The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  “Not much external damage for falling out of the sky. The EMTs pulled a branch out of his chest at the scene,” Calloway said.

  “Is that what happened?” Elena asked.

  “Came down from Athens tower. Corolis took him pretty far away. That’s the theory. We pulled the trach tube here at the clinic, after I pronounced him, and the IVs. NSS took his clothes and stuff.”

  Elena nodded. “Did they bag his hands before they worked on him?”

  “No,” Calloway said. “The protocols say to do that with gunshots or attacks, but I imagine that didn’t occur to them at the time.”

  “Let’s swab his fingers anyway.”

  The two docs did that, and they cleaned the dead man’s fingernails, too, putting the cotton swabs and toothpicks into bags that Martin marked and set aside. Elena’s eyes, and the camera on her mask, looked closely at Cash Ryan’s skin.

  “There are no external injuries on examination of the right posterior thorax. The skin is intact,” she said, speaking for the mike. Elena held the right shoulder out of the way while a camera rolled itself closer and recorded what she saw. She lifted the right knee and flexed it over the left, which rolled the hip into view. “No external injuries on the right flank, hip, or leg.” The camera whirred and retreated after it had done its close-ups. Calloway repeated the process on the left side.

  Elena looked up at the X-rays mounted on the wall screen. “There’s a first rib fracture on the left,” Elena said. She reviewed the films in rapid order. Helt watched them flash by, labeled, so he at least knew what he was supposed to be seeing, monochrome art of white bones and dark flesh. “And one in the right hand. Did I miss any?”

  “One rib and a broken right fifth metacarpal is all I count,” Calloway said.

  Elena’s eyes went back to a lateral view of the cervical spine, the graceful curve of stacked bones that supported the back of the skull. “He didn’t even break his neck. Poor bastard,” Elena said.

  Calloway held a scalpel in position over the chest. Both of them stood very still, as if in reverence. The pause had the feeling of an old ritual, and it probably was, for the corpse, supine, waiting for the knife, looked like Michelangelo’s Pietà.

  Calloway’s incision carved out a huge Y, beginning beneath the man’s collarbones and continuing down to the pubis.

  Helt closed his eyes and heard Severo Mares’s voice coming more or less from the direction of the wall screen. He opened them again to look at Severo’s face.

  “It really is your problem, IA. Your nerds closed down the tower cameras for an hour this evening,” Severo said.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. Nineteen hundred to 2000. Here’s the gap.”

  At 1900, the video showed views of Athens tower from below, views looking down from the empty observation tower to the wilderness that surrounded the elevator shaft, empty. A camera on the ceiling of the elevator cage looked down at an empty floor.

  Gap.

  At 2000, views of the Athens tower from below, views looking down from the empty observation tower to the wilderness that surrounded the elevator shaft, empty.

  At 2026, the elevator’s motion sensors woke up and looked down at Elena Maury, riding the Athens tower elevator down past Center to Level One.

  Helt swallowed, hard. A woman he’d just made the first tentative steps toward knowing was entirely too much involved in a death he hadn’t expected.

  Helt stopped the video.

  “Severo. This isn’t right,” Helt said.

  He heard Severo draw in a breath that would have decreased the air pressure around him by several millibars.

  “Yeah,” Severo said. “The doc doing the autopsy is looking like the only person of interest we have right now. Should we stop her?”

  There was no connection between the death and this woman, surely. Surely it was just a coincidence that put her in proximity to Ryan’s suicide.

  “I don’t know.” Helt brought up medical personnel on Kybele and looked for pathologists. “Severo, she may be our only person of interest but she’s the only pathologist we have. And as far as we know, this was a suicide.”

  “Aiee,” Severo said, a sound of dismay offered in a reflective tone of voice.

  “Heh. I get the feeling anything we do is going to be wrong. But Calloway’s right there, and everything’s on camera.”

  There was a pause while Severo thought about that. “Yeah. I can’t think of anything else we could do, except stop this before it got started. We didn’t do that.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Helt said. “I could clear this with Mena,” Helt said. He meant Mena Kanakaredes, the Biosystems exec.

