by Sage Walker
“I’m the only person on Kybele right now who has experience with autopsies in real time,” Elena said. “Calloway found my name when he asked the system for an assistant. Should I have refused, because I had known the man in life?”
It was a rhetorical question and he didn’t answer it. He waited for two steps.
“We live in small towns now,” Elena said. “We’ll be living next door to our morticians, our bakers, our butchers. It’s not a new pattern and perhaps it will be easier for us than cities were.”
The Lab was almost empty. They picked a booth near the bar and sat down. Elena slipped the shawl from her shoulders, and the curve at the base of her throat was lovely and her skin was flawless and must feel like silk. Helt wanted to rest the palm of his hand on her throat, to see the contrast between that shade of creamy tan and his own pale hide.
Elena ordered brandy. So did Helt.
When it came, she cupped the big snifter in both hands to warm it and stared into the liquid as if it were a mirror.
“Are you tired?” Helt asked.
“Yes. I’m tired and I’m worried.”
She looked up from her drink. The booth was dim, only a candle burning in a red glass to light it. Her eyes, in this light, were the color of clear Baltic amber and a tiny reflected flame burned in each of them. She didn’t look worried. She looked relaxed, calm, tolerant. She looked as if she wondered if Helt would do a good interview. “Did you sleep last night, Helt Borresen?” she asked.
“Some. In the bunkroom in the office. And I napped there just before I came to meet you.” Helt reminded himself to be cautious, to guard himself against liking her too much. He should be looking at this woman as someone who might be trying to deceive him, an actress using very effective tools to distract him; her eyes, her graceful hands, her apparent honesty. Helt pushed his brandy aside, unrolled his screen, and stiffened it. “You know I’m going to ask questions. Shall we begin?”
Elena made a space for her own screen on the table and read the file he sent to her. “Unexpected death. Mena didn’t say suicide, or murder, or accident. Our leaders are cautious.”
She scrolled down until she found the section with her name on it. “So that’s how you found the connection,” she said. “We were at the same college. You found split restaurant charges and then, later, rent charges from the same apartment address. Yes, we lived together for a short time during my last semester at MIT.”
“Roomies or lovers?” Helt asked.
“Lovers,” Elena said. She leaned back against the padded fake leather of the booth and looked directly, calmly, at Helt’s face. He had known this, and he didn’t want to know it. She was so cold, this woman. His sudden fear made him want to gasp.
She’d said he knew how to compartmentalize. He had to prove that, right now, right here.
“Tell me what you knew of him,” Helt said. “Tell me things the records won’t show.”
“For the record,” Elena said.
“Yes. If this was a jump, a suicide, an accident, so be it. But I don’t want to find out it was a murder and find that the perp is still on this ship after that last shuttle leaves.”
“The perp. You’ve been reading protocols, or genre mysteries.”
“Yes. Protocols say that kin murders kin, and as a prior lover, you’re kin. Sort of.”
“Do I need someone here from Legal?”
“If you want. I’m recording.”
“I don’t want anyone from Legal.”
“I’m not a cop. I’m the Incident Analyst, and because this death was definitely an incident and, as Mena said, unexpected, my job is to find out how and why it happened. So you’re on the record. Be careful.”
“I’ll be careful. For the record, Cash Ryan has been a ghost to me since I left MIT,” Elena said. “I knew he was hired for some engineering work early on. I knew he was gone before I came up here. I saw his name show up three years ago but I ignored it because he was on a three-year contract. He would finish his work and leave. I’d be staying.”
“Would you have left Kybele if you thought Cash Ryan would be a colonist on her?” Helt asked.
She shook her head. “Absolutely not. I wanted … it was my life, dreaming of this place. My only goal. Everything I’ve ever done was done for this.” She looked at the stone ceiling as if she saw through it to the hollow heart of Kybele above them.
Helt couldn’t stop watching her hands, the way her fingers cupped the brandy snifter as if it were infinitely precious, something to be held safe, protected from harm.
“You didn’t hate him enough to give this up,” Helt said.
“Hate him? That’s your phrase, Helt Borresen, not mine. When he came up here, I found him highly avoidable, and I avoided him. But I wasn’t going to give up a dream because of that. A little social discomfort, a little stepping out of the way, would not cause me to lose the chance to help shape this tiny world and go to another one.” She smiled into her brandy snifter. “Every day, I wake surprised to find I’m not dreaming this, that the dream didn’t vanish while I slept. We’re so lucky, we dreamers, so immeasurably lucky.”
