Armintor considered the question a moment. “I think you did a good job making her forget about her rehearsed speech.”
Twomanrie waved her hand. “Yes, yes. But what did you think of what we learned?”
“It’s strange that she didn’t see her husband at all either morning. I know they sleep separately, and that they have maids and stuff, but it still seems strange that they wouldn’t even take one minute to say goodbye.”
Twomanrie nodded. “I agree. Not sleeping together is rather common. Not saying goodbye, however, is a little bizarre. They are married, after all. Did they despise each other, I wonder? Tell me what else you noticed.”
Sifting through the information they’d learned, Armintor said, “Well, she said she believed her husband was murdered, but the reason for it never came out.”
“No, it didn’t,” said Twomanrie with a smug expression.
“I know you did it on purpose—her not telling us, I mean—but I’d like to know what she would’ve said.”
Twomanrie shrugged. “Her story is always waiting in her brain, if I ever need to access it.”
At that moment a ray of sunlight snuck through the clouds at the western horizon and illuminated the park. Everything turned lucid, fresh, luminous. Droplets of water shimmered upon the leaf buds. Armintor felt a bittersweet longing. For a home, for affection, for a true place in the universe.
In the next instant the clouds closed in again, and it began to rain. And she felt the same premonition of doom as she had earlier in the afternoon. The skin on her neck crawled. She looked behind them, but no one was there.
Twomanrie made a sound of annoyance. Had she felt the premonition too? “Did you feel that?” Armintor asked.
“Of course I feel it. We should have brought our rain-repeller jackets.”
“I wasn’t…” Armintor wanted to say, I wasn’t talking about the rain, but she stopped herself. Twomanrie didn’t like it when she spoke about anything not factual and verifiable.
“Finish your sentence. You know I hate it when you trail off in the middle of speaking.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t remember the jackets.” It was her job to bring those necessities. To facilitate Twomanrie’s life, so Twomanrie herself could concentrate only on those things she wanted to.
“I am not angry. It’s part of your nature to be forgetful,” Twomanrie said.
I’m not forgetful, Armintor wanted to say. But she didn’t. Twomanrie hated to be gainsaid. Even more than she hated when Armintor didn’t finish her sentences. Even more than when Armintor wanted to go anyplace alone—however brief—that wasn’t Twomanrie’s idea. Even more than she hated when Armintor noticed something that she herself hadn’t. But that had only happened once, and it had been trivial, and hadn’t even mattered in the investigation.
But it had happened. Once. Armintor smiled, and ducked her chin to hide it.
“Come.” Twomanrie took a new path. “Hurry, before we get soaked to the skin.”
Chapter 18
Gallawaygg
Date: 2419
The next day dawned overcast and cool. They went to Roxanya Sixer’s residence to interview the human staff.
“We’re going to interview the maid first, right?” Armintor asked.
“No,” Twomanrie said. “I want her to be thinking about our interview and getting more and more nervous.”
Armintor thought back to a few months ago, when they’d been back on Vega-2 to investigate the deaths of ten politicians. Then, Twomanrie had wanted to interview the most important witness right away. She’d said it was because she didn’t want to give them time to get a cover story straight. Armintor didn’t see any difference between then and now, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to give Twomanrie any excuse to still think she was dealing with a Beta.
The other interviews went quickly in the small room they’d been given in Roxanya Sixer’s house. All the servants were adamant that Roxanya Sixer and Ted Tamobi were a committed couple.
“They just sleep apart so’s they get a good night’s sleep. Mr. Tamobi, he thrashes—” The elderly butler cleared his throat. “He thrashed horrible in his sleep. That’s the only reason.”
After he left, Twomanrie leaned forward. “What do you think?”
Armintor shared the most succinct and biting answer she’d thought of during the interview. Twomanrie always liked one or two sentence answers the most. “If I were him, I’d say anything to not get Roxanya Sixer into trouble. She’s his sole employer now.”