  “That would cover our asses,” Severo said.

  “Maybe. How does this sound? ‘Sorry to bother you after hours, ma’am, but your pathologist was the first one down the tower elevator after a guy jumped off the platform, we think, except the cameras were shut down for an hour so we’re not sure she was the first one down, but she should do the autopsy?’”

  Mena Kanakaredes would think they were both nuts.

  “When you put it that way…” Severo said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Severo said. “We’ll live with it.”

  “That we will,” Helt said. “Let’s see the rest of this.” He released the pause button on the video clip.

  Elena was carrying a stainless steel cage that held stacks of little cylinders. She looked at the buttons near the elevator door, and she didn’t look worried or tense. She stepped out onto the platform near the Athens agora. The doors closed.

  “You finished with your interviews?” Helt asked.

  “Yeah. Doughan’s over here at the station. Reviewing records on this guy Ryan. The dead man is Cash when people talk about him. Never went by Charles.”

  “Do you have his interface? Anything that has a privacy barrier on it? We can work around that,” Helt said. SysSu would need to look at every record on the man, anything that might give a glimpse of his hopes, his dreams, his fears.

  “We’ve been looking for it. He wasn’t carrying an interface. Maybe there’s something in his quarters.”

  Helt nodded, his eyes on the captures of empty views of elevator exits in Center before and after the SM hour. It wasn’t that rare for Center to stay deserted for a night. Crops in the fields near Stonehenge, animals moving through wilderness, often weren’t in a camera eye, and the paths in the shadows of the towers sometimes spent entire nights without a human to disturb them. Charles “Cash” Ryan had come and gone unseen, and the only human in the camera’s view after his death was Elena Maury. That probably meant nothing, or maybe it didn’t.

  He split the waiting room screen into side-by-side views and scanned the records currently available at NSS. An ID mug shot of Cash Ryan, engineer, on ship for the past three years. His job had been placing and testing some of the stabilization engines outside, the ones that gave tiny and ongoing corrections to Kybele’s spin.

  No family on ship. The notice of his death would go to his mother in—southwest Idaho, a retirement community. NSS would notify her before morning.

  He closed Ryan’s picture and looked for Elena Maury. Her status in Biosystems was very high, second in influence only to Mena Kanakaredes, the division chief. Elena Maury had impressive credentials in genetics and clinical medicine.

  Helt looked for her in his interdepartmental dispute histories. She wasn’t there. He looked for her in crowds and at concerts, and she came to those, sometimes, so she wasn’t a complete hermit. Sometimes she came with a man, sometimes with one or more women. There were a couple of captures that showed her with Mena. He checked for repeats on the men and women he saw beside her from time to time. It looked like she wasn’t in any sort of partner relationship.

  Her name was listed in a few papers in genetics before she came to Kybele, but then the list got really, really long. A lot of stuff was happening up here and a lot of data was going back to Earth. Helt returned to Severo.
“Which SysSu kids found the body?”

  “Beauchene. Tay,” Severo said.

  “Thanks,” Helt said. Jerry, Gerard—Jerry—Beauchene and Nadia Tay. He hadn’t known they were a couple. They were young. Helt didn’t know if either of them had ever seen a dead human before tonight. “How are you handling them?”

  “I gave them coffee and then they went away. They still looked shook up some.”

  They might have gone to SysSu. The techs on duty during the outage hour might still be there. The names were Akua Mirin and Guiren Le. The recording of their session looked like routine maintenance stuff but it would need to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.

  Helt signaled Jerry Beauchene. He got audio. Jerry was listening to a man’s voice, loud enough to hurt Helt’s ears, reading, “… red shadows from a pinoñ fire bloodied the vigas above us.…”

  “A bit much on the volume,” Helt said.

  “Hi, Helt.” Jerry turned the recorded voice off.

  “Is that Ryan?” Helt asked.

  “Yeah. We’re working up a bio. He did some slam poetry when he was a kid.”

  “Heh,” Helt said. “Sure, we’ll need a bio on Cash Ryan. You sure you want to do that tonight?”

