Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Hannah looked up at Brox. It was not like him to speak so obliquely, to say things in such an indirect, unfocused way. You're wrong, Hannah told herself. It is like Brox. It's like Brox when he's in shock, in mourning, straining to deal with a hurricane of personal emotions and professional crises that all come at once.

  "Go on, Brox," said Jamie. The two humans glanced at each other, in silent agreement that Brox had to say it, had to get the words out there. No one could perform this last part of his current duty for him.

  "Her name is--was--Emelza 401. She--she was an Inquirist, approximately one-quarter of a ranking level above me in the Inquiries Service. And she was my prospective mate. My fiancee, I suppose you would call her."

  Neither Jamie nor Hannah pushed any harder. We know the rest, thought Hannah. You were going to marry her. You were here together working to keep the peace between humans and Kendari. And approximately sixteen hours ago, she was found dead of caffeine poisoning. It was unquestionably a murder. And she died in the office she shared with three BSI agents, with a BSI coffee mug next to her head.

  EIGHT

  DOCUMENT OF DEATH

  Now we know, thought Jamie as he worked the crime scene. Now we know why it had to be this way.

  Why the BSI agents on the scene couldn't take on the investigation. That coffee mug--and the fact that the body was found in their workplace--made them prime suspects.

  Why Brox couldn't do the job all by himself. He was not only too close to the case emotionally--he also had to be considered a suspect. Jamie didn't know anything about Kendari crime statistics, but it was at least a reasonable bet that the percentage of murders that turned out to be domestic disputes wouldn't be that different than the rate for humans--and an awful lot of human murders were committed by spouses, intended spouses, and ex-spouses.

  Why no human--or Kendari--on the scene could do the job. Why both the Kendari and human embassies were in lockdown until Hannah and he could examine the crime scene. Every human and every Kendari, in both embassies, had to be considered a suspect. Emelza 401 had died in the midst of a diplomatic battle for the control of two whole planets. If the murder of one enemy xeno--or, indeed, the murder of one of your own people, staged so as to discredit the opposition--could win that battle for one side or the other, was there a government anywhere, at any time, that wouldn't at least have been tempted by such a prospect?

  Or had Emelza known something, said something, possessed something that could have led to her death? Was she merely a passive victim? Or had she, in some way, been playing the game of worlds herself--and taken one risk too far?

  The worklights from their crime scene kit were powered up and casting harsh cones of cold and clinical brightness down on the sad little scene of death, illuminating the dark corners, making the shadows sharp and hard. Nothing could look right, or natural, or simple in light that hard.

  They decided to examine the nonmedical physical evidence first. The big, obvious item was the coffee mug--but it was rarely a good idea to go for the big, obvious thing first. Hannah and Jamie pulled samples from the dried-up spill off the hard flooring on the human side and the carpeting on the Kendari side. They snipped fabric and did adhesive-tape lift-samples of every nearby surface, but all of that was more or less pro forma. If there was anything there to find, they'd find it--but there wasn't going to be anything there.

  They photographed the rest of the room as well, from the desk chairs placed neatly behind the remarkably tidy human desks and the equally tidy Kendari workstalls to the plain, undecorated walls and doors. Probably pointless, all of it, but there was always the off chance that some mark, some small item might be a clue. Later, they would have the photographs to check.

  Thinking about it for a moment, Jamie wasn't much astonished by the compulsively clean work areas. You wouldn't want to risk leaving anything around for your counterparts to see--not when those counter-parts were onetime enemy agents and likely would be so again in the future.

  The three human desks were arranged identically. On each sat a pencil cup, holding three pencils and three pens, a plastic deskpad writing surface, a stack of blank writing paper, and a set of sockets for a desktop data display and input system. If the agents here had been using anything like standard BSI security procedures--and they plainly had been--the data units were taken away and locked up when not in use. Faint scuff marks on the desk showed where the data system units had sat.

