Asimov's SF, January 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Hello, Niranjana. Where's Dexter?” said Dr. Nnebuogor. Ferron felt the scientist reading her meta-tags. Dr. Nnebuogor raised her eyes to Rao. “And—pardon, officer—what's with the copper?”

  “Actually,” Ferron said, “I have some bad news for you. It appears that Dexter Coffin was murdered last night.”

  “Murdered. . . .” Dr. Nnebuogor put her hand out against the table edge. "Murdered?"

  “Yes,” Ferron said. “I'm Police Sub-Inspector Ferron.” Which Dr. Nnebuogor would know already. “And I'm afraid I need to ask you some questions. Also, I'll be contacting the other researchers who share your facilities via telepresence. Is there a private area I can use for that?”

  Dr. Nnebuogor looked stricken. The hand that was not leaned against the table went up to her mouth. Ferron's feed showed the acceleration of her heart, the increase in skin conductivity as her body slicked with cold sweat. Guilt or grief ? It was too soon to tell.

  “You can use my office,” Dr. Rao said. “Kindly, with my gratitude.”

  * * * *

  The interviews took the best part of the day and evening, when all was said and done, and garnered Ferron very little new information—yes, people would probably kill for what Coffin was—had been—working on. No, none of his colleagues had any reason to. No, he had no love life of which they were aware.

  Ferron supposed she technically could spend all night lugging the cat carrier around, but her own flat wasn't too far from the University district. It was in a kinship block teeming with her uncles and cousins, her grandparents, great-grandparents, her sisters and their husbands (and in one case, wife). The fiscal support of shared housing was the only reason she'd been able to carry her mother as long as she had.

  She checked out a pedestrial because she couldn't face the bus and she felt like she'd done more than her quota of steps before dinnertime—and here it was, well after. The cat carrier balanced on the grab bar, she zipped it unerringly through the traffic, enjoying the feel of the wind in her hair and the outraged honks cascading along the double avenues.

  She could make the drive on autopilot, so she used the other half of her attention to feed facts to the Department's expert system. Doyle knew everything about everything, and if it wasn't self-aware or self-directed in the sense that most people meant when they said artificial intelligence, it still rivaled a trained human brain when it came to picking out patterns—and being supercooled, it was significantly faster.

  She even told it the puzzling bits, such as how Chairman Miaow had reacted upon being introduced to the communal lab that Coffin shared with three other BioShell researchers.

  Doyle swallowed everything Ferron could give it, as fast as she could report. She knew that down in its bowels, it would be integrating that information with Indrapramit's reports, and those of the other officers and techs assigned to the case.

  She thought maybe they needed something more. As the pedestrial dropped her at the bottom of her side street, she dropped a line to Damini, her favorite archinformist. “Hey,” she said, when Damini answered.

  “Hey yourself, boss. What do you need?”

  Ferron released the pedestrial back into the city pool. It scurried off, probably already summoned to the next call. Ferron had used her override to requisition it. She tried to feel guilty, but she was already late in attending to her mother—and she'd ignored two more messages in the intervening time. It was probably too late to prevent bloodshed, but there was something to be said for getting the inevitable over with.

  “Dig me up everything you can on today's vic, would you? Dexter Coffin, American by birth, employed at BioShell. As far back as you can, any tracks he may have left under any name or handle.”

  “Childhood dental records and juvenile posts on the Candyland message boards,” Damini said cheerfully. “Got it. I'll stick it in Doyle when it's done.”

  “Ping me, too? Even if it's late? I'm upped.”

  “So will I be,” Damini answered. “This could take a while. Anything else?”

  “Not unless you have a cure for families.”

  “Hah,” said the archinformist. “Everybody talking, and nobody hears a damned thing anybody else has to say. I'd retire on the proceeds. All right, check in later.” She vanished just as Ferron reached the aptblock lobby.

  It was after dinner, but half the family was hanging around in the common areas, watching the news or playing games while pretending to ignore it. Ferron knew it was useless to try sneaking past the synthetic marble-floored chambers with their charpoys and cushions, the corners lush with foliage. Attempted stealth would only encourage them to detain her longer.

