“Might take a couple of days. We’d nothing scheduled, you know.”
“Well. Next time I risk my neck for the Cause, I’ll be sure to let the Security goons know that they have to abide by your schedule.”
***
“Were you drunk?” their section head demanded the next morning. He was looking at the report Lukas had put into the system that night, when it was obviously far too late for them to go trekking into hostile neighborhoods after shady characters. “Choofing, perhaps? Or are you two, Chord help us all, both congenital idiots?”
“Never drink on duty, sir!” Lukas said with a snappy salute.
“Never touch choof, sir!” Aleks chimed in.
“At a minimum, you could have scanned the girl’s ID so we could check her story and pick her up later if we wanted to question her. If you were even marginally competent, you’d have run her ID on the spot, and if her story did check out, you could have gone back to where you first spotted the boy and questioned the shopkeeper. I’ll have to waste my time reviewing your suitcam footage and getting Records to run facial recog on the girl.”
“No need,” Aleks volunteered. “I’ll get right on that while Lukas goes back to the shop.” The storm that opened the rainy season had settled to a steady drizzle, and the wind was no longer blowing the rain sideways, but no one could call the conditions pleasant. At least whoever reviewed the cams could stay dry.
“No, I’ll do that part. I’m senior to you, anyway,” Lukas corrected him.
The Section Head’s cold, fishy eyes – why did SecHead Henrik always remind him of a dead fish, Aleks wondered – grew significantly colder. Despite the hot, damp air, Aleks shivered slightly.
“As I said,” the SecHead repeated, “I will personally take over investigating the girl, since it is abundantly clear that neither of you has the sense to look beyond a pretty face.”
“Didn’t say she was pretty, sir!” Lukas protested.
“It was a deduction,” Henrik told him, “based on the fact that you young men appear to have dropped twenty IQ points each – which you could ill afford to lose – while utterly failing to interrogate this citizen properly. You did upload your suitcam footage, I trust?”
“Do that immediately, sir!” the two unfortunate juniors chorused.
“No time. Give me your cams, and pick up new ones before you go.”
“Go?”
“Back. To the shop. Both of you,” Henrik said slowly and clearly. “At least you may be able to clarify whether your singularly inept chase targeted a petty thief or a saboteur. And if I send both of them,” he muttered as he turned away, “maybe they’ll add up to one halfwit.”
So there they were, cold and wet after the long hike from the nearest transit stop. Smartcloth might shed water, conserve body heat, and stretch to serve one’s needs, but eventually the clammy damp feeling did soak through. And the shop was closed, the window grilles locked and metal shutters drawn down. At least the shop owner’s neighbor was willing to talk to them, although that was a mixed blessing considering her near-deafness and the way she talked all round their questions.
“Old Benj?” repeated the old woman who kept the sweetstall next door to Benj’s shop. The overhang of the stall protected her from the rain – important, that, for the poor who wore clothes repurposed from a generation before smartcloth. But Lukas didn’t think she would get many customers on a day like this. “What, did he have an accident?
“Where is he?”
“Hmm… if it was a really bad accident, I’d guess he took the coastal train and mebbe one of them cliff turns collapsed again and nobody marked it. Karl!” she shrieked without warning right into Lukas’s ear. “Coast train line blocked again?”
“Been nothing like that on the news, Odd Sal,” objected the rotund Citizen who had been the actual target of her shriek. He joined them in the shelter of the overhang and shook out his rusty black cloak.
Odd Sal lifted her bony chin. “Course ‘tain’t on the news, Karl! You think Them Above would tell us if they’d got a bunch of folk killed with sloppy road maintenance? That there coast road’s a menace, so it is, and the way you can tell,” her voice going down a register as she paused, “the way you can tell is because ‘tain’t never nothing ‘bout it on the news!”