She looked up. Helt smiled at her. To spend life here meant living a dream, and there was no one on this ship who did not share some version of that dream. A wonderful thing, but dreamers can be dangerous. “Yes. We’re lucky.” And I have a job to do, Helt reminded himself, although he did not want to believe this woman capable of murder. He wanted the death to have never happened. He wanted to know, to understand, the dreams of a woman who was literally shaping life for Biosystems. Was she lonely? Did she have a lover now? Would she be as careful with Helt as she was with that glass? He didn’t ask any of those things.
“You’ve been here ten years.”
“I’ve been here ten years. I didn’t know Cash was on board again until about three years ago when I saw him in Center. I ran for my lab and closed the door.”
“Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did he ever try to contact you?”
“No. He didn’t bother me. He didn’t try to renew our relationship. But you know that, if you looked for times and places where Elena Maury and Cash Ryan were in the same place at the same time on this ship.”
He was still looking. He’d found none as yet. “Did that seem odd to you? Not even a chance meeting? Not even a ‘Hi, how are you?’ Did that surprise you?”
“You’re good,” Elena said.
She knew techniques for psychiatric interviews as well as Helt did. But the techniques work, and if Helt couldn’t hack clients who were intellectual peers, or brighter than he was, he had been in the wrong job for a long, long time.
“No, it didn’t surprise me. I told you, I had decided having one weird dude on this ship as a short-timer was not going to spoil my days. And the Cash Ryan I knew years ago was one weird dude.”
“From what I’ve found so far, he didn’t have close friends,” Helt said. “He had coworkers. But he tested close enough to be socially acceptable to get a job here. You were lovers. Why? Will you tell me?”
“Because it may help lay the ghost? That’s what the post-trauma protocols say. Talk it through.” Elena took a generous mouthful of brandy and swallowed it. “Okay.”
Helt motioned to the bartender and he brought refills for both of them.
“MIT. Cambridge,” she said. “I noticed him because we hung in the same places but we didn’t get together until my senior year. Just knew who he was. Pretty curls, an intent look, and he talked with his hands. I’m rambling. Is that what you want me to do?”
She looked amused, as if she had reviewed the strategies for the game they were playing before she came here. Probably she had.
“Yes. Elena, the man is dead. Once we know why he’s dead, all of us can get back to the dream. Until then, dead or not, he’s in our way. Please, ramble.”
“It was the slam poetry that suckered me in.”
Her smile brought out her c
heekbones beautifully. She didn’t have dimples. Helt decided it didn’t matter.
He wondered briefly if he should let her know how intently SysSu had looked for a connection between Elena and Cash, and decided to go for full disclosure. “We found a line or two. The ITs in SysSu found it, I mean. Was he really a poet?”
“Ah, even better than that, a stealth poet. So they found his net name for those years. Penny Dreadful, he called himself. He did the occasional guitar gig, but he never read at the slams. Just watched, intent, motionless, with a look of … frustrated pain? Something like that. More like he was looking at aliens and was lonely because he couldn’t communicate with them. His face made me think of … Poe, perhaps. But he was healthier, at least physically. Some sort of Byronic throwback.
“Cambridge, and the club was a dark cave, not off Harvard Square but in a quiet rundown area that had been a working class district. When it rained, when the air was wet, you got whiffs of ancient sweat and beer outgassing from the brick walls. Not that there wasn’t plenty of new sweat and new beer as an overlay.”
Helt’s own student bar had not been like that at all. He saw, so clearly, polished white pine walls, a girl’s fingers stroking the stem of a glass of colorless wine. Kirsten. Her name came to him now, and the memory of her hair, the color of ripe wheat, her tense shoulders, her straight back as she walked away.
Yes, it had hurt.
“The poetry was full of passion and political outrage and poignant reactions to leaves, waves, and the open beaks of poisoned birds. Like that. And we were all young and brilliant, of course, and no one had ever loved or suffered as we loved and suffered.
“Throw in pheromones, and that Cash could really play that guitar.”
Even if pheromones are not as noticeable to humans as they are to, say, ants, Helt believed in their efficacy. The invisible scents floating around the red glass bowl of the candle on the table made him believe that the promise of that first meeting with Elena, out in Center, would survive the rude statement Cash Ryan had made with his death, whatever it had been meant to say. But he couldn’t love her and then find out she was a murderess. He wouldn’t.
“Set and setting count in love affairs,” Elena said. She paused, smiling again.
