by Paul Preuss
“Not just your tummy, Blakey. You have hungry eyes.” Her voice fell a few decibels, so that he had to lean closer to hear her. Her six-inch mirrored earrings swung like pendulums, threatening to hypnotize him. “All the way here on the liner I could feel your hungry eyes eating at me.”
“How ghastly for you,” he said. He said it louder than he’d intended; adjacent heads turned.
Nancybeth recoiled. “Blake, silly! Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”
“I wish I didn’t.” He took advantage of her temporary retrenchment to gain a few inches toward his goal. “Have you seen the book yet? Do you think Darlington’s given it a decent burial in this mausoleum?”
“What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously. Her chin was abeam his shoulder now, and there was danger she would be swept aft. “Vince has very good taste. I think the gold on the edge of the pages goes really well with the ceiling.”
“That’s what I meant.” He’d finally reached the altar that enshrined the relic, only to discover that it was almost impossible to see; the party guests in the vicinity were using the glass top of the display case as a handy tabletop for their plates and wine glasses. Blake turned queasily away, Nancybeth still with him.
“I’m surprised to see you here without Mrs. Sylvester,” he said bluntly.
She wasn’t sophisticated, but she had a sixth sense for the needs of others, and Blake’s matter-of-factness got through to her; she answered in kind. “Vince won’t talk to Sondra. He invited me ages ago—because he thought I’d drag her along. His idea was that she was going to rub me in his face, and he was going to rub that book in hers.”
Blake smiled. “You’re okay, Nancybeth. You call it the way you see it.”
“I’m seeing it now. And I’m calling it. But it’s not answering.”
“Sorry. Fact is, I’m looking for someone else.”
Her eyes went cold. She shrugged and turned her back on him.
He moved through the crowd searching the faces of strangers. After filling a plate he tried to get away from the crowd and found himself alone for the moment in a small chapellike room off the grotesque glass-domed nave of Darlington’s cathedral. In this small room were cases displaying objects quite different from the run of execrable gimcracks Darlington had pushed to center stage. Inside the cases Blake recognized the fossils of Venusian life that had gotten Darlington’s silly art gallery a place on the map of the solar system.
They were dusty red and gray things, fragmented, morphologically ambiguous. He knew nothing of paleontology, but he understood that these had been authenticated as the remains of creatures that had burrowed and crawled, maybe flapped and glided, during a brief paradise of liquid water and free oxygen that had prevailed millions of years ago, before the catastrophic positive feedback of the greenhouse effect had turned Venus into the acid-drenched, high-pressure inferno it was now.
The remains were more suggestive than descriptive. Scholarly volumes had been devoted to these dozen scraps of stone, but no one could say for sure what things had made them, or left them behind, except that whatever they were, they’d been alive.
Blake brooded unhappily on the puzzle, hardly new to him, that so many people like Vincent Darlington possessed so many treasures of which they had not the slightest conception of value—aside from money, aside from possession itself.
His ponderings were abruptly interrupted.
In the adjoining room a woman’s scream rose above the babble, a man yelled, and in quick succession there were seven very loud whacks—overtaken by a long splintering of glass.
For a moment the air hung still, echoing, before everyone in the crowd began screaming and shouting and fighting each other to get out. Blake dodged panicked refugees and seconds later found himself in an empty room, confronting a bloody tableau.
Sondra Sylvester was writhing in the grip of Percy Farnsworth and a horrified Nancybeth. Sylvester’s heavy silk gown had been slashed by falling glass, and blood was streaming down over her livid face from cuts in her scalp. Her right arm was raised stiffly over her head, where Nancybeth was trying to pull it down to get at the black pistol that Sylvester still held in a steel grip, yelling at her, “Syl, no more, no more…” Meanwhile Farnsworth had Sylvester around the waist and was trying to throw her to the glass-strewn floor; he and Nancybeth had also suffered cuts on the scalp and shoulders. Sylvester’s finger tightened on the trigger and an eighth bullet smashed into the riddled stained-glass ceiling, loosing another shower of fragments.