Aleks had to shout at Karl and Odd Sal to shut up as they launched into what was clearly only the latest phase of a long-standing squabble, and Lukas actually pulled Sal back by the shoulders to keep her from wagging one long, dirty fingernail right in Karl’s face. “Clatter and Cacophony!” Lukas cursed. “You two are a living model of disrespect for Harmony. We could hand you over to the peace officers on a charge of willful obstruction – and we will, if you don’t quit bickering and tell us what we want to know.”
Karl and Odd Sal agreed that Benj had shuttered his shop the previous night, before setting off for an annual two-week visit to his married sister and her family. But since Sal insisted that the sister lived on the north coast, and Karl was equally sure she was farming somewhere in the West Downs district, that didn’t get them much farther.
“We’ll just have to get Records to chase down her address,” Aleks said with resignation. “Hey, you two! I’m not through with you yet. What’s Benj’s full ID?”
After a few seconds of listening to them squabble about whether it was BenjP2878 or Benjmin3W4, Lukas shook his head. Neither so-called ID was actually in the proper format. “Just hold out your hands for me to scan your own IDs,” he said, “and buzz off. He’ll have registered his shop with the city,” he pointed out to Aleks. “We’ll just have to get Records to cross-check against the registrations first and then locate the sister.”
“They’re going to love us,” Aleks sighed. “They’re going to love us almost as much as Henrik does. Why don’t we check in the shop to see if there’s any information there?”
“Because it’s locked?”
“Duhhh. A peace officer could break in if he were investigating a burglary, couldn’t he? And this whole case might still turn out to be a burglary, right?”
“And we might be peace officers, and we might have brought a set of lockpicks or at least a crowbar with us, but we aren’t and we didn’t,” Lukas pointed out.
“I bet I can bust the locks on those shutters with a brick or something.”
Here Odd Sal, who hadn’t buzzed off far enough to be out of earshot, intervened. “If the gentlemen want to look at old Benj’s shop, they don’t need to bust it up. Didn’t he slide the key under my door, like he always does when he takes his vacation?”
An inspection of the shop revealed nothing more useful than lamps that didn’t work, chairs missing at least one leg, and a handful of outdated electronic devices; Lukas recognized several voicecoms, a calculator, and a mapper. None of them responded to a spoken command or even to the emergency power switch. “Aleks, quit flicking the switch on that mapper, you’re going to break something!”
“It’s already broken,” Aleks protested, but he put the mapper back with the other electronic things. “Who would want any of this stuff, anyway? My personal CodeX can do everything this junk is supposed to do and a lot more.”
Lukas shrugged. “From the look of this neighborhood, half the residents probably traded their CodeXes for choof and dug out the devices Grandpa used instead of applying for a replacement.”
“That’s just dumb,” Aleks protested.
Lukas shook his head. “If you want a replacement, you have to bring in your broken CodeX. And that’s kind of hard to do after you’ve traded it to a drug dealer.”
“Well, I’m taking the lot back to the office. We’ll ask Engineering to take a look at them. The voicecoms for sure. They might have been used by saboteurs who didn’t want anything traced back to them?” Aleks suggested hopefully. “And it’s not like we have anything else to take back – like a forwarding address for this Benj.”
“That’s barefaced robbery, that is!” Odd Sal complained.
&nb
sp; Lukas held up his hand. “We’ll give you a receipt, of course. Aleks, scan all the device numbers and add a note saying they’ve been temporarily confiscated by Security.”
“Ha! Like Benj’ll ever see them again!”
“If we haven’t returned them before Benj comes back from his vacation,” Lukas said, “he’s welcome to come to the Bureau and put in his claim. Now find me something to carry this junk in!”
It appeared that neither Benj nor his customers bothered with shopping bags. Odd Sal had plenty, though, in all sizes and types, including a stiffened cotton tote bag that would hold everything they were taking. Just to restore a little goodwill, Lukas paid her asking price even though it was, conservatively, three times what the bag had actually cost.