  Once the surrounding area had been examined and recorded, they focused in on the areas of central interest--the victim, and the coffee cup that was the apparent murder weapon.

  Jamie photographed Emelza. Overall views from all angles, close-ups of her head, her feet, her hands clenched into fists. He moved through the process systematically, methodically. One shot after the next. He shifted position to get another angle--and caught himself a moment later, just crouching there, motionless, lost in thought, staring at nothing at all.

  "Jamie?" Hannah called out. "Stay with us, okay? It's bad enough we're nearly losing Brox. You need to keep sharp."

  "Huh? What? Oh--okay." He blinked and forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand. Measure. Photograph. Evaluate. Seek for the small thing, the tiny detail that would speak and tell them big things. Study the corpse as a record, a result, a document that displayed the physical results, the defining marks, of whatever it had experienced, and therefore would show, to a discerning eye, how death occurred.

  Think of the corpse as a thing, an it--not a she, not a person, not the intended spouse of your friend, your enemy, your colleague. Think of the corpse as a puzzle piece, a crossword to be solved, a part of an intellectual game--and not as the centerpiece of an interstellar, interspecies crisis.

  Keep it clean. Keep it simple, Jamie told himself. Solve the crime. Let the victim, and the victim's intended, and the politics, take care of themselves.

  "It'd be nice if it were that easy, wouldn't it?" he said to himself, speaking out loud.

  "What?" Hannah asked, busy herself, doing a quick pencil sketch of the scene. "Were you talking to me?"

  "No," said Jamie. "Not to you." He was going to have a hell of a time keeping things clean, simple, and impersonal if he started out by talking to the dead victim.

  "Okay," Hannah said absently, not really listening as she finished up her drawing. "You just about done with the initial photography of the victim?"

  "Yeah," said Jamie, his voice close to a whisper. "But I'm not in any hurry to finish. I don't know what, exactly, we do next."

  "What do you mean?"

  "What I'm thinking is if this was a--a regular murder, and we had more or less normal facilities, some sort of trained tech would magically appear and draw samples here in the field for analysis, then take the body away to a lab to run tests. We might never see the body again, but we'd get a nice fat data file full of medical evidence. But we don't get that this time--and I don't know how to draw Kendari blood or take tissue samples for toxicology and so on. What happens instead?"

  Hannah glanced over at Brox. He was standing, his back to the crime scene, staring blankly at a patch of very blank wall. He was acting one hell of a lot like a human who had held together until his job was complete, his duty performed, and then fallen apart. It had been an act of sheer will to keep moving forward, get the job done--but now the job was done. He had delivered the human investigators he had been told to retrieve. Now he could let go, unravel, at least a little bit, for a little while.

  "Well," said Hannah, "the obvious answer would be to get someone from the same species, preferably someone who has some expertise in crime scenes, to do the job--and that's Brox. But Brox can't. He's the grieving intended mate--and, let's face it--a suspect. Don't get me wrong. Everybody in both embassies is a suspect, and that BSI coffee mug and the three desks for BSI agents three meters from the corpse don't make it look good for our side. But the whole point of our being dragged in here was to keep from having Brox investigate this one by himself. Eve
n if he wasn't half in shock, even if we were ready to ask him to draw samples from his fiancee's dead body--it would taint the whole case to have him do the work."

  "Then it's up to us," said Jamie. "But I don't know what sorts of samples to take, or how to take them. And that brings us right back to Brox. He's the only one who can walk us through this."

  "No he isn't," Hannah said. "Medical officer. The Kendari diplomatic mission must have some sort of medical officer. So would the human mission."

  "Both of whom are also suspects," Jamie objected. "More so than most of the other embassy personnel, given that this a prima facie poisoning case."

  Hannah gestured to Emelza. "If we found her dead from a blow on the head, would you say that carpenters had to be prime suspects because only a carpenter would know how to use hammers?"

  "I don't see your point."

