
It sat down, balanced neatly on the rail between sink and counter-edge, and flipped its blue fluffy tail over its feet. Its purr vibrated its whiskers and the long hairs of its ruff. Ferron offered it a bit of kibble, and it accepted ceremoniously.
“Must be new,” Indrapramit said. “Though you’d expect an adult to have learned to talk in the cattery.”
“Not new.” Ferron offered a fingertip to the engineered animal. It squeezed its eyes at her and deliberately wiped first one side of its muzzle against her areactin glove, and then the other. “Did you see the cat hair on the lounge?”
Indrapramit paused, considering. “Wiped.”
“Our only witness. And she has amnesia.” She turned to Indrapramit. “We need to find out who Coffin was expecting. Pull transit records. And I want a five-hour phone track log of every individual who came within fifty meters of this flat between twenty hundred yesterday and when Patrol broke down the doors. Let’s get some technical people in to figure out what that pile of gear in the corner is. And who called in the welfare check?”
“Not a lot of help there, boss.” Indrapramit’s gold-tinted irises flick-scrolled over data–the Constable was picking up a feed skinned over immediate perceptions. Ferron wanted to issue a mild reprimand for inattention to the scene, but it seemed churlish when Indrapramit was following orders. “When he didn’t come online this morning for work, his supervisor became concerned. The supervisor was unable to raise him voice or text. He contacted the flat’s minder, and when it reported no response to repeated queries, he called for help.”
Ferron contemplated the shattered edges of the smashed-in door before returning her attention to the corpse. “I know the door was locked out on emergency mode. Patrol’s override didn’t work?”
Indrapramit had one of the more deadpan expressions among the deadpan-trained and certified officers of the Bengaluru City Police. “Evidently.”
“Well, while you’re online, have them bring in a carrier for the witness.” She indicated the hyacinth parrot-cat. “I’ll take custody of her.”
“How do you know it’s a her?”
“She has a feminine face. Lotus eye
s like Draupadi.”
He looked at her.
She grinned. “I’m guessing.”
Ferron had turned off all her skins and feeds while examining the crime scene, but the police link was permanent. An icon blinked discreetly in one corner of her interface, its yellow glow unappealing beside the salmon and coral of Coffin’s taut-stretched innards. Accepting the contact was just a matter of an eye-flick. There was a decoding shimmer and one side of the interface spawned an image of Coffin in life.
Coffin had not been a visually vivid individual. Unaffected, Ferron thought, unless dressing one’s self in sensible medium-pale brown skin and dark hair with classically Brahmin features counted as an affectation. That handle–Dexter Coffin, and wouldn’t Sinister Coffin be a more logical choice?–seemed to indicate a more flamboyant personality. Ferron made a note of that: out of such small inconsistencies did a homicide case grow.
“So how does one get from this” –Ferron gestured to the image, which should be floating in Indrapramit’s interface as well– “to that?” –the corpse on the rug. “In a locked room, no less?”
Indrapramit shrugged. He seemed comfortable enough in the presence of the body, and Ferron wished she could stop examining him for signs of stress. Maybe his rightminding was working. It wasn’t too much to hope for, and good treatments for post-traumatic stress had been in development since the Naughties.
But Indrapramit was a relocant: all his family was in a village somewhere up near Mumbai. He had no people here, and so Ferron felt it was her responsibility as his partner to look out for him. At least, that was what she told herself.
He said, “He swallowed a black hole?”
“I like living in the future.” Ferron picked at the edge of an areactin glove. “So many interesting ways to die.”
Ferron and Indrapramit left the aptblock through the crowds of Coffin’s neighbors. It was a block of unrelateds. Apparently Coffin had no family in Bengaluru, but it nevertheless seemed as if every (living) resident had heard the news and come down. The common areas were clogged with grans and youngers, sibs and parents and cousins–all wailing grief, trickling tears, leaning on each other, being interviewed by newsies and blogbots. Ferron took one look at the press in the living area and on the street beyond and juggled the cat carrier into her left hand. She slapped a stripped-off palm against the courtyard door. It swung open–you couldn’t lock somebody in–and Ferron and Indrapramit stepped out into the shade of the household sunfarm.
The trees were old. This block had been here a long time; long enough that the sunfollowing black vanes of the lower leaves were as long as Ferron’s arm. Someone in the block maintained them carefully, too–they were polished clean with soft cloth, no clogging particles allowed to remain. Condensation trickled down the clear tubules in their trunks to pool in underground catchpots.
Ferron leaned back against a trunk, basking in the cool, and yawned.
“You okay, boss?”
“Tired,” Ferron said. “If we hadn’t caught the homicide–if it is a homicide–I’d be on a crash cycle now. I had to re-up, and there’ll be hell to pay once it wears off.”
“Boss–”
“It’s only my second 48 hours,” Ferron said, dismissing Indrapramit’s concern with a ripple of her fingers. Gold rings glinted, but not on her wedding finger. Her short nails were manicured in an attempt to look professional, a reminder not to bite. “I’d go hypomanic for weeks at a time at University. Helps you cram, you know.”
Indrapramit nodded. He didn’t look happy.
The Sub-Inspector shook the residue of the areactin from her hands before rubbing tired eyes with numb fingers. Feeds jittered until the movement resolved. Mail was piling up–press requests, paperwork. There was no time to deal with it now.
“Anyway,” Ferron said. “I’ve already re-upped, so you’re stuck with me for another forty at least. Where do you think we start?”
“Interview lists,” Indrapramit said promptly. Climbing figs hung with ripe fruit twined the sunfarm; gently, the Senior Constable reached up and plucked one. When it popped between his teeth, its intense gritty sweetness echoed through the interface. It was a good fig.