Then Sylvester dropped the pistol, having exhausted the ammunition clip. She relaxed almost luxuriously into the arms of the others, who suddenly found themselves supporting her.
Blake helped them carry her to the side of the room, away from the glass. So much blood was pouring over Sylvester’s eyes that she must have been blinded by it—scalp wounds flow copiously, even when they’re not serious—but she’d been seeing clearly enough when she sent the first rounds from the illegal weapon into Vincent Darlington’s body.
Darlington lay on his back in a spreading pool of crimson, staring open-eyed through the shattered dome at the tops of tall trees on the opposite surface of the central sphere, his body frosted over with powdered glass.
Behind him, safe inside the case that served as a table for smeared plates and empty glasses, rested the object of Sylvester’s passion.
Sparta was inside a kaleidoscope, its broken bits of glass falling with rapid stuttering leaps into new symmetric patterns that repeated themselves endlessly out to the edge of her vision, and beyond. The slowly spinning vortex of jagged colors seemed to be sucking her into infinity. With each shift, a strung-out, whistling explosion echoed through her mind. The scene was dizzying and vivid—
—and part of her consciousness stood to one side watching it with enjoyment. That part was reminded of a cartoon she’d seen on an eye doctor’s wall, a car speeding across a desert on a long straight road, passing a sign that read “Vanishing point, ten miles.”
She laughed at the memory, and the sound of her own laughter woke her up.
Her blue eyes opened to find Viktor Proboda’s brighter, bluer ones, wide in his square pink face, only inches away. “How do you feel?” His blond eyebrows were twitching with concern.
“Like somebody hit me in the head. What was I laughing about?” With his help she sat up. There was a heavy ache in the muscle of her jaw that brought back an old memory, from circa age fourteen, of an abscessed wisdom tooth. Cautiously she touched her cheek. “Oww! I bet that’s pretty.”
“I don’t think the jaw’s broken. You’d know.”
“Great. Do you always look on the bright side, Viktor?” She pulled herself to her feet with his help.
“We should get you to the clinic. A concussion requires immediate…”
“Hold off a minute. Did you pass your friend Sondra Sylvester on your way in here?”
Proboda looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Yes, in the core, just outside the Ishtar gate. I knew something was wrong from her face. She looked at me but she didn’t even see me. I was thinking about what that mining robot did on Star Queen, and I thought that’s why you came here, so I thought I’d better find you.”
“Thanks… Dammit.” She grabbed at her ear, but her commlink had fallen out. “She knocked it loose. Viktor, call in and send a squad to the Hesperian Museum on the double. Call the museum too, try to warn Darlington. I think she went to kill him.”
He knew better than to ask for explanations. He keyed the emergency channel, but as soon as he mentioned the Hesperian Museum the squad dispatcher interrupted.
He listened, his jaw sagging, then broke the link. He looked at Sparta. “Too late.”
“Is he dead?”
His chin jerked in a nod. “She put four .32 slugs in him. After they grabbed her, she put four more through his glass ceiling. It’s lucky she didn’t kill somebody on the other side of the station.” Still looking on the bright side.
She
touched his arm, half urging him to start moving and half comforting the big, sad cop—recognizing that he was sad for Sylvester, whom he’d admired, not for Darlington, that silly leech. “Come on, let’s go,” she said.
A tall woman was standing in the doorway, Kara Antreen. Rigid and gray, her square-shouldered severity was at odds with the luxury of Sylvester’s office. “Viktor, I want you to take immediate charge of the investigation into the shooting of Vincent Darlington.”
Proboda halted, perplexed. “Not much of an investigation, Captain. There was a roomful of witnesses…”
“Yes, it shouldn’t take long,” Antreen said.
“But Star Queen…”
“You are relieved of your responsibilities with respect to Star Queen,” Antreen said flatly. She cocked an eye at Sparta, daring contradiction. “That’s a new case, now.”
Sparta hesitated, then nodded. “That’s right, Viktor. You’ve been very helpful, and I appreciate it…”
Proboda’s unhappy face grew longer.