  "Everyone knows that caffeine is deadly poison to Kendari. They train and train and train every human who comes into contact with Kendari, exactly because it's in such common use with us and it kills them. We all know what the symptoms are, how small the dose has to be, what a Kendari caffeine case looks like. You don't need to be a doctor to know poison will kill you."

  "Point taken. They aren't stronger or weaker suspects than anyone else."

  "Right," said Hannah.

  "So you're saying we pull both medical officers out of solitary?" Jamie asked. "Let them watch each other, and we watch both of them--and maybe Brox will snap out of it enough to watch us watch them?"

  "Right. Brox will know how to contact his side, and have them contact our people."

  "Let's do it."

  But, of course, it was never that easy.

  Ambassador Stabmacher splashed some water on his face, smoothed his hair back with the damp palm of his hand, and did his best to straighten up and smooth over the rumpled clothes he had been in for more hours than he cared to admit. He didn't much worry about his appearance for his own sake, but he knew full well the importance of looking his best for the sake of those he represented. And when that hatch opened in a moment, he would be the visible face of the human embassy on Tifinda.

  The annunciator chimed, and the ambassador folded up the sink, made one last check of his appearance in the mirror, and went to the door. He pushed the intercom button. "Hello," he said.

  "I'm here to escort you," said a voice he heard from the intercom, and also, in more muffled tones, coming through the hatch.

  "Very good," he said. "You'll see what I believe are called tamper-indicator tapes over the seam of the hatch and the hatchway and so on. I'm told that those need to be removed before the hatch is opened, to prevent them from getting jammed in the mechanism."

  "Yes, sir," said the voice once again, in a tone that managed to suggest both due respect for the ambassador, but also a slight weariness at being told how to do your own job by someone who knew far less about it than you did. "I'm photographing the tamper strips now, to demonstrate they were intact, just in case that comes up."

  There was a slight pause, and then a few quiet rustles and scraping noises. "All right, sir. Ready for you on this side."

  The ambassador undid the lock from the inside, and the door slid back into its recess. Ambassador Stabmacher put a smile on his face while at the same time trying to mask his very genuine sense of relief--and then decided there was no point in masking it at all. Who wouldn't be glad to get out? And why not, at least once in a while, let his expression and his voice show the way he really felt, instead of the way he ought to feel?

  "Hello," he said, putting out his hand. "Ambassador Berndt Stabmacher, representing the United Human Governments to the Eminent Masters and the Preeminent Director of the Grand Warrens of the Conclave of Tifinda." He grinned again and shook his head slightly. "How's that for a mouthful?"

  "Senior Special Agent Hannah Wolfson, BSI," said the woman as she took his hand. "Very glad to see you, sir. This is a bad situation. But you know that better than I do."

  "Maybe not. I've been cooped up here quite a while. Things might have changed without my knowing," said the ambassador. He gestured around the small compartment. "Negotiating from voluntary solitary confinement is difficult."

  "There was a lot of negotiating, yes, sir. It took a lot of dickering with the Kendari just to get a deal that would allow me to go through the door on the human-embassy side of the joint operations center."

  "Let me be sure from you that I understand the agreement. The medical officers from the two embassies are to perform the, ah, actual handling of the body, and the two ambassadors, and Inquirist Brox 231, and you and your partner are to observe? Plenty of witnesses all around?"

  "That's about it, sir. Except I believe the Kendari medical officer will be the one doing most of the work. Obviously their medical people will know more about handling one of their corpses. And my partner is watching the body while Inquirist Brox and I collect everyone else."

  "Yes, I suppose that makes sense. Well, let's go pick up our doctor and get on with it. I promise you there are a great number of people who don't want to be kept waiting any longer."

  "We've gathered that much, sir, but I think it might be best if you didn't say anything more until after we have dealt with the primary evidence. I think it would be wise if we waited for a formal interrogation--or debriefing, if you prefer that word."

  "'Hearing,' would come closest, I think. But let's get on with it, shall we?"

