Xenopath - [Bengal Station 02]

by Eric Brown

  Vaughan stilled his implant and enjoyed the respite. He might not have captured the kid, but at least he’d frightened her away from the park. With luck, she would have more sense than to return.

  With luck, she might evade the assassin for a while yet.

  He made for the nearest ‘chute station and home.

  * * * *

  TWELVE

  REAL DANGER

  It was late by the time Sukara cleared away the remains of the meal and Jeff suggested they take a bottle of wine onto the veranda and relax for a while.

  Jeff sat with his outstretched legs propped on the rail. He looked exhausted. He’d eaten his meal quickly, as if he’d had nothing since breakfast, and told Sukara all about his investigations between mouthfuls.

  A warm breeze wafted in, and soft music drifted down from the top level.

  Sukara leaned against him, clutching his hand, and said, “This kid, Pham. She’s in real danger, right?”

  Jeff nodded. “For some reason the killer’s trying to find her.”

  “Because she saw him in the amusement park.”

  He was silent for a while. “Maybe. Or maybe because of something he read in her mind. I don’t know. The only clear-cut fact is that he’s after her.”

  “But you scared her away from the park, right? So she won’t go back there.”

  He tapped his head. “Let’s hope she’s as quick up here as she is at running away.”

  Sukara grinned and dug him in the ribs. “You’re getting old, Jeff! You can’t even catch a seven-year-old kid!”

  “You should have seen her move!”

  “Strange, isn’t it? The other day I saw a girl. She reminded me of Tiger. Now you tell me about this kid. I can’t get Tiger out of my mind.”

  Jeff smiled at her and stroked her hair. “I thought of Tiger earlier. Pham does look a lot like her.”

  Sukara was thoughtful. At last Jeff said, “What is it?”

  “What?”

  “Su, you’re dwelling on something. What is it?”

  “I was thinking... When all this is over. When the killer is caught and the case is closed. Maybe we could find Pham, help her out. You said she’s a street-kid, right? An orphan?”

  “Her parents were killed in a dropchute accident a few years ago. She had a decent job till she decided to see the world.”

  Sukara smiled. “She must be brave, Jeff. To give up a job, and a place to live, and just take off like that.”

  “Brave, foolish. Perhaps they’re the same thing.”

  “Anyway, I’d like to help her. Maybe find her a job up here, give her some money.”

  Jeff hugged her. “We’ve got to find her first.”

  She looked up at him. “You’ll try, won’t you? You and Kapinsky?”

  “Of course we’ll try. The kid’s vital to the case. Hell, I don’t want the killer to get her.”

  She smiled and sipped her wine. Until she’d met Jeff, she’d never tasted wine, only beer. He’d introduced her to red wine, a good vintage from India, as well as many other things.

  She looked up at him. “Jeff?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Are you okay? I mean, reading minds again? You told me what it was like, back then.”

  “That was different, Su. Then I couldn’t turn the damned thing off. The mind-noise was always there, even when I was dosed up on chora. And the drug wasn’t good for me.”

  When Sukara first met Jeff, over two years ago, he had looked pretty awful, thin and haunted, with an addict’s frantic look in his eyes. He’d been a different person, then—depressed and cynical and without hope.

  Then Osborne ripped Jeff’s implant from his head, intending to kill him—and it had been the best thing that had ever happened to Jeff Vaughan. Far from killing him, it had renewed his life, given him mind-silence and allowed him to concentrate on small, day-to-day concerns... Like personal relationships. Sukara had sought him out, detecting something good behind the haunted eyes, and decided that he was the man for her.

  And now he was reading again, all because of her, and Sukara felt more than a little apprehensive.

  “So it’s different, now that you can turn it off. But... but you’re still reading minds, aren’t you? All those evil, cynical minds you said drove you mad back then?”

  He turned to her and stroked her cheek. “You know something? I can bear that, now that I know you. Back then I had no one. I knew Tiger, knew how good she was, but I wasn’t this close to her.”

  “But you read her mind?”

  “Su...”

  “You knew her better than you know me?”

  Jeff sighed. “Su, that’s not true. I never read her. I just picked up her mind-noise, and I knew she was good. I didn’t know her better than I know you. My God, we’ve been together two years now—that intimacy is how I know you’re a good person.”

  She was quiet, choosing her words. “But you don’t want to read me?”

  He hung back his head and stared at the stars. “Su, Su... How to explain?”

  “You said that I should use the mind-shield so that no other telepaths might read what you tell me.” She paused, then went on, “But I think you just don’t want to read my mind, my secrets.” Something awful occurred to her. She stared at him, to observe his reaction. “You don’t want to read me because you might find out that I’m not as good as my sister, right?”

