“Everyone on that project was cleared by three security agencies.”
“All it would take would be for one of them to look the other way,” Mace said. “If one of them had a vested interest in seeing the project fail, maybe?”
“Too much speculation.”
“And we still don’t have a motive,” Mace said, nodding. “After all, no other transport terminal on Mars was hit. In fact, that project has been one of the most sabotage-free of any in Signatory Space. No one seems to object to Mars having a transport system.”
“But that was the first leg built by PolyCarb,” Cambel said.
“So? The other legs—”
“Martian contractors mainly, but there was a lot of Lunessa input. Materials and so forth.”
Mace nodded slowly “Trade?”
“Nothing you’re saying,” Nemily said, “makes any sense to me. Who are these people? What’s Hellas Planitia?”
“Hellas Planitia is where Mace’s wife died,” Cambel said.
“It’s on Mars? That’s what Koeln said.”
Mace looked at her narrowly. “What did Koeln say?”
“He told me your wife had died on Mars.”
“Why would he bring that up?” Cambel asked.
Nemily looked from one to the other, uncertain. She wanted to talk to Mace, alone. She waited.
Mace stood, scowling. “None of this makes a reasonable connection to me. As far as it goes, Koeln’s investigation is completely separate from SAs concerns. What’s missing?”
“I can tell you that,” Nemily said. She closed her eyes, anxious. “Something Koeln told me. He asked me if I knew who my sponsor was.”
“Your sponsor?”
“I came to Aea as a sponsored immigrant. It was the only way I was going to get in. Someone sponsored me. I never knew who until today.”
“Who—?”
“Your wife. Helen. That’s the name on my InFlux jacket. And evidently she sponsored Glim, too.”
“Before I left Lunase,” Nemily told them, “Glim asked me to bring something here. I told him no. But he must have hidden it in my gear anyway because at InFlux they questioned me about contraband. I didn’t know anything about it, I told them that, but it’s not possible to be believed under those conditions. I thought they were going to send me back. But something happened—someone else got involved, someone interested in what I’d brought in—and it was all right. They passed me through. Ever since, I’ve thought that might come out and they’d expel me. Now, if Glim is here—”
“He may be looking for the vacuum you carried for him. It compromises you. I see.” He picked up her uneaten food and carried it to the sink.
“What kind of vacuum?” Cambel asked.
“I don’t know. Some discs were found in my baggage at customs, so I guess that must have been it. It was two and half years ago—”
Mace’s expression startled her.
“Who was your InFlux councilor?” he asked.
“Jeter Malcolm.”
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
She heard him running up the stairs.
“Funny,” Cambel said. “I gave up believing in the power of coincidence a long time ago. Things happen, occasionally they turn out to be serendipitous, but...”
“What do you mean?”
“Mace wanted to find out about Hellas Planitia. The problem was, the company wasn’t going to let him. There was a security element way over his level. They wanted him off the investigation. One of the things PolyCarb does when they don’t want to terminate an employee’s contract, but want to control him, is move the employee around. They started doing that to Mace, so he resigned. He thought he could tackle the problem from the outside. There was missing data from the accident. He sued PolyCarb for full disclosure, but when all is said and done, they have a lot more clout than a single irate citizen. We’ve been scrounging for data since we returned, thinking we might stumble on something at the fringes. He did volunteer work for InFlux, hoping Helen might come through under a different name. Her body was never found. For a while, he believed she had gotten away, alive.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Mars is a big world, with a lot of area to get lost in. Maybe some year they’ll find her remains, fifty, a hundred kilometers from Hellas Planitia. No, I don’t think she lived. But he started looking. Later, after I resigned from PolyCarb, I helped him. It’s turned into a rather comfortable business. The last six months, he really started losing interest. I thought he might... I don’t know, normalize, I suppose... and we have our business and things worked out fairly well with the PolyCarb settlement. Then he meets you at a party and all this starts falling out of the air. You’re turning out to be the best lead we’ve ever found. Suddenly everyone is interested in what Mace Preston knows about a particular kind of sabotage. Now this stuff about Helen being your sponsor. Serendipity is a wonderful thing.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“No.”
“Then—?”
“I think you were put in Mace’s path.”
“How? Our meeting was an accident.”
Cambel shrugged.
“Why are you interested in this? Why did you resign from PolyCarb?”
“Personal reasons.”
“And none of my business?”
“I’m glad you’re perceptive.”
“But—”
She stopped, hearing Mace’s footsteps, returning.
“Do you recognize him?” Mace asked, placing an image before her.
It showed a man with thick hair and a heavy beard obscuring the lower half of his face. But the eyes, though narrower than now, were immediately recognizable. She looked up.
“You?”
“Couple of years ago.”
“You were there...”
Mace paused. “Yeah.”
“You took the discs...”
He nodded. “Would you like to hear them?”