  “I’m not exactly sleepy,” Jerry said. “Nadia and I came over here.”

  “Here where?”

  “SysSu.” Meaning Systems Support’s offices, on the agora.

  “Okay. Have you found this guy Ryan anywhere today? In the past few days?” Helt asked.

  “Not yet,” Jerry said.

  “Jerry’s scouting the public cameras,” Nadia’s voice said. “I’m searching his work history.”

  “I’m at the clinic. I’ll meet you at SysSu as soon as I can,” Helt said.

  Helt didn’t know if he could help them, help Jerry and Nadia, burn off some of tonight’s stress hormones. If he could have thought of an excuse to send them on a five-mile run, he would have. Data mining was probably as good for them as any other stress reducer. A way to work off energy when you’ve walked up to a dead body while you had other things in mind.

  And please let it be a suicide, nothing more than that, Helt thought. Please let it be just professionalism that’s making Elena so calm about this. Let this stay simple, an event we can deal with quickly. SysSu has plenty of work to do before the last shuttle leaves and we fire up the big engines.

  Helt looked up at the screen in the waiting room of the clinic. He fed it the view Elena’s goggles showed her, the overlaid diagram that coached her and Calloway through a procedure they had seldom, if ever, performed. Helt shifted to a long view of the OR, and shifted it again, to stare at the ceiling lights when he saw Calloway at work with rib cutters. But fascination drove him back again.

  They lifted the sternum out and Elena laid it aside, to be replaced later. She aspirated blood from the heart. The left hemithorax, so spacious with its lung collapsed down to the size of two fists, held clotted blood.

  “There’s less blood in the thorax than I expected,” Elena said.

  “Yeah. If we had as much blood in us as Special Effects people always think, we’d explode. This looks like plenty to make his heart stop,” Calloway said.

  Elena scooped out a clot and put it in a jar.

  A jagged cut lay beneath that puncture wound on the shoulder, marking the slick pleural membrane of the apex of the chest. The subclavian artery was severed clean.

  Wow, Helt thought. The names are on-screen before I see what the real things look like. Anatomy lesson. Elena’s distancing technique works. At least it’s working for now.

  “Cold,” Elena said when she slipped her hand into the opened chest.

  “Don’t know how long he was out there,” Calloway said. He slipped a probe into the heart muscle. “Twenty-eight degrees Celsius.”

  “Climate programmed frosts at night last week in Center. I guess the ground is cold,” Elena said.

  Calloway pushed his finger through the broken skin above the collarbone and watched it emerge in the chest cavity. He moved the broken first rib back and forth with his finger.

  “Yup,” Calloway said. “He was speared by a pine tree. The rescue crew thinks he was trying to fly down, break his fall by skimming trees. Little branch stabbed his subclavian artery. He bled out into his chest. It must have taken a while.”

  “Spare me,” Elena said.

  They were working as a smooth team, coached by the program, Calloway doing the heavy muscle work while Elena’s hands slipped into corners and crevices. Her translucent gloves darted and swooped, lifted instruments from a tray beside the table, used them and replaced them with calm and efficient motions. Her body as it leaned and stretched was calm, too.

  Helt decided he was definitely a weird duck. Because watching Elena work at the business of exploring death, he wanted to talk to her, wanted to erase the trauma that had just fallen into her life, wanted, perhaps, to leave open the possibility that he would someday watch her work in peace and smile with pleasure. He wondered how and when she would learn that she was the first person on record to come off the Athens elevator after Cash Ryan died.

  Helt switched to view her favorable waist-hip ratio through a different camera.

  The blond kid, the night tech, came into the waiting room and sat down beside Helt, sharing the couch at a distance. He was all bones and angles, with hair and eyelashes so pale that “albino” could cross a person’s mind.

  “Hi,” he said, immediately focusing on the wall screen. He wore his name tag, Martin Kumar, PA, MSII. “Wow, stunning views you’ve called up.”

  Martin’s accent came from somewhere in the British Isles, but that was as close as Helt could call it. It was apparent the kid meant the autopsy views, not Elena’s hips. “This is a better look than I had in the autopsy room,” Martin said.

