Analog SFF, December 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "What the hell—"

  "Please,” he said, his attention apparently focused on washing his hands.

  So without further comments I counted up all his marks: forty-seven. I wrote down that number, then my thirty, then the difference.

  He came back to where I stood, pointed at my final figure. “So that's how many helios I must have tagged?"

  "Seventeen, yeah.” Puzzled by his behavior, I turned to look at him. He was squinting at my calculation as if trying to confirm the steps of a complex mathematical proof. After a few seconds he shook his head and let out a heavy, disgusted breath. “Dyscalculia,” he said.

  "What?"

  He snorted. “Calculational apraxia. Numeric dyslexia.” He shook his head again, then busied himself tidying up the workbench. “Had a small stroke last year. No big deal, right? Except that out here it takes kind of a while to get medical attention. So they could only fix most of the damage."

  I stared at him.

  "Damnedest thing. In the end, just two residual problems. I can't do much with this pinky finger—” He waggled his right hand. “—and for anything involving numbers beyond three, I'm completely fucked.” He faced me, his deep-grooved features expressionless. Then he shrugged. “All right, Jenna Dalmas, investigator. What the hell are you here for?"

  His abruptness took me off guard—but I'd been ready for that query since before I'd parked my bike. “Well, two things, actually. Some news to tell you. And a question.” I gestured back toward the living room. “Maybe we should sit down?"

  His gaze was fixed on my face. “This wouldn't be good news, I don't suppose?"

  "No. I'm afraid not."

  He gave a little nod. “Then let's just stay right here and get this over with.” He took a step back and leaned against the bench, his arms crossed over his chest.

  "Right.” I took a slow breath. “Do you remember Rafe Lindquist?"

  That seemed to surprise him. But then he looked annoyed. “Dyscalculia, Ms. Dalmas. Not amnesia. Or dementia."

  "Um ... huh?"

  "Well, I'd damned well better ‘remember’ Rafe, hadn't I? We've only been exchanging messages every few months for—” He paused, then frowned. “—well, for a lot of years now."

  I held up a hand. “Sorry. All I knew was that he'd studied with you back in grad school."

  He grunted. “So what's Rafe to you, then?"

  "We knew each other, a little, back in school. And, um, afterward."

  He gave me a sharp look. “In the uprising, you mean?"

  Not knowing his politics, I braced as I answered, “Yes."

  But he only nodded and looked thoughtful. “Can't say that I recall ever hearing your name."

  "Oh, no, we were only casual acquaintances. And then we fell completely out of touch—until just a couple of days ago."

  He cocked his head to one side, and his expression hardened. “What's happened?” His dried-out voice was quiet but threatening, like the first sprays of dust blowing in ahead of a windstorm.

  "Rafe's dead, Dr. Johnson."

  The air seemed to go out of him, and for a second I thought he might lose his balance. But after a moment he said, “Go on."

  "Somebody killed him the night before last. They were trying to get some information out of him. They messed up."

  He turned his face away from me.

  I waited.

  Finally he spoke. But what he said was, “You must have known my daughter."

  I frowned. “I didn't think you had any children."

  He nodded, still looking toward the nearby wall. “Her mother and I split up before she was born. We didn't register my name. But my daughter and I always stayed in touch. Right to the end, almost.” He faced me again, looked me up and down. “You and Zoe must have been just about the same age."

  My eyes widened. “Wait—Zoe? Not Zoe Patchell?"

  His gaze tight on my face, he gave the barest of nods. “You knew her?"

  "Oh yes,” I said. Recalling her goofy grin one time as she looked up from some hack I'd helped her pull off. Recalling her tiny, distant figure in the stadium, her suddenly limp body collapsing to the blood-slick ground while I still cringed from the shot's echoing report. “Yes,” I repeated. “We met a few times."

  He nodded again, this time as if something in my response had met with his approval.

  Then he shook his head. “And now Rafe. The bastards will get you all, eventually."