Aleks had to carry the hot pink tote emblazoned on both sides with flowing gold letters that read, “Odd Sal’s sweeties for sweethearts.”
Large letters. And there was no way his smartcloth uniform tunic would stretch to cover the bag.
“Cheer up,” said Lukas with the blithe unconcern of one who had foisted the bag on his junior. “Maybe the gilt will wash out in the rain.”
The lettering proved to be waterproof, but the pink dye drizzled down Aleks’s leg and puddled in his right shoe without appreciably diluting the startling color of the bag.
***
Grigg had to fast-scroll through almost a full day’s worth of mostly pointless activity on each suitcam before he reached the part showing a girl with a shopping basket. He backtracked from there to where they had said the chase began, outside that junk shop, and ran the recording from Aleks’s cam at quarter speed.
It was useless. The boy they’d been chasing showed only as an out-of-focus blur at the edge of the cam’s frame, and the chase itself was nothing but a series of jiggling, unfocused images of the New Citizen slum. Lukas’s cam recording was, if anything, even worse. One of these days he was going to lean on the Bureau for Technology to develop a suitcam with a wide field of vision and a really strong anti-shake system.
He didn’t get any recognizable images until just before they started questioning the girl, and those were useless; they’d already lost the target, and all the suitcams showed were New Citizens contradicting themselves. Eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable; no useful clues to be gained there.
He synched both cams to the start of the interrogation and watched them on a split screen with the sound turned off. Lukas’s cam was terrible – he seemed to have been twitching like a choofer in withdrawal, his hand gestures kept blocking the picture, and half the time he was turned at an angle that displayed the street rather than the subject. The younger man’s cam had recorded a reasonably clear image of the young woman – and as he’d surmised, she was pretty enough to distract both men from their duty, although probably a couple of years older than they were. She was a little bit of a thing, with a neat figure underneath her dowdy buttoned-up tunic and loose pants. A smooth cap of shining dark hair framed a face with large eyes and a mouth with a distractingly full lower lip – when it wasn’t moving. A talker. But bright enough not to interrupt his habbers; at least she kept her mouth shut occasionally, presumably when Aleks or Lukas was speaking... “Slow back 10 segs,” Henrik said, and then, “Begin still selection.” The recording went forward again at quarter-speed.
“Select…select…select… End.” “To SecHead Records, highest. Attach stills.”
Then he backed Aleks’s recording to the first view of the girl, turned up the sound and listened to what had actually been said. She talked quickly and seemed almost credible as she complained about her stepbrother. It seemed her biggest worry was the basket of black-market goodies she’d been carrying, and as she babbled about that Henrik’s eyebrows shot up. If she were as competent and professional a baker as she sounded, that might offer an angle into another group he’d had his eye on.
A ping from Records: the facial recognition program had identified her almost immediately. What, had she been picked up before this? That could be very useful.
“Show results,” Grigg said, and the report came up on his virtual screen, over the running vid of the girl. She had been identified as Devra Fordise, teacher at Wilyam Serman Secondary School. So that was why she was already in Records’ files; disappointing.
What else? Living family: one full brother, age forty, married, two children, application for another child license waiting for approval. No teenage step-brothers, no living parents; so she’d lied to the habbers, and he could prove it. Enough there to bring her in for more questioning.
The biographical record was incomplete: no birth date, no crêche entry records until ‘65, when she was registered as a five-year-old in the care of a grandmother, both parents dead. And even then she was only in part-time crêche care, during school hours; apparently the grandmother liked having a child underfoot afternoons and nights. Women were generally incomprehensible. Note of grandmother’s death, ’73; the child would have been thirteen then. The brother, Rikard, would have been twenty-eight and – yes – already married. He could have applied for the child, but didn’t; the records showed Devra as a ward of the state, entered into full-time crêche care. At fifteen, as soon as was legal, she applied for and got a part-time job with – His eyebrows rose. With Gunter’s Pastry Shop. As apprentice baker. She must have already had significant skills to land a position with the best baker in Harmony City.