“The captain and I should be able to wrap things up pretty quickly,” Sparta said.
Proboda stepped away stiffly. He’d been impressed by Inspector Ellen Troy and had unbent enough to let her know it. He had even defended her to his boss. Now she’d grabbed the first chance to cut him out of the case. “Whatever you say,” he growled. He marched out past Antreen without wasting a backward glance on Sparta.
Alone, the two women watched each other in silence. Antreen was impeccable in her gray wool suit, Sparta was a weary urchin, battered but streetwise. But Sparta no longer felt at a disadvantage. She only felt the need for rest.
“You’ve repeatedly and ingeniously managed to avoid me, Inspector Troy,” Antreen said. “Why the sudden change of attitude?”
“I don’t think this is the place to talk, Captain,” Sparta said, tilting her chin to indicate the room’s invisible bugs and eyes. “Corporations like this one are good at keeping secrets. But it could still be considered a violation of the suspect’s chartered rights.”
“Yes, certainly.” Antreen’s eyelids drooped over her gray eyes—and here was an excellent liar indeed, Sparta saw, who did not betray herself when she had been anticipated, even two moves deep. “Back to headquarters, then?” Antreen suggested.
Sparta walked confidently past her; Antreen fell into step immediately behind. They walked into the spiraling transparent corridor that overlooked the control rooms.
Sparta paused at the rail.
“Something wrong?” Antreen asked.
“Not at all. I didn’t really get to see this on the way in. I was too busy. For someone who’s never left Earth before, it’s an impressive sight.”
“I suppose it is.”
From ten meters overhead, behind the curving glass, Sparta and Antreen peered down at the men and women of Ishtar at their consoles. Some were alert and hard at work, some were lounging, idly chatting with each other, sipping their coffees and smoking their cigarettes while watching on giant screens as loyal robots sliced and shoveled through the underworld.
Antreen’s right hand was in her outside jacket pocket. She leaned in close to Sparta, a movement that an Arab or a Japanese might not have noticed. But she was close enough to make a typical Euro-American nervous.
Sparta turned to her, relaxed, alert. “We can talk here,” Sparta whispered. “They left the eyes and ears out of this stretch.”
“You’re positive?”
“I checked the corridor coming in,” Sparta said. “So let’s stop playing games.”
“What?”
Sparta heard offended dignity, not guilt, overlaying Antreen’s caution—she was excellent. Sparta’s tone grew exaggerated. “By now you’ve got the files I ordered from Central, haven’t you?” She was playing the tough cop from headquarters, dressing down the locals.
“Yes, of course.”
Anger, persuasively laid over confusion, but Sparta laughed in her face. “You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”
Antreen was suddenly prickling with suspicion. She said nothing.
Sparta prodded her hard. “The files on Pavlakis Lines. Get your staff in shape, will you?”—but behind the contemptuous sneer on her bruised and blackened face, Sparta was striving to keep her throbbing consciousness from fractioning again. The broken bits of the kaleidoscope were whirling at the edge of her vision. “If you’d seen the reports you’d know it was that ape Dimitrios, taking it out on young Pavlakis. Revenge. Because the kid ended the forty-year-old insurance con Dimitrios had been running with his dad. Pavlakis played into his hands by hiring Wycherly to protect him—a guy who was already in on the scam, who needed money more than anything and had the added advantage of being a dead man in advance. Got all that?”
“We have that information,” Antreen snapped. Anger again, this time laid over smug relief, for Sparta was talking police work after all. “We have Dimitrios’s statement, the widow’s statement. Pavlakis came to us himself before we could pick him up—before the blowout. He says he suspected it all along, that Dimitrios rigged a phony accident.”
“He did?” Sparta grinned, but it was a weird grin coming out of that swollen, seared face. “Then what are you really doing here?”
“I came to tell…” But this time Antreen couldn’t disguise the shock. “…you…”
“You came for me. Here I am. Took you forever to get me alone.”
“You know!” Antreen looked around wildly. They were hardly alone. But they were isolated from the workers below in a glass tube with no ears. Afterward, what would witnesses make of what was about to happen?