  I shook my own head as I tried to correct him. “It wasn't the Committee who killed Rafe. In fact—"

  Suddenly angry, he waved away my objection. “Haven't you figured this out by now? It's not the Committee Police that keep the Central Committee's families in power. No—it's everybody who doesn't rise up and kick the damn Committee and its doubly damned police off this planet! That's who killed Zoe and Rafe: everybody who hears the shots but then just looks the other way. Everybody who thinks about standing up and defying the Central Committee but then pushes those thoughts aside and keeps doing what they're told."

  That struck a little too close to home. I wanted to tell him that you can only ask so much of people. That you can't demand that someone keep sacrificing her entire life for some abstract ideals. That sometimes people just have to survive.

  But I didn't say any of those things. Because—of course—I knew he was right.

  Johnson misunderstood my silence. “I know what you're thinking. That here I am making this speech, while meanwhile I'm as guilty as everybody else.” He sighed. “Well, you're right. We're all guilty.” He paused, and then he glanced at my face with an expression I couldn't decipher. His voice dropped. “Well, almost all of us, anyhow.” And then, as I wondered just whose face he'd seen in that glance, he pulled himself up straighter and said, “Thank you, Ms. Dalmas, for traveling all the way out here to tell me about Rafe. I do appreciate it. I believe you also said that you have a question for me?"

  Huh. For a minute I'd actually forgotten about that.

  I tried to collect my thoughts. All of this talk about guilt and responsibility, and about Zoe, was stirring up feelings that I'd thought I'd lost a long time ago.

  "I'm here because of something Rafe said. When I asked him if he'd heard any rumors about the Warrant."

  A muscle jumped beside his jaw. Otherwise his face could have been stone. “The Warrant?"

  "I don't suppose you'd have any idea what happened to it, after the uprising?"

  Frowning, he squinted at me. “Who's your client, Ms. Dalmas? Who hired you to ask me this?"

  I stared right back. “The Subcommittee on External Affairs.” I wasn't going to apologize to him. I wasn't going to deny the choices I'd made.

  "And they know you're here? That you're investigating me?"

  "Um, no. Not exactly."

  That seemed to intrigue him. “Really? You don't keep your clients informed of your progress?"

  "No, not always. Not every little detail."

  From above his shoulder, the skeleton of a creature with a pair of too-close eye sockets and a long, wide jaw grinned knowingly at my claim.

  "I see,” said Johnson. He gave me an appraising look; after a moment he apparently reached some decision. “Did you know that those people—your employers—have been out here a couple of times since the uprising? Poking around and asking vague questions?"

  Damn! I should have spent more time with Garcia Ortega's data crystal. All this trouble—and Rafe's death—for an already-examined dead end.

  He continued, “I guess they knew about my connection to Zoe. So it was the Warrant they were looking for?"

  I nodded. “It disappeared during the uprising. They want it back, as you might expect."

  "How about you, Ms. Dalmas? What do you want?"

  I opened my mouth, but then realized that I had no answer for him. That simply wasn't a question I ever asked myself.

  He prompted, “Do you want the Warrant in their hands? Or maybe you'd prefer that the Vulesk kick us back to Earth?
Assuming they don't just kill us all, of course."

  His taunting was starting to annoy me. Mostly, though, I was simply exhausted—physically from last night, and now emotionally besides.

  "You know, Dr. Johnson, I don't really have a clue as to what I want. So how's this—you just go ahead and tell me that you have no idea where the Warrant is; then you offer me breakfast. I eat, I leave, we never see each other again. Okay?"

  He glanced once more at my scrapes and scabs and gave me a rueful smile. “You've obviously gone through a lot to come visit me, Ms. Dalmas. I'd really like to tell you what you want to hear—but I'm afraid I can't. The Warrant showed up here the day after Zoe was murdered by the Committee Police."

  If I hadn't been so tired, I suppose I would have said something clever. As it was, I just slumped against the workbench behind me.

  He continued, “Parcel post. She packed it into a box and mailed it to me. Hand addressed; her name wasn't anywhere on the package. The note inside just said, Can you hold this for a while?"