  He returned her stare, shaking his head. “That isn’t the reason at all, Su.”

  “But you don’t want to read something in here, do you? Is it my past? What I did in Bangkok? Is that it?”

  He took her cheek in his hand, cupping it. “Su, what you did back then is what made you who you are today. It’s not that I don’t want to read it, it’s just that... Look, some things should remain your own.” He stopped and closed his eyes. She watched him. She’d seen him do this before, in apparent frustration at being unable to find the words to explain something to her. He opened her eyes and said, “Okay, so we have telepathy. Thanks to some neuroscientist working twenty years ago, some of us can have an operation to enable us to read the minds of others—”

  “I don’t see...” she began.

  “What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t natural. It wasn’t meant to be. If everyone could read each other’s minds, the world would be chaotic. It wouldn’t function. You see, all of us have stray thoughts, desires, that are more fantasy than reality—it’s the animal in us, playing something out on a primitive level. And it’s these that shouldn’t be read, especially by people who are close, who have something special.” He shook his head. “I’m not explaining it very well, but all that matters to me, Su, is you, and your happiness—” he lay a hand on her stomach, “and little Li in there.”

  She said quietly, “So you don’t want to read my mind because you don’t want to find my secrets, my fantasies?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I have no secrets, Jeff. And my fantasies are all about you.”

  Gently, he kissed the top of her head.

  “One day, Jeff, one day will you read me?”

  After a short silence he nodded and said, “Okay, one day, Su, I promise I’ll read you, if that’ll make you happy.”

  She beamed. “More than anything,” she said.

  They finished the wine, and Jeff stood suddenly and scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom, and Sukara wondered whether anyone in the world was any happier than she was now.

  Later, in the early hours, she lay awake and stared out at the gibbous moon and wondered about what she had told Jeff about her secret thoughts and fantasies. She was convinced she had no secrets from her husband, but perhaps Jeff wanted to save himself from reading all her petty irrationalities—her jealousy when they were in the company of other women, her hatred of smooth-talking men in business suits, her grief at what had happened to Tiger... She turned and hugged Jeff to her, and fell asleep thinking that perhaps he was right in not want
ing to read her mind, after all.

  She awoke in pain around six, and tried not to wake Jeff. She sat up, agony like stabbing daggers in her right calf. Jeff awoke, alarmed, and then relieved. “Thought you were in labour, Su,” he said, digging his thumbs into her muscle, easing the cramp.

  He was called away at eight by Kapinsky, just as Sukara was looking forward to a leisurely breakfast talking to him about nothing at all. She had breakfast alone, ate a grapefruit, and drank a glass of Vitamilk until it was time to go for her fortnightly appointment with her midwife. Later she was meeting Lara for coffee. She hadn’t seen her friend from the Thai restaurant for a while, and she had so much to tell her.

  The midwife enclosed Sukara’s stomach in a scanner and she watched the image of her daughter appear on the screen, in full colour and astounding detail. Her baby had grown a lot since the last scan, three months ago. She could tell already that, six months on, their daughter had Jeff’s long face and strong jaw—not Sukara’s round Thai face. She stared at the curled, pink little girl in her womb and could not stop her tears of joy.

  The midwife downloaded the images and Sukara copied them to her handset. She would show them to Jeff after dinner tonight, a special surprise.

  She was well, and the baby was thriving, and Sukara left the clinic in a buoyant mood.

  She made her way to the Himachal Park café to meet Lara, riding a crowded upchute from Level Three and then strolling through the relatively uncrowded lawns of the park.

  It was as she passed a particularly beautiful flowerbed—a blaze of red azalea—that she was struck by a sudden wave of... she could only describe it as despair. She found a park bench and sat down quickly. It was more than despair, a feeling more definite. Almost a premonition. She was so happy now; life was going so well, that she knew, with a terrible certainty, that things could only get worse. She thought for a second that she was going to lose Jeff, but somehow knew that that was not the cause of her despair. It was something to do with her... or the baby. No, not the baby, her. She was convinced, then, that she was going to die.

  She was so happy, and most people in the world were so sad, and she was going to pay for her happiness with an early death.

  Then, suddenly and inexplicably, the feeling passed. She told herself that she was fine. She was fit and healthy and still only twenty-three; she had all her life ahead of her. Years with Jeff, watching their daughter grow...

  It was her hormones, she knew: she was taking on the burden of the world’s despair, feeling guilty for her own good fortune.

  She stood up, suddenly optimistic again, and hurried through the park to the coffee shop.

  * * * *

  THIRTEEN

  THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS

  “So, where do we stand?”

  Kapinsky leaned against the floor-to-ceiling viewscreen, staring out over the ocean with her back to Vaughan.