  “Thank you,” Helt said. “I jiggered the color a little. The overlay had too much contrast in the outlines, so I paled it some. More see-through.”

  Script appeared from somewhere and took over a corner of the screen.

  “Here comes the first lab report,” Martin said. “This is from the heart blood sample.”

  Normal chemistries, the screen told them, normal blood count. Blood alcohol 0.06%.

  “So he had a buzz on, but he wasn’t even legally drunk,” Martin said. “He kept a good crit, too, so he was getting enough exercise.”

  “What happens if people don’t exercise?”

  Martin grinned. “Well, sir, the daily health maintenance pill has an erythropoietin booster in it, so everyday activity usually keeps bone marrow functional. But some people get anemic anyway. If there’s no other cause than lack of exercise, we recommend that. If people don’t get around to doing it, we offer some sessions in a centrifuge. It’s a great motivator.”

  He leaned forward as something changed on-screen. “Oh, that’s a good view of the liver! Nice and smooth. This person was no boozer.”

  They watched as Elena helped lift the brownish liver, the dark red spleen, into the camera’s view. By the book, she showed the intact appendix to the camera, let it fall back into place, ran the slippery lengths of small intestine, palpated the large, examined the colon for lesions, took samples.

  The work, once divided into small sections with defined tasks, went quickly. Don’t think of the big picture, Helt reminded himself. Martin remained intent on the screen, very much like a dedicated fan at a football match.

  On through the stomach, tied off and packaged, kidneys, sections of ureter. Elena rinsed things and suctioned juices, keeping Calloway’s access clear. She needled other things and squirted the samples into tubes, and set them into the cold box.

  “Helt?” Jerry Beauchene’s voice, from the SysSu feed. “It seems Dr. Maury and Charles Ryan lived together once.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Helt said. He had heard the expression my heart sank and he knew it didn’t really happen, but in his chest, something dark and heavy woke and stirred. Elena Maury was slicing
up a man she’d made love to. He had never seen anything so cold.

  “When they were students together at MIT.”

  “Thanks, Jerry,” Helt said.

  Martin, on the couch beside Helt, seemed not to have noticed Helt speaking, and Jerry hadn’t sent his audio to the shared screen in the clinic. Helt was grateful for that. This wasn’t news everyone needed to hear right now. And if he could get MSII Martin to move out of earshot, the young man could get back to his work. There was no reason for the night tech to babysit; Helt felt, well, not fine, but competent enough to look away if the dissection stuff got to him.

  “Martin. Would you like to go back to the action?” Helt asked. “I’m fine here. Really, I’m fine.”

  Martin looked at Helt as if he’d forgotten anyone else was in the lobby. “Oh, sorry. I’m on duty if anyone shows up, and I came through because Elena sent me to turn on the cooling in the morgue storage box and start the bloodwork. And to … to check the lobby.”

  “To see if the IA was whimpering in a corner, perhaps? Thank you, Martin. I’m okay. Actually, I’m fascinated. And I’m grateful for Dr. Maury’s concern.”

  “I’ll go back, then. Calloway said to tell you there’s coffee in the lounge. Down the hall, left.”

  Uh, no, Helt’s stomach told him. “I think I’ll pass,” Helt said. “But thank you.”

  Martin smiled, unfolded himself from the couch, and went away.

  On-screen, Elena and Calloway continued their teamwork, Elena so measured in what she did, so businesslike, Calloway looking for all the world like a construction guy carefully demolishing a house with an eye to repurposing everything in it.

  The room’s cameras hovered over them as they replaced the sternum and closed the long incision with big staples, turned the body over, and went to work lifting the scalp. That done, they sawed away the thick bone of the skull in a circle and lifted out the brain.

  It wasn’t gray, Helt saw. It was a sort of gray pink. And that was pretty much it, but Helt was surprised that they replaced the skull plate, pulled the scalp down neatly, rolled Cash Ryan’s body supine, and folded his dead hands across his chest. As if for a family to see.