  "So it's been right here all along?” I looked around at the cabinets and shelves. But no, the Subcommittee had already been here, hunting. And if he'd buried it somewhere in the desert, their aerial searches should have turned it up.

  He shook his head. “They had just murdered my daughter. And nobody—none of us—had tried to stop them. Do you think I cared whether someday the Vulesk might disband our colony—or even kill us? All I had to do was destroy the Warrant and eventually the whole colony would get exactly what we deserved."

  A day ago his statement might have made me gasp. Now, though, I wondered what I would have done in his place. Maybe he was right. Maybe our colony had gone too far wrong, maybe we'd proven ourselves unworthy of this new world.

  "So that's it?” I asked. “You destroyed the Warrant?"

  He was slow to answer. Finally he nodded. “I may have. But my best guess is no—it will probably all still be there."

  "Huh.” I was too drained to even work up the annoyance to demand a straight answer.

  "What do you know about salmon-lizards, Ms. Dalmas?"

  I just looked at him. This was his show now. He'd been rehearsing this scene in his mind for eighteen years; I was merely the audience.

  He persisted. “Really. Salmon-lizards?"

  I shrugged. “Small, harmless. Grown on farms, right?"

  "Come here.” He turned and marched toward the end of the room where I'd entered. After a second I followed.

  He pointed to a big terrarium.

  At first all I could see was an empty tank, half full of dry soil. But then something moved against the glass, down inside the soil. Stepping closer, I could make out a system of tunnels. As I watched, a slim, light brown creature twice the length of my middle finger scuttled out of one tunnel and disappeared into another.

  "Incredibly good at hiding from predators,” he said. “Even after a couple of decades, almost all of a brood will survive to return for mating."

  "Return?"

  "Well, yes, that's where they get their name. They always return to their original nest to mate. The entire brood arrives within a day or two of the anniversary of their hatching. After several hours of frenzied mating, they burrow into the ground and build a communal nest."

  "That's where they lay their eggs?"

  "No. That's where they die. The eggs—usually just one per lizard—continue to develop within their parents’ decaying bodies. When the larvae hatch, a plentiful supply of easy-to-digest nutrients surrounds them."

  "Yum."

  "After a few molts, the young salmon-lizards climb to the surface. Once they've rested up and gotten their bearings, they scatter in all directions, each eventually traveling impressive distances—never to meet again until it's time to mate."

  "A couple of decades later?"

  He nodded.

  "And right now I find all this fascinating because...?"

  "Did you know that the Warrant is hollow? And that each of those gemstones has a hole drilled through it? They're beads, actually, strung on a complicated wire frame."

  He paused, then, as if his non sequiturs should now have answered all of my questions.

  It took me a few seconds to put the pieces together. Then I stared at him. “No,” I whispered. “You didn't...."

  He returned my gaze. “I just couldn't bring myself to destroy it. Not right away, anyhow. Maybe someday there'd be another uprising. Maybe someday there'd be people living here who didn't deserve exile or death."

  "But ... well, just how big is a brood of salmon-lizards?"

  He held up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. Right—he couldn't do numbers anymore. But he said, “More lizards than beads, if that's what you're asking."

  "So you took the Warrant apart...?” I shook my head in wonder, trying to picture him—still coping with the news of Zoe's death—driving out into the desert to find a newly hatched brood of salmon-lizards preparing for their diaspora. Capturing them. Popping one of the Warrant's gems into each belly, sealing the incisions with his purple cement. And then releasing the lizards into the desert.

  He said, “I recorded the disassembly, of course, so it could be reversed someday. Several of the lizards are carrying copies of that recording."

  "How thorough of you,” I said, dumbfounded by the insane risk he'd taken with the colony's future. But then, he'd already been prepared to condemn us all.

  What about that wire frame, though? He couldn't fit that into a lizard. He'd have to hide it someplace safe, somewhere that—oh.

  Impressed, I glanced across the room toward his workbench. Toward the pyramidal wire rack he used for drying his instruments.