She had remained in school and continued living at the crêche for three more years. Application submitted for full-time work at Gunter’s. Passed final academic examinations with – Henrik’s eyebrows rose again – extremely high scores. Work application refused by Bureau for Education; instead, mandatory entry to teacher training program at Harmony University. Completed program in three years; sent to Wilyam Serman Secondary School as Basic Science teacher, where she’d now been working for two years.
Several interesting anomalies, there, but no previous records with Security, Defense, or any other bureaus except Education. A model citizen, then.
A model citizen who’d just spun a string of total fabrications to two rehabilitation officers. Grigg snapped, “Personal transmission, rehabilitation agents Lukas Pasko and Aleks Nikols,” and after the two beeps that let him know he had a direct link to their CodeXes, “Terminate shop search. Return to Bureau, check out a flitter, and go directly to Block P compartment 3F in Harmony Glen Estates to arrest citizen Devra Fordise, ID DF3722a.”
CHAPTER FIVE
On the Monday after Landing Day, Harmony University was all but deserted. Despite the fact that the holiday so often coincided with the start of the rainy season, most students left two days early to make the most of the celebrations and straggled back late to campus, damp and hung over, to begin the fall semester after the holiday.
Lars Eklund, Senior Lecturer in Science Education, had frequently been heard to remark that he looked forward to the unofficial vacation before and after Landing Day as one of the few times in the year when a man could get anything done. This morning, however, he had not yet begun to grapple with the stacks of forms, messages, and student papers that all but covered his desk. His morning mug of kahve cooled on the desk while he stood with his back to it, looking out the window at the silver sheets of rain lancing down seven stories to the ground.
It had been several months since one of his graduate students had shocked him out of the frozen paralysis of grief he’d fallen into after Marina’s death.
In looks Julle was nothing like his petite, tousle-haired Marina. She was modeled more on the line of a Valkyrie: tall and more handsome than beautiful, with braids of tawny-gold hair wrapped around her head. In spirit, though, there were similarities. One being a talent for prodding Lars out of his scholarly peace and into action.
She’d erupted into his office without appointment one afternoon in the spring semester. “You look like skim milk with a couple of frozen thornberries for eyes,” she announced. “Have you even been outdoors this semester?”
“During the long rains, yes,” Julle answered. “But on a beautiful day like this? I bet you’re the only person still scuttling through the tunnels from residence hall to office.”
“Yes,” Lars said. “That’s what I like about them. No people. Now go away. Your job is to write a graduate thesis using all the words the Bureau for Education likes, not to fuss about some old professor’s health.”
“You let me worry about that,” she said. “Come on. We’re going for a walk. You can leave that.” She pointed to his CodeX, and he noticed that she was not wearing hers. What, were they out of fashion these days?
The young were so energetic. It was easier to give in to her than to argue. What did it matter, anyway?
The green quadrangle surrounded by university buildings was full of students like Julle, sprawled out on the grass to read or just soaking up the first really good sunshine of the year. He flinched at the sight of all those healthy bodies, all the arrogance and immortality of youth on display. But Julle led him around two edges of the quad and down a narrow dirt path beside the Social Justice building, where generations of students had taken the short cut between the syncrete walkway and the antique cobblestoned border of the Quad.
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere. I just needed to talk to you where nobody could eavesdrop.”
“That’s a relief. I was afraid you were making me your personal Seniors Exercise project.”
“Not entirely a bad idea,” Julle said, looking him up and down. “But first we need to get the leaflets going again. You’ve got the source materials; I’m in contact with the distributor; it’s high time we went back to work.”
“That’s all over now,” he said. “Ma- my wife was the writer. All I did was copy out her compositions in a legible hand that nobody could associate with us. There aren’t going to be any more leaflets.”
“Why not? They were mostly quotations anyway. What, did you bury the books with Marina?”
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