Twomanrie nodded with approval. “Exactly. To misquote Mr. Sherlock Holmes, you’re using that head of yours for logic as well as ornament.”
Armintor couldn’t hide her smile. It was the ultimate, rare compliment when Twomanrie actually used a quote from Mr. Sherlock Holmes to praise her.
After the other human servant, a cook, was interviewed, the maid entered the small room they’d been given, her eyes downcast.
“Hello, child,” Twomanrie said with a kind voice. “Sit. Have some water if you’d like.”
The maid perched on the edge of the seat across the table from Twomanrie, reached out for a glass of water, then withdrew her hands and shook her head.
“Just take a deep breath, all right? Good,” Twomanrie used what Armintor thought of as her Calming Friend voice. “I want you to go back to the day before your master died.”
The maid, who’d been studying the pristine surface of the table, snapped her head up. “D-do you mean the day of?”
“No, the day before.”
A small flush crept up the maid’s neck. She blinked several times.
Twomanrie leaned forward. Excitement vibrated her body. “I want you to tell me exactly what you did that day, from the time you awoke in the morning.”
The maid blinked several more times, then in a hesitant voice she began, “I got up at my usual time. Six local. And then I went up to the kitchen, to—”
“In your pyjamas?”
“N-no, of course not!” the maid said.
“Then you’re leaving something out, aren’t you?” Twomanrie changed to the voice Armintor thought of as Shaming Teacher.
The maid met Twomanrie’s gaze, still blinking rapidly. She then told Twomanrie each detail of her morning routine. “And then I went to the kitchen,” she finished.
“Whose breakfast tray did you bring up first?” Twomanrie asked.
“The master’s. I always do—did—the master’s first, since he don’t need me to do anything else for him and it’s just in and out. So I set it up on the table like I always do, and he said he’d get to it in a minute. Then I went back to the kitchen.”
Twomanrie nodded, leaning over to pat the maid on her arm like a dog. “Good. And then?” She had switched to what Armintor called her Exacting But Fair Employer demeanor.
The maid leaned back slightly. “And then I took Ms. Sixer’s tray up. She was already awake and sitting up, ready for her breakfast.”
“Did you see anything unusual?”
“Nope.”
“Did she do anything unusual?”
The maid started to shake her head, but then shifted in her seat. “She was sitting up in bed. Like she was already up for a long time.”
“Did you do anything unusual?”
The maid startled a little. “Me? No.”
Twomanrie switched to what Armintor thought of as her Concerned Friend demeanor. “And you looked out the window. What did you see?”
The maid paled. She stopped blinking. “People,” she whispered finally. “Walking. That’s all.”
They visited the local constabulary.
“All molecules in the house were tested,” said the detective assigned to talk with them. He had the Constabulary Regular, a hook pack that among other things replaced his fingertips with plazstik ones capable of lifting fingerprints and DNA from surfaces and siphoning DNA from the air. One of his eyes had been replaced by a flat black panel that covered his entire eyesocket. As w
ith anyone who had a disfig hook, Armintor found it difficult to look him in the face.
“We also found no trace of anyone entering the house,” the detective continued, “except for the three servants, Ms. Roxanya Sixer and Mr. Ted Tamobi himself for the fifteen days before Mr. Tamobi’s death.”
“And the food he consumed?”
“We scanned every molecule in the kitchen. Nothing.”
Twomanrie leaned forward slightly. “I presume you downloaded data from his optical hook?”
The detective nodded. “We downloaded data from everyone he came into contact with for the month before his death. We found no one he hadn’t known for many years. No one who’d had any contact with the compounds that killed him.”
“And what, exactly, killed him?”
“Every molecule of glucose in his body had been turned to ethanol and carbon dioxide.”
Twomanrie looked taken aback. “You mean he… he fermented?”
The detective nodded. “He fermented.”