Ferron reached up and stole one too.
“Miaow?” said the cat.
“Hush.” Ferron slicked tendrils of hair bent on escaping her conservative bun off her sweating temples. “I don’t know how you can wear those boots.”
“State of the art materials,” he said. Chewing a second fig, he jerked his chin at her practical sandals. “Chappals when you might have to run through broken glass, or kick down a door?”
She let it slide into silence. “Junior grade can handle the family for now. It’s bulk interviews. I’ll take Chairman Miaow here to the tech and get her scanned. Wait, Coffin was Employed? Doing what, and by whom?”
“Physicist,” Indrapramit said, linking a list of coworker and project names, a brief description of the biotech firm Coffin had worked for, like half of Employed Bengaluru ever since the medical tourism days. It was probably a better job than homicide cop. “Distributed. Most of his work group aren’t even in this time zone.”
“What does BioShell need with physicists?”
Silently, Indrapramit pointed up at the vanes of the suntrees, clinking faintly in their infinitesimal movements as they tracked the sun. “Quantum bioengineer,” he explained, after a suitable pause.
“Right,” Ferron said. “Well, Forensic will want us out from underfoot while they process the scene. I guess we can start drawing up interview lists.”
“Interview lists and lunch?” Indrapramit asked hopefully.
Ferron refrained from pointing out that they had just come out of an apt with an inside-out stiff in it. “Masala dosa?”
Indrapramit grinned. “I saw an SLV down the street.”
“I’ll call our tech,” Ferron said. “Let’s see if we can sneak out the service entrance and dodge the press.”
Ferron and Indrapramit (and the cat) made their way to the back gate. Indrapramit checked the security cameras on the alley behind the block: his feed said it was deserted except for a waste management vehicle. But as Ferron presented her warrant card–encoded in cloud, accessible through the Omni she wore on her left hip to balance the stun pistol–the energy-efficient safety lights ringing the doorway faded from cool white to a smoldering yellow, and then cut out entirely.
“Bugger,” Ferron said. “Power cut.”
“How, in a block with a sunfarm?”
“Loose connection?” she asked, rattling the door against the bolt just in case it had flipped back before the juice died. The cat protested. Gently, Ferron set the carrier down, out of the way. Then she kicked the door in frustration and jerked her foot back, cursing. Chappals, indeed.
Indrapramit regarded her mildly. “You shouldn’t have re-upped.”
She arched an eyebrow at him and put her foot down on the floor gingerly. The toes protested. “You suggesting I should modulate my stress response, Constable?”
“As long as you’re adjusting your biochemistry…”
She sighed. “It’s not work,” she said. “It’s my mother. She’s gone Atavistic, and–”
“Ah,” Indrapramit said. “Spending your inheritance on virtual life?”
Ferron turned her face away. WORSE, she texted. SHE’S NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO PAY HER ARCHIVING FEES.
–ISN’T SHE ON ASSISTANCE? SHOULDN’T THE DOLE COVER THAT?
–YEAH, BUT SHE LIVES IN A.R. SHE’S ALWAYS BEEN A GAMER, BUT SINCE FATHER DIED… IT’S AN ADDICTION. SHE ARCHIVES EVERYTHING. AND HAS SINCE I WAS A CHILD. WE’RE TALKING TERABYTES. PETABYTES. YOTTABYTES. I DON’T KNOW. AND SHE’S AFTER ME TO ‘BORROW’ THE MONEY.
“Ooof,” he said. “That’s a tough one.” Briefly, his hand brushed her arm: sympathy and human warmth.
She leaned into it before she pulled away. She didn’t tell him that she’d been paying those bills for the past eighteen months, and it was getting
to the point where she couldn’t support her mother’s habit any more. She knew what she had to do. She just didn’t know how to make herself do it.
Her mother was her mother. She’d built everything about Ferron, from the DNA up. The programming to honor and obey ran deep. Duty. Felicity. Whatever you wanted to call it.
In frustration, unable to find the words for what she needed to explain properly, she said, “I need to get one of those black market DNA patches and reprogram my overengineered genes away from filial devotion.”
He laughed, as she had meant. “You can do that legally in Russia.”
“Gee,” she said. “You’re a help. Hey, what if we–” Before she could finish her suggestion that they slip the lock, the lights glimmered on again and the door, finally registering her override, clicked.
“There,” Indrapramit said. “Could have been worse.”
“Miaow,” said the cat.
“Don’t worry, Chairman,” Ferron answered. “I wasn’t going to forget you.”
The street hummed: autorickshaws, glidecycles, bikes, pedestrials, and swarms of foot traffic. The babble of languages: Kannada, Hindi, English, Chinese, Japanese. Coffin’s aptblock was in one of the older parts of the New City. It was an American ghetto: most of the residents had come here for work, and spoke English as a primary–sometimes an only–language. In the absence of family to stay with, they had banded together. Coffin’s address had once been trendy and now, fifty years after its conversion, was fallen on–not hard times, exactly, but a period of more moderate means. The street still remembered better days. It was bulwarked on both sides by the shaggy green cubes of aptblocks, black suntrees growing through their centers, but what lined each avenue were the feathery cassia trees, their branches dripping pink, golden, and terra-cotta blossoms.
Cassia, Ferron thought. A Greek word of uncertain antecedents, possibly related to the English word Cassia, meaning Chinese or mainland cinnamon. But these trees were not spices; indeed, the black pods of the golden cassia were a potent medicine in Ayurvedic traditions, and those of the rose cassia had been used since ancient times as a purgative for horses.
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