“But—”
“If you’re wondering if that’s the reason I’m seeing you now, don’t. You looked familiar when I saw you at Piers’ dom, but only vaguely. I thought maybe I’d seen you at Everest—a ghost—and when I found out that you’re a cyberlink I decided that that accounted for it. But two and half years ago? I was doing a lot of things then to—I didn’t want to remember certain things. Maybe on some level I made an association, but believe me I did not remember till just now.”
Cambel grunted. “Ser-ren-dip-ity.”
Mace frowned at her.
“I believe you,” Nemily said.
He looked relieved. “As for it giving you trouble, no, it won’t. There’s no record and I doubt Jeter would remember.”
“Unless directly questioned?”
“Maybe. Even then, with no records, he wouldn’t tell the truth.”
“Why aren’t there records?”
“Consistency,” Cambel explained. “An arrangement. Mace took the discs. A favor on Jeter’s part. He couldn’t file any kind of report on them then. He couldn’t deny you admission without cause. So it’s as if it never happened.”
Mace smiled at her. “So there’s no threat to your citizenship. Not from that, anyway.”
“There’s no way for Koeln to know about it, then.”
“No.”
“But he acts like he knows.”
“He’s fishing. Helen being listed as both your and Toler’s sponsor means that there must be more to the association.”
“What did you do with the discs?” Nemily asked.
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
Part of the left-hand wall of the plain room that contained only a chair slid aside, revealing a floor-to-ceiling rack of shelves filled with discs. She estimated the length of the shelves at three meters, that each shelf, then, contained roughly three hundred discs, and she counted eleven shelves full, a twelfth containing a dozen or so overflow.
“I’m surprised SA didn’t find these,”
Mace said. “I suppose they assumed anything important would simply be on my d.p.”
The obsession of Aeans with collecting things fascinated Nemily, both for its manifold expressions and its demands on resource. It unsettled her at times; Lunessa exhibited nothing quite like it, unless their absorption in watching themselves counted. Even in the more cramped confines of the outer rings, Aeans fell into competition over gathering scraps and fragments of a past they barely understood, while others acquired the understanding without the artifacts, and so could impress those with the actual objects with long explanations of provenance and symbolism. Scattered through the labyrinthine matrix of the orbital, in unused niches or spacious sections of the interior, museums proliferated, dedicated to the arcana of misremembered pasts and disconnected remnants, as isolated from their origins as the people who gave their passions to preservation.
Books, music, and images formed the core contents of Aea’s reliquaries, but Nemily had seen a host of minor idols filling the sacristy of the necrolater’s personal temples. Ancient computer parts, pieces of clothing, small pins designating rank or membership, rectangles of plastic once used for identification or commerce, coins, paper currency, tokens, canceled receipts, manufacturer’s logos, stationery letterhead, rubber stamps, place markers bearing the names of emporia or artists or books,
small stuffed toy representations of animals, fictional or real, bills of lading from forgotten transport companies, catalogues, brochures, pens and pencils, small figurines cast in plastic, jewelry, utensils, dead flowers pressed in a number of clear media, autographs of people known and unknown, mission patches of ancient spaceflights, various measuring tools, swatches of cloth, food packages, buttons, belts, buckles, videos, samples of material used in forgotten components from unremembered projects, medallions, jars, lids, unopened packets of pharmacopiates, bones, miniature model kits, antique data storage discs, paperclips, thumbtacks, ribbons, cups, coasters, gears, wire, eyeglasses, keys, postcards, game pieces, candles, lists of names of residents of cities, stamps, envelopes, address labels, trademarks, badges, bags, fans, rings, timepieces and pocket knives.
Much, perhaps most, were copies based on drawings, photographs, or descriptions, some taken from authentic artifacts. It did not matter so much that the objects were “originals”—it was recognized that the culture from which they came replicated everything it could as much as it could, rendering the concept of originality itself as fluid and subjective—only that they duplicated as closely as possible the thing copied. Detail mattered more than pedigree.
The Exclusion had driven the dispersed progeny of Gaia in different directions. Some places turned their backs on any heritage that might obligate them to a past that had shut them out, others preserved what they already had and pretended an independence of identity as tenuous as their hold on survival, while Aea embraced recovery of all that might be within the apocryphal Archive short of finding the Archive itself, which in all probability did not exist.
Nemily ran her fingertips along a row of the discs. “Mine are in here?”
“I thought they weren’t yours.”
“I meant—”
“I know. I’m joking. Yes, they are. In fact, they were the first.” He stepped alongside her and pointed at the left-hand corner of the top shelf. “I never bothered to listen to any of them before these. I mean, I’d heard a lot of pre-Exclusion music before, but—I was searching for something else. So I’d analyze them for interlaced data and if I didn’t find it, I passed them on through other dealers. These... maybe I was ready to find something else... I kept them for the music.”
“Did you analyze them?”
Mace shrugged. “I automated the process to search for key factors. My system alerts me if it finds anything relevant.”
“Did they contain anything?”
“I don’t know. I never ran a full analysis.”
“I don’t understand. Were you looking for something or not?”
He scowled and slapped the touchpoint on the wall that closed the doors over the discs.
Nemily followed him out into the atrium. He had started as if he knew where to go, then lost momentum and came to a halt, indecisive, near the center of the floor. She hung back, waiting.