  He granted me a small smile. Not so much acknowledging his own cleverness, I thought, as expressing his satisfaction with me for figuring things out.

  "Okay,” I said slowly. “So then you just wait for the lizards to come home. A couple of decades, you said—?"

  He nodded. “The exact schedule varies from one brood to the next—so the nest site has to be checked each anniversary until they show up. I've been out there a couple times so far."

  "But they'll return in the next few years, right? Before the Vulesk arrive?"

  He snorted. “How the hell should I know?"

  "Let's hope,” said a familiar female voice through the room's doorway, “that they return very soon."

  Carla stepped into the lab, the neat little maser pistol in her hand pointing my way. Daniel entered behind her, carrying the rifle I'd left with my bike.

  "Keep your eye on the Professor,” she told him.

  Before the stacked terrariums, Daniel took a careful stance. Holding the rifle at waist level, he aimed it toward Johnson's chest. Then, for just an instant, he glanced at me; he didn't look happy.

  "Well,” I said, “you two must have gotten up early."

  Her mouth smiled. Her gray eyes didn't. “We'd have been here even sooner if we hadn't wasted so much time on that loser hotel manager."

  "Roger? He doesn't know anything! What did you—"

  For a second her smile deepened. Then she shrugged. “Nice trick you played on us.” The tip of her pistol gestured toward my bandaged arm. “Must ache a bit, huh?"

  I peeked at Johnson. He was staring at Carla, his expression fixed and grim. His index finger twitched every few seconds.

  She said, “I should have thought of your damned motorcycle. Still, it's not like there were a lot of fresh bike tracks leading away from Glendora this morning. Or a lot of possible destinations in the direction they pointed."

  I nodded toward her gun. “I thought you said you weren't my enemy."

  "Things certainly would be going smoother if you'd believed me. We're a bit beyond that now, though, don't you think?"

  Daniel turned toward her. “But—"

  "Daniel." She spoke his name like a teacher firmly cautioning a child.

  He pressed his lips together and, after a guilty glance my way, returned his attention to
Johnson.

  Johnson's stony silence was making me nervous. I worried that he'd make some sudden, stupid move. So I told him, “These two have been following me for days. Carla here claims that they're from some secret underground resistance movement. And that they want the Warrant so they can force through some big political changes."

  He nodded. “They the ones who killed Rafe?” he asked.

  Uh-oh. Hoping that he wasn't about to try anything, I moistened my lips. “Well—"

  "It was an accident!” Daniel blurted. “We—"

  "Daniel!" Carla looked quite annoyed. But she still kept her eyes on me.

  Their interchange hadn't perturbed Johnson's expression. Staring at Carla he said, “And now you're going to have an accident with us."

  She seemed surprised. “Why, no—not at all! I'm simply going to ask you a few questions, and then we'll be on our way."

  I didn't suppose that Johnson bought that any more than I did. I asked, “What questions?"

  "We were listening to you two for several minutes, you know, from the other room. So, Professor, now all you need to tell me are the coordinates of the salmon-lizard nest and the anniversary date."

  His dried-out voice was as quiet as before. “Go to hell,” he told her.

  Her head shook sadly. “Disappointing. Oh well. Daniel?"

  He avoided my gaze as he lowered the rifle and set it against the cages. Carla stepped to one side as he walked past her toward Johnson.

  She pointed her maser between us and said, sweetly, “If either of you tries anything, the other one cooks."

  Daniel reached into a pocket and pulled out an injector.

  "Daniel,” I said, “you don't have to do this! Don't take the chance. Not again."

  Frowning, he looked at me, then at Carla. Then he shook his head as if to clear it and fired the injector into the side of Johnson's neck.

  Johnson gasped. His whole body tensed, and his eyes opened very wide. For a long moment he didn't move, except for a slight swaying.

  Then, finally, he exhaled and relaxed.

  I hadn't realized that I'd been holding my own breath. I let it out and exchanged a relieved glance with Daniel.