  Dr. Rao's information about the prime number progression had leaked beyond scientific circles—or been released—and an endless succession of talking heads were analyzing it in less nuanced terms than he'd managed. The older cousins asked Ferron if she'd heard the news about the star; two sisters and an uncle told her that her mother had been looking for her. All the nieces and nephews and small cousins wanted to look at the cat.

  Ferron's aging mausi gave her five minutes on how a little cosmetic surgery would make her much more attractive on the marriage market, and shouldn't she consider lightening that mahogany-brown skin to a “prettier” wheatish complexion? A plate of idlis and sambaar appeared as if by magic in mausi's hand, and from there transferred to Ferron's. “And how are you ever going to catch a man if you're so skinny?”

  It took Ferron twenty minutes to maneuver into her own small flat, which was still set for sleeping from three nights before. Smoke came trotting to see her, a petite-footed drift of the softest silver-and-charcoal fur imaginable, from which emerged a laughing triangular face set with eyes like black jewels. His ancestors had been foxes farmed for fur in Russia. Researchers had experimented on them, breeding for docility. It turned out it only took a few generations to turn a wild animal into a housepet.

  Ferron was a little uneasy with the ethics of all that. But it hadn't stopped her from adopting Smoke when her mother lost interest in him. Foxes weren't the hot trend anymore; the fashion was for engineered cats and lemurs—and skinpets, among those who wanted to look daring.

  Having rushed home, she was now possessed by the intense desire to delay the inevitable. She set Chairman Miaow's carrier on top of the cabinets and took Smoke out into the sunfarm for a few minutes of exercise in the relative cool of night. When he'd chased parrots in circles for a bit, she brought him back in, cleaned his litterbox, and stripped off her sweat-stiff uniform to have a shower. She was washing her hair when she realized that she had no idea what to feed Chairman Miaow. Maybe she could eat fox food? Ferron would have to figure out some way to segregate part of the flat for her . . . at least until she was sure that Smoke didn't think a parrot-cat would make a nice midnight snack.

  She dressed in off-duty clothes—barefoot in a salwar kameez—and made an attempt at setting her furniture to segregate her flat. Before she left, she placed offering packets of kumkum and a few marigolds from the patio boxes in the tray before her idol of Varuna, the god of agreement, order, and the law.

  * * * *

  Ferron didn't bother drying her hair before she presented herself at her mother's door. If she left it down, the heat would see to that soon enough.

  Madhuvanthi did not rise to admit Ferron herself, as she was no longer capable. The door just slid open to Ferron's presence. As Ferron stepped inside, she saw mostly that the rug needed watering, and that the chaise her mother reclined on needed to be reset—it was sagging at the edges from too long in one shape. She wore not just the usual noninvasive modern interface—contacts, skin conductivity and brain activity sensors, the invisibly fine wires that lay along the skin and detected nerve impulses and muscle micromovements—but a full immersion suit.

  Not for the first time, Ferron contemplated skinning out the thing's bulky, padded outline, and looking at her mother the way she wanted to see her. But that would be dishonest. Ferron was here to face her
problems, not pretend their nonexistence.

  “Hello, Mother,” Ferron said.

  There was no answer.

  Ferron sent a text message. Hello, Mother. You wanted to see me?

  The pause was long, but not as long as it could have been. You're late, Tamanna. I've been trying to reach you all day. I'm in the middle of a run right now.

  I'm sorry, Ferron said. Someone was murdered.

  Text, thank all the gods, sucked out the defensive sarcasm that would have filled up a spoken word. She fiddled the bangles she couldn't wear on duty, just to hear the glass chime.

  She could feel her mother's attention elsewhere, her distaste at having the unpleasant realities of Ferron's job forced upon her. That attention would focus on anything but Ferron, for as long as Ferron waited for it. It was a contest of wills, and Ferron always lost. Mother—

  Her mother pushed up the faceplate on the V.R. helmet and sat up abruptly. “Bloody hell,” she said. “Got killed. That'll teach me to do two things at once. Look, about the archives—”

  “Mother,” Ferron said, “I can't. I don't have any more savings to give you.”