“My wife died on Mars,” he said finally “The company declared it an accident. Her body was never found, but then they claimed she hadn’t been there in the first place. The cause of death—well, that’s problematic, I suppose, but I never accepted that it was an accident and I don’t think PolyCarb did, either. Sometimes it’s necessary to put a face on something for the benefit of the shareholders. I—they expected me— demanded—I signed her death certificate.”
Nemily glanced at Cambel, who only watched, arms folded. “But you didn’t believe she was dead.”
“I didn’t. And even if I did, the question of why still needed answering. Certain pieces of data went missing from the accident. Never recovered. So I figured they had to relate to Helen in some way. If I could find out what those data are, how they connect with the accident, maybe I could find a starting point to actually begin looking for Helen herself.”
“Or explain why she died. If she had lived, wouldn’t she have come back here?”
“She couldn’t. Not legally and openly, anyway Part of the death certification. She was barred from access to Aea or Aean holdings. Curious rule, isn’t it? If she’s really dead, she’ll never try. If she isn’t, then the rule presumes culpability, fraud, criminal intent.”
“People slip past InFlux all the time,” Cambel said.
“And if she had, why wouldn’t she contact me? So I was left with the same possibilities. Either she couldn’t get here or she really was dead. I finally decided she was dead.”
“How could she sponsor me, then?”
“Anyone with the right connections with InFlux could falsify those records, use her name as a cover.”
“That,” Cambel said, “would be a very small pool of people.”
“Maybe that’s who Koeln is looking for,” Mace said.
Cambel shrugged.
“Or maybe she is back in Aea,” Nemily said. “You said you didn’t believe she was dead. Maybe you were right.”
“Maybe “ He shook his head. “She couldn’t legally do anything,
though. I don’t know”
“What about now?”
He breathed out heavily. “Now is complex.”
He lapsed into silence, standing in the center of his atrium. Cambel cleared her throat.
“I have some questions to ask of certain people,” she said. “So I think I’ll get on it. I kept Sonia on retainer for the next few days, just in case.”
“Wait,” Mace said. “I can’t safely access my system. Do you still have the records from Hellas Planitia?”
“Sure. Which ones?”
“Personnel.”
“Yes “ She looked at Nemily and nodded. “I’ll pull them up, get the
images. You want Nemily to go through them?”
“Yes,” Mace said.
“Okay,” Cambel said. She patted Mace on the shoulder. “I’ll call when I have something.”
Mace nodded. Cambel gave Nemily a significant look—but what it meant Nemily could not read—and left the dom.
“How do you mean, complex?” Nemily asked.
He shrugged. “Now I’m not sure I would want her to be alive.” He turned and gave her a burdened smile. “Maybe I’ve felt that way for a long time, but... things become habit after so long. I went through the motions of the search for a long time, gathering odd bits of information, collecting—things.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I’d do now if I actually found something. I’d been running on momentum for so long and I finally ran out.” He coughed. “Then there’s you.”
“What about me?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you want to know?”
He laughed. “I don’t know yet.”
“Well...
maybe we can figure it out. If you want.”
“Where do we start?”
“Why don’t you tell me about Helen.”
Listening to Mace, the impression she built of Helen was of headlong pursuit, a bolide in search of a crater yet to be, and that their relationship was largely an accident of trajectory.
Prior to Mace, her encounters had all been brief because the surfaces she impacted lacked substance and, tissue-thin, allowed her to pass through. She never looked back to see the result of her passage. When she reached Mace, he exhibited none of that tenuousness, and Helen came to a momentary halt against him, surprised and intrigued and, in an attempt to extract herself, thoroughly and unexpectedly caught by a perverse unwillingness to go on without him. She found something in him she did not wish to give up, though she often spoke about their relationship as if love had less to do with it than simple compatibility. He never believed her blithe dismissals, believing through it all that she loved him.
For his part, it was the nature of her energy that attracted him and the capacity for achievement that impressed him and the unfettered joy in doing that bound him. They had been shoved together by a job, a project she was supervising which required a local Martian presence, and he was part of the security package, second in authority At first it seemed unlikely. She was Aean, PolyCarb, management, and he quickly developed a fantasy about her. He had spent a lifetime practicing concealment, so he automatically kept his feelings private and hidden. Part of the process involved denial, and when they did come together, it took Helen the better part of a long night to seduce him, finally abandoning any and all subtlety by simply stripping off her own clothes, matter-of-factly presenting him with an opportunity he could not ignore and a dilemma that overwhelmed his stoic abnegation. When the project ended, she offered him a job and a proposal of marriage, in that order. She had been just as bemused as he, simultaneously dismayed and pleased by an apparent and perversely welcome betrayal of self.
Their respective positions with PolyCarb kept them apart for long periods of time and Mace began to suspect this to be intentional on Helen’s part. She did not trust herself to be satisfied with any pretense to
domesticity. She played the schedules masterfully to ensure separations that fueled their reunions and still strangled any resentments.
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