  He sprawled in a comfortable lounger and gave her a detailed account of everything he’d found out the day before: his infiltration into the Scheering-Lassiter HQ, and the fact that its employees were shielded to a person. He told her about his finding Pham on the surveillance cam, and his investigations which had led to the pix of the Thai assassin.

  He voiced his concern over the assassin’s motives in trying to locate Pham. “What I don’t get,” he said, “is why he’s after her.”

  She turned and stared at him. “Vaughan, she saw the fucking shooting, for Chrissake.”

  He held her stare. “So?”

  “So—she’s a witness. He’s an assassin. Therefore: he wants her dead. It looks pretty fucking simple to me.”

  “Well, it doesn’t look all that damned clear-cut to me, Kapinsky. Listen. Okay, so she saw the killing. Saw Kormier sliced. But there was no way she could’ve seen the killer. He was twenty metres away. It was a dark night.”

  “So, the killer was taking no chances. He read her in the vicinity, and decided to eliminate her. I don’t see your problem.”

  “Dammit, my problem is that he had no reason to kill her. He’s a telepath—he knew she didn’t see him.”

  “So, he’s taking no chances. Listen, we aren’t dealing with your regular Station citizen here. This guy kills for fun. ‘So a street-kid might have seen my handiwork? Great, let’s butcher her while I’m at it.”‘

  Vaughan was silent for a time. “I think it’s more than that. I think it was something he read in her mind.”

  “Yeah, like she might’ve seen him.”

  “No, something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What kind of investigator are you, Vaughan?”

  “Ease up, for Chrissake.” He stared at her, then said, “So okay, what’ve you been doing?”

  “Looking into the Mulraney killing. I’ve come up with something. She was lasered in a park on Level Two. I trawled through the surveillance cams around the place, came up with this.”

  She crossed to her desk and turned the com-screen to face him. She tapped the keypad and a second later the full-body image of a tail, dark-suited guy filled the screen. It was a distance shot, and indistinct. “Gimme that pix of the guy you brought in.”

  He took it from the lounger next to him and carried it across the room, sitting in a swivel chair and staring at the pix on the com.

  Kapinsky held up the pix next to the screen, comparing.

  The two images were similar—both guys were of the same height, the same build.

  Kapinsky looked at him. “But you said there was something not quite right about this guy? Like, he was built like a Westerner but had Thai features?”

  He thought she was going to get into another critical riff—say that there were such people as Eurasians who combined characteristics of both races. He got in first. “Not only his features. There was something wrong about... well, all of him. He didn’t act right. He was a Westerner trying to act like a Thai.” As he said it, he knew how dumb it sounded.

  “But he had a Thai face?” Kapinsky said. Surprisingly, there was no sneer in her tone. “So,” she went on, “look at this.” She tapped the keys again.

  The image bloomed, homed in on the guy’s face.

  Vaughan stared. “He isn’t Thai.”

  The guy was Indian.

  Vaughan looked at Kapinsky. “So Mulraney’s killer wasn’t the guy who killed Kormier and Travers?”

  “What do you think?” she said. “Same height, build, but different faces—gotta be two guys, right?”

  “Seems that way.”

  Kapinsky smiled for the first time that morning. “You ever heard of chus?”

  He stared at her. “Shoes?”

  “C-H-Us. Capillary-holo-units.”

  She opened a drawer of the desk and pulled out a small, flat case. She opened the lid, hinged it back and turned it to show Vaughan.

  The thing inside, nestling in red velvet, resembled a silver face-stocking, connected to what might have been a control box.

  “What is it?”

  “A chu. Watch.”

  She pulled the device from its case and laid it on the desk, then tapped a code into the control box.

  Instantly, the silver filaments changed colour. Vaughan made out flesh tones, a hank of what looked like fair hair.

  Kapinsky held it up. It was as she were lofting a severed head for his inspection, or an empty face mask, its hollow cheeks and open mouth giving the face a ghoulish expression.

  She slipped the mask over her head and adjusted the controls. The face changed, became that of a young woman in her twenties with long fair hair.

  “What do you think, Vaughan?”

  He resisted the urge to tell her it was a big improvement. “Impressive. Never even heard of these things before.”

  “No wonder,” the blonde beauty said, “they’re the latest hi-tech disguise out of Rio. Been available, at exorbitant prices, for about a year.”

  Vaughan nodded. “So... you thi
nk the killer has one of these things?”

  “It makes sense. It’d explain how he looked like a Thai in the plastics factory when he posed as Pham’s uncle, but had the body language of a Westerner.” She pulled off the chu, its features distorting horribly.

  She sat down facing Vaughan and said, “I’ve been thinking about what Shelenkov told us, and what you learned from Kormier’s widow.”