  Madhuvanthi said, “They'll kill me.”

  They'll de-archive your virtual history, Ferron thought, but she had the sense to hold her tongue.

  After her silence dragged on for fifteen seconds or so, Madhuvanthi said, “Sell the fox.”

  “He's mine,” Ferron said. “I'm not selling him. Mother, you really need to come out of your make-believe world once in a while—”

  Her mother pulled the collar of the VR suit open so she could ruffle the fur of the violet-and-teal-striped skinpet nestled up to the warmth of her throat. It humped in response, probably vibrating with a comforting purr. Ferron tried not to judge, but the idea of parasitic pets, no matter how fluffy and colorful, made her skin crawl.

  Ferron's mother said, “Make-believe. And your world isn't?”

  “Mother—”

  “Come in and see my world sometime before you judge it.”

  “I've seen your world,” Ferron said. “I used to live there, remember? All the time, with you. Now I live out here, and you can too.”

  Madhuvanthi's glare would have seemed blistering even in the rainy season. “I'm your mother. You will obey me.”

  Everything inside Ferron demanded she answer yes. Hard-wired, that duty. Planned for. Programmed.

  Ferron raised her right hand. “Can't we get some dinner and—”

  Madhuvanthi sniffed and closed the faceplate again. And that was the end of the interview.

  Rightminding or not, the cool wings of hypomania or not, Ferron's heart was pounding and her fresh clothing felt sticky again already. She turned and left.

  * * * *

  When she got back to her own flat, the first thing she noticed was her makeshift wall of furniture partially disassembled, a chair/shelf knocked sideways, the disconnected and overturned table top now fallen flat.

  “Oh, no.” Her heart rose into her throat. She rushed inside, the door forgotten—

  Atop a heap of cushions lay Smoke, proud and smug. And against his soft gray side, his fluffy tail flipped over her like a blanket, curled Chairman Miaow, her golden eyes squeezed closed in pleasure.

  “Mine!” she said definitively, raising her head.

  “I guess so,” Ferron answered. She shut the door and went to pour herself a drink while she started sorting through Indrapramit's latest crop of interviews.

  According to everything Indrapramit had learned, Coffin was quiet. He kept to himself, but he was always willing and enthusiastic when it came to discussing his work. His closest companion was the cat—Ferron looked down at Chairman Miaow, who had rearranged herself to take advantage of the warm valley in the bed between Smoke and Ferron's thigh—and the cat was something of a neighborhood celebrity, riding on Coffin's shoulder when he took his exercise.

  All in all, a typical portrait of a lonely man who didn't let anyone get too close.

  “Maybe there will be more in the archinformation,” she said, and went back to Doyle's pattern algorithm results one more damn time.

  * * * *

  After performing her evening practice of kalari payat—first time in three days—Ferron set her furniture for bed and retired to it with her files. She wasn't expecting Indrapramit to show up at her flat, but some time around two in the morning, the lobby door discreetly let her know she had a visitor. Of course, he knew she'd upped, and since he had no family and lived in a thin-walled dormitory room, he'd need a quiet place to camp out and work at this hour of the night. There wasn't a lot of productive interviewing you could do when all the subjects were asleep—at least, not until they had somebody dead to rights enough to take them down to the jail for interrogation.

  His coming to her home meant every other resident of the block would know, and Ferron could look forward to a morning of being quizzed by aunties while she tried to cram her idlis down. It didn't matter that Indrapramit was a colleague, and she was his superior. At her age, any sign of male interest brought unEmployed relatives with too much time on their hands swarming.

  Still, she admitted him. Then she extricated herself from between the fox and the cat, wrapped her bathrobe around herself, stomped into her slippers, and headed out to meet him in the hall. At least keeping their conference to the public areas would limit knowing glances later.

  He'd upped too. She could tell by the bounce in his step and his slightly wild focus. And the fact that he was dropping by for a visit in the dark of the morning.

  Lowering her voice so she wouldn't trouble her neighbors, Ferron said, “Something too good to mail?”