This is the strangest case,” said Twomanrie as they walked through the park. “Though it gives me much to go on. For as Mr. Sherlock Holmes once said, the most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or specific features from which deductions may be drawn.” She nodded her head once, decisively. “I need to consult the library.”
But those words revealed merely the preoccupation of Twomanrie’s thoughts, for of course there was no library in the city, or indeed on the planet. The government kept some historical paper documents in cryostorage, but that was all. Anyone under the age of twelve used a flake or other handheld to access the sphere. Everyone over the age of twelve used the sphere, data pushing or the Underworld.
Unfazed as far as Armintor could tell, Twomanrie asked the hotel’s front-desk mecha to make an appointment with a chemist at the university, and to help them hail a skimmer. “I want you to interview the chemist,” she said on the way to the university.
“Me? By myself?” Armintor flushed with joy.
“I will be in the room, but yes. I believe you are ready to take the lead on an interview.”
Armintor flushed again. Twomanrie was trusting her to interview an important source. After all these years, finally she was acknowledging that Armintor wasn’t stupid.
“What do you know about fermentation?” the chemist asked, peering at them with overly large brown eyes above a thin nose. They all sat on stools in one corner of a small, white lab.
The chemist reminded Armintor of her mother, with her cold, intelligent stare. But she shouldn’t let that distract her right now. She glanced at Twomanrie before she said, “I only know that—”
“Not much,” interrupted Twomanrie. “As my mentor once said, I consider a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. Until now, I’ve never considered facts about fermentation useful enough to store.”
The chemist nodded twice, as if she were confirming the limited intelligence of the general populace, and of unhooked people in specific. “Well, the yeast molecule is actually a fascinating organism.” The chemist turned away slightly, as if lecturing to herself. “It’s boundlessly energetic. As long as it has fuel it will happily go along converting one thing into another. It won’t stop until it runs out of fuel.”
“What exactly does it convert?” Armintor asked.
“It converts carbohydrates—sugars—into gases, alcohol or acids.”
“So if it converts—” Armintor began.
“Does it need to be a closed system to work?” Twomanrie interrupted.
The chemist jolted back to the present and stared at Twomanrie. “Do you mean to ask if yeasts need an anaerobic environment?” She shook her head emphatically. “No. Yeasts are quite forgiving. They love their little processes so much that they’ll take almost any environment as long as it meets their basic needs. The environment can be aerobic, although the yeast prefers to ferment rather than aerobically respirate.”
“What about the human body?” Armintor asked quickly, before Twomanrie could ask another question.
“Ah. The human body.” The chemist’s prosthetic hand grasped at air, as if itching to perform an experiment. “Yeasts are present in the human body. Between the toes of some people, for instance.”
Armintor glanced at her feet.
The chemist gave a small chuckle. “Don’t worry. Those yeasts are relatively benign. And, of course, we have yeasts in our gut microbiome.”
Armintor opened her mouth to ask about the microbiome, but Twomanrie got her question out first. “So yeasts are integral to human survival?”
The chemist shrugged. “Some are beneficial. But I’m not convinced they’re crucial. Human biology is complex enough that if gut yeasts didn’t exist, we would still find a way to thrive.”
“Are they ever dangerous?” Armintor asked.
The chemist nodded. “There are yeasts that can colonize the body. Infect us. Kill us, with the right catalyst and under the correct conditions.”
“So could a yeast—”
“So a death by yeast is common?” Twomanrie interrupted.
Armintor’s eyes burned from unshed tears. This was supposed to be her first interview. Why couldn’t her mentor see her as capable?
“Not common,” the chemist said. “But it does happen. Mostly to the immunocompromised, the aged. And a yeast colony takes a long time to progress.”
Armintor leaned forward, forced her question into the pause while Twomanrie was still inhaling. “Then why did Ted Tamobi die so quickly?”
The chemist focused her large brown eyes on Armintor and smiled. “That was no common yeast. It was manufactured—indeed, carefully crafted—to kill humans. It devastated the victim’s body. A pity, really. Mr. Tamobi was a donor to the chemistry department.”