  Jamie stood alone--or nearly alone--in the harshly lit center of the joint operations center. He did, after all, have the simulants for company, for whatever that was worth. And, of course, Emelza 401 was there as well.

  He knelt in front of her body and considered it thoughtfully. He knew nothing about her, really. She had been an Inquirist, she was young, and somehow, a group of family members from both sides had concluded she and Brox would be a good match. That was all.

  In the cold, grim world they were working in, it didn't matter if he knew much else, unless it bore directly on how and why she was murdered. He, Jamie Mendez, and Hannah Wolfson, Commander Kelly, and Ambassador Stabmacher, and the BSI, and even Greveltra and his monster ship, had been pulled into all this not because of who she was, or what she did, or thought, or felt, or who did or did not love her, or even because she had died--but simply because of how she had died, and when, and where, and what was going on around her death. All that really mattered about her, to any of them, was that she had been murdered in the midst of delicate negotiations, and in a way that threw suspicion on humans in general, and BSI agents in particular. She had been reduced to a token, a symbol, an excuse.

  "I'm sorry," Jamie said to Emelza. "I'm sorry you're in the middle of all this." In the middle, and yet just about forgotten. Which brought him back to the simulants--over at the edge, and likewise just about forgotten.

  He stood up and walked over to them, stared at them both again. They were doing their deflated-beach-toy routine. But it would be a mistake to underestimate them. Whatever they were, exactly--robots, living beings, some weird amalgam of the two--they were here, in this room, because the Vixa were powerful enough to insist upon it and get their way. Odd to realize that he had more contact with them than any of the other Vixa. Unless Greveltra counted--and Jamie had gotten the very distinct impression from Brox that Greveltra, to some extent, didn't count. Jamie had barely said five words to Zeeraum.

  And if he didn't count, these two--beings, objects, machines, animals--certainly didn't. And what did that say about the "real" Vixa if they surrounded themselves with lesser forms?

  "What are you here for?" Jamie asked the two simulants.

  The two of them stirred and came to life. The humanoid one was moving much faster and more smoothly than he had before. The thing had started out as a cartoonish blob-shaped approximation of the human body, so poorly programmed that it didn't even know to face the person he was speaking to. But it had learned to look up at him and establish eye contact.

  For that matte
r, Jamie realized, the simulant had grown eyes along with a mouth, nose, and ears--or at least simulations of them. They all looked painted on, like the features on a doll or a mannequin. He had a sort of a mop of hair on his head--no, strike that--there were bulges growing out of his head that were colored and textured to approximate a thick mop of hair. "We are here to observe and assist," said the simulant. The words came out of the general region of the mouth, but the mouth itself did not move--nor did any other part of the head. But Jamie recognized the voice--his own voice--all the same.

  Jamie felt as if he were looking through a mirror that produced a blurred and slightly distorted reflection. It was more obvious by the hour that this simulant was making himself over into a copy of Jamie Mendez.

  "For whom do you observe? What are you here to observe?" he asked in Lesser Trade. "And how do you assist? You have not been of any great help so far."

  "We observe on behalf of those who sent us. Our assistance will be provided at a later time and will be of significant help to you."

  "Those answers, I must tell you, are of no help at all."

  "They are the answers we provide. Our assistance will be provided at a--"

  "That's enough," said Jamie. "Quiet."

  He turned his attention to the Kendarian simulant, who pointed his muzzle at Jamie and cocked his head slightly to one side in a startlingly good imitation of one of Brox's mannerisms. "You have had more time to develop and observe than your companion. Will your responses be any more helpful?"

  "We observe on behalf of--"

  "Quiet," said Jamie. It didn't make any sense. Jamie was no expert on diplomatic niceties, but BSI agents had to know the basics. The principles of diplomatic immunity and of extraterritoriality, of an embassy being outside the territory and control of the host government, were to all intents universal. The Elder Race traditions and laws controlling those concepts were virtually identical to human practices.