  “An interesting potential complication.”

  She gestured to the glass doors leading out to the sunfarm. He followed her, his boots somehow still as bright as they'd been that morning. He must polish them in an anti-static gloss.

  She kicked off her slippers and padded barefoot over the threshold, making sure to silence the alarm first. The suntrees were furled for the night, their leaves rolled into funnels that channeled condensation to the roots. There was even a bit of chill in the air.

  Ferron breathed in gratefully, wiggling her toes in the cultivated earth. “Let's go up to the roof.”

  Without a word, Indrapramit followed her up the winding openwork stair hung with bougainvillea, barren and thorny now in the dry season but a riot of color and greenery once the rains returned. The interior walls of the aptblock were mossy and thickly planted with coriander and other Ayurvedic herbs. Ferron broke off a bitter leaf of fenugreek to nibble as they climbed.

  At the landing, she stepped aside and tilted her head back, peering up through the potted neem and lemon and mango trees at the stars beyond. A dark hunched shape in the branches of a pomegranate startled her until she realized it was the outline of one of the house monkeys, huddled in sleep. She wondered if she could see the Andromeda galaxy from here at this time of year. Checking a skymap, she learned that it would be visible—but probably low on the horizon, and not without a telescope in these light-polluted times. You'd have better odds of finding it than a hundred years ago, though, when you'd barely have been able to glimpse the brightest stars. The Heavenly Ganges spilled across the darkness like sequins sewn at random on an indigo veil, and a crooked fragment of moon rode high. She breathed in deep and stepped onto the grass and herbs of the roof garden. A creeping mint snagged at her toes, sending its pungency wide.

  “So what's the big news?”

  “We're not the only ones asking questions about Dexter Coffin.” Indrapramit flashed her a video clip of a pale-skinned woman with red hair bleached ginger by the sun and a crop of freckles not even the gloss of sunblock across her cheeks could keep down. She was broad-shouldered and looked capable, and the ID codes running across the feed under her image told Ferron she carried a warrant card and a stun pistol.

  “Contract cop?” she said, sympathetically.

  “I'm fine,” he said, before s
he could ask. He spread his first two fingers opposite his thumb and pressed each end of the V beneath his collarbones, a new nervous gesture. “I got my Chicago block maintained last week, and the reprogramming is holding. I'd tell you if I was triggering. I know that not every contract cop is going to decompensate and start a massacre.”

  A massacre Indrapramit had stopped the hard way, it happened. “Let me know what you need,” she said, because everything else she could have said would sound like a vote of no confidence.

  “Thanks,” he said. “How'd it go with your mother?”

  “Gah,” she said. “I think I need a needle. So what's the contractor asking? And who's employing her?”

  “Here's the interesting thing, boss. She's an American too.”

  “She couldn't have made it here this fast. Not unless she started before he died—”

  “No,” he said. “She's an expat, a former New York homicide detective. Her handle is Morganti. She lives in Hongasandra, and she does a lot of work for American and Canadian police departments. Licensed and bonded, and she seems to have a very good rep.”

  “Who's she under contract to now?”

  “Warrant card says Honolulu.”

  “Huh.” Ferron kept her eyes on the stars, and the dark leaves blowing before them. “Top-tier distributed policing, then. Is it a skip trace?”

  “You think he was on the run, and whoever he was on the run from finally caught up with him?”

  “It's a working theory.” She shrugged. “Damini's supposed to be calling with some background any minute now. Actually, I think I'll check in with her. She's late, and I have to file a twenty-four-hour report with the Inspector in the morning.”

  With a twitch of her attention, she spun a bug out to Damini and conferenced Indrapramit in.

  The archinformist answered immediately. “Sorry, boss,” she said. “I know I'm slow, but I'm still trying to put together a complete picture here. Your dead guy buried his past pretty thoroughly. I can give you a preliminary, though, with the caveat that it's subject to change.”

  “Squirt,” Ferron said, opening her firewall to the data. It came in fast and hard, and there seemed to be kilometers of it unrolling into her feed like an endless bolt of silk. “Oh, dear. . . .”