Whatever Captain Antreen told them to think.
Antreen jerked her right hand up and out, but she was close—it had been a mistake to move in so close. Sparta’s own right hand came across the space between their bodies and seized Antreen’s wrist as it cleared her pocket. In a microsecond Antreen was stumbling; Sparta was taking her down sideways along the direction of the resisting arm, using the resistance. Startled, Antreen’s left leg tried to move across for balance, but it went nowhere except into Sparta’s solidly planted left thigh. Antreen dove, but Sparta did not let her dive; controlling the weapon, Sparta never let go of Antreen’s right wrist, and Antreen spun onto her back as she fell. She hit the carpeted floor heavily.
If Sparta had been a little stronger, a little bigger, a little less tired—if she’d been perfect—she might have prevented what happened next. But Antreen was quick and strong and as practiced at unarmed combat as Sparta. With the leverage of her long legs and free arm she rolled, pulling Sparta across her—Sparta brought Antreen’s arm up sharply behind her back as she rolled—another half roll and Sparta would lose her grip; Antreen would be on top of her…
Antreen screamed when she drove the spike into her own spine.
It was a crescendo of pain, but she screamed with more than pain. She screamed in the horror of what was happening to her, what was about to happen to her—what would happen quickly, but not quickly enough.
Sparta yanked the thing out of Antreen’s back almost instantly. Only then did she see what the weapon was. She knew she was too late—
—for the telescoping needle had already sprung out and was writhing like a hair-fine worm in Antreen’s spinal cord, questing for her brain. Although she could no longer feel the fast approaching mind-death, still she screamed.
Sparta tossed the barrel of the empty hypodermic on the mat and sat back, legs splayed, sagging onto her rigid backthrust arms, sucking in great gulps of air. The corridor thundered with booted feet and around its curve a squad of blue-suits appeared, stun-guns drawn. They stumbled to a halt in good order, the front rank to their knees, half a dozen gun snouts pointing at Sparta.
Antreen had kept on rolling, onto her back. She was crying now, great sobs of pity for her dwindling awareness.
Viktor Proboda shoved his way through the patrollers and knelt beside her. He reached out his big hands and hesitated, af
raid to touch her.
“You can’t do anything for her, Viktor,” Sparta whispered. “She’s not in pain.”
“What’s happening to her?”
“She’s forgetting. She’ll forget all this. In a few seconds she’ll stop crying, because she won’t remember why she’s crying.”
Proboda looked at Antreen’s face, the handsome face framed in straight gray hair, a face momentarily stretched into the mask of Medusa but where even now the terror was fading and the tears were drying. “Isn’t there anything we can do for her?”
Sparta shook her head. “Not now. Maybe later, if they want to. But they probably won’t.”
“Who are they?”
Sparta waved him off. “Later, Viktor.”
Proboda decided he’d wait; Inspector Troy said lots of things that went past him the first time. He stood and shouted at the ceiling. “Where’s that stretcher? Let’s get moving.” He stepped over Antreen to Sparta, holding out his hand. She took it and he pulled her to her feet. “Practically the whole company was watching you. They called us right away.”
“I told her it was clean. She was so eager to get me she believed me. What’s happening to her is what would have happened to me…”
“How did you know they’d call us?”
“I…” She thought better of it. “Lucky guess.”
There was a commotion among the police, and the stretcher came through. As the two bearers were kneeling beside Antreen she spoke, calmly and clearly. “Awareness is everything,” she said.
“Are my parents alive?” Sparta asked her.
“The secrets of the adepts are not to be shared with the uninitiated,” Antreen replied.
“Are my parents adepts?” Sparta asked. “Is Laird an adept?”
“That’s not on the white side,” said Antreen.
“I remember you now,” Sparta said. “I remember the things you did to me.”
“Do you have a Q clearance?”
“I remember your home in Maryland. You had a squirrel that slid down a wire.”
“Do I remember you?” Antreen asked.
“And I remember what you did to me.”