Armintor wracked her brains to try and think of the perfect follow-up question, but she couldn’t come up with one before Twomanrie asked, “And who, in your mind, could have created such a thing?”
The chemist shrugged. “No way to tell. And don’t forget, whoever gave it to him merely needed to purchase it.”
Armintor saw Twomanrie’s nostrils flare in irritation. Obviously the chemist didn’t know that Twomanrie hated being told things she’d already realized.
Good, she thought. I hope you realize how annoying it is to be condescended to. Then she ducked her head, worried that her mentor would see the thought in her eyes.
To her surprise, instead of asking more questions, Twomanrie stood to go. Armintor saw regret in the chemist’s face. As if the conversation hadn’t progressed far enough. As if there were something still interesting in her brain that she wanted to share.
“Is there anything else you can tell us about the person who dosed Mr. Tamobi?” she asked.
The chemist smiled, revealing a different facet of her personality. She suddenly seemed kindhearted. “That is a good question. I have to say that it might not have been one person. It could have been a them.”
Armintor slid to the edge of her stool. “What do you mean?” She heard the eagerness in her own voice. She hoped Twomanrie did too. She was asking the questions Twomanrie had missed.
“Mr. Tamobi must have been primed. He died almost instantly—for a person who ferments from the inside—so he had to have been primed for the fermenting agent. The catalyst.”
Terrified exultation shivered through Armintor’s entire body. She didn’t dare look to gauge Twomanrie’s reaction to her successful questions. “So you’re saying he was primed outside the home? And then he got the catalyst inside the home?”
“Well, perhaps. How long had he been home when he died?”
“About two hours.”
“Then most certainly he’d been primed before that. The yeast worked devastatingly quickly. I’d say he was primed at least forty-eight hours previously. And it could have been months beforehand.”
“Does the constabulary kno
w this?” Armintor asked.
“The constabulary doesn’t consult with us at the university.” The chemist’s tone said that it was the constabulary’s crucial mistake. “But whoever did it, we should just hope they’ll never turn this yeast loose upon the general populace. It would cause devastation as bad as the Blue Mist Plague. Not that we…”
The Blue Mist Plague. A rushing sound flooded Armintor’s mind. The chemist’s voice drowned.
She jumped to her feet. “Thank you for your time.” She stumbled to the door. She couldn’t let her first interview—her sort of first interview—fail. But her vision darkened and the lab door disappeared. She collapsed against a table.
“I can’t breathe,” she gasped. Her lungs burned as if they were filled with water, as if she’d never breathe again.
Hands gripped her head, gently pushed it forward and down. Easing the pressure. Allowing air to flow into her lungs.
“Breathe,” a voice said, patting her head. “Breathe.” Twomanrie.
Later, she came to stark awareness in her hotel room. Gasping for breath, she sat up.
“There, there,” Twomanrie said, sitting on a chair at the side of the bed. “Are you feeling better?”
“I ruined the interview.”
“Of course you didn’t. You even helped me discover the crucial clue.”
“I—” Armintor cut off her angry words. She hadn’t helped. She’d done the discovering herself. But she couldn’t tell Twomanrie that.
“Finish your sentence. You know I hate it when you do that.”
Armintor wanted to tell her, Stop treating me like a child. You wouldn’t have gotten that clue if it weren’t for me. Give me credit instead of hoarding it all to yourself. But she didn’t dare. Instead, she asked, “You aren’t angry?”
Twomanrie gave a small smile. “What kind of monster would be angry at you for grieving for the death of an entire planet’s worth of human life?”
At Twomanrie’s kind answer, Armintor’s anger disappeared under a wave of gratitude. Easing back down upon the pillow, she made a sound halfway between a sigh and a sob. “I thought I’d gotten over it.”
The Disk Mirror Solution (Galaxia Mortem Book 1) Page 13