“They do,” Helt said.
“And I suffer from an unworthy attraction to tall, silent men.”
Tall and silent when he could be, Helt suffered a momentary fear Elena would find some of his old poetry someday. Can’t hide. But she would have a hell of a time getting him to admit what his net name had been in those years.
“I said Cash Ryan was quiet, and he was. There’s a time, in talking, when the conversations wander toward parents, high school crushes, old girlfriends. I got answers to direct questions, but after a time I noticed that there were never any calls home or messages from Mom, or from old friends. That every reference to family was oblique, and the subject got changed fast.
“There were never any plans about the future, either. I wasn’t looking for marriage, at least not on a conscious level. There were shared daydreams, of course. How life would be on Kybele. Whether we would both make it. I was short-listed already; Cash never actually said he was but the implication was there.
“And of course he wasn’t on the colonist short list. I found that out after I had started graduate work at Stanford.”
“His doctorate is from MIT,” Helt said.
“I was accepted at both places. Cash wasn’t. He decided I couldn’t leave him. I decided I could. I did.”
“Was he abusive?” Helt asked.
Elena developed an intense interest in her brandy snifter. She set it down with measured deliberation.
“If you require physical violence as a parameter for abuse, no. If you’re looking for emotional blackmail on the level of ‘I’ll kill myself if you leave me,’ no.”
“You just tensed up. I don’t think you’re lying. Are you protecting him?”
Elena looked for eye contact with Helt, and got it.
“No. I’m not protecting him. I’m talking to you, Helt Borresen, and I’m telling you everything I know. Pay attention.”
Held as motionless as a stalked rabbit by the depths of her amber eyes, Helt could only nod.
“He was suspicious. If I said I was at the lab, he would call the lab to make sure I wasn’t out screwing somebody else. He was curious about my sexual history and assumed every friendship I had, man, woman, or critter, was for sex. I’m making this sound blatant but he was subtle in his insinuations. It’s not always words; body language and speech patterns can make you squirm.”
Helt was reading hers as best he could. She was a little more rigid than she had been at first, but not much. She used standard media English, but there was that tiny hesitation before some of her words, that hint of indrawn breath. He’d never heard anyone do that and he couldn’t place where it came from. He was breathing her air, breathing deeply to catch her scent and his own, and his hindbrain liked the mix. A lot.
“He left sometimes and didn’t post anything anywhere that I could find, and didn’t answer his interface. Sometimes for hours. Once or twice for days. I began to think he was dealing, or part of a Mafia family, or something.
“But everything was subtle. I said that. I never found any specific thing about him that I could say, definitely, This is wrong, illegal, immoral. But he made me uneasy, and I left.
“We parted friends, technically speaking. I had his offer to come to me if I needed him. And I went off to Stanford and I never saw him again.”
“Until three years ago.”
“Yes.”
“Do you—from what you remember of him—do you think he would have committed suicide?”
“No. Never. Not the man—the boy—I never really knew.”
“Could he have become a killer?”
Elena pulled her shawl a little closer around her shoulders. “Because every suicide contains at least two things, both the killing of the self and the murder, in some magical way, of an other? I don’t know. I think the construct I’ve made in my mind, my imagined Cash Ryan, could kill someone who got in his way.”
Sociopaths, make that psychopaths, could kill and never look back, except to see if they’ve been found out. That’s what the books said. Helt suppressed a shiver.
“But I don’t know about his life, not before, not after he charmed me for a while. I don’t know, Helt Borresen. Do you think people can change? Change in fundamental ways?”
“I don’t know,” Helt said.
“Neither do I.
But she did. And so did he. Injuries change people. An injury had changed his mother in terrible ways.
Helt looked at the woman who sat across the table, someone new in his life, someone who knew a hell of a lot about nature and nurture, about genetic manipulations and therapies for warped brains and bodies. She had access to treatments that worked now and could be redesigned to work better. On Kybele, in a real way, children, human children, could be, had to be, designed to thrive here. Helt felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. “Elena vets every embryo,” Mena had said. That meant she discarded the ones that didn’t meet her standards.
Elena sighed. The curve of her breasts rose and fell. Her skin was beautiful, her hair, the shape of her smooth arms, the contours of solid muscle under her creamy skin. Her amazing hands were hypnotic in their deliberate grace; she pushed buttons that Helt had never known he had. She wakened longings for a time and place, a woman, that somewhere, in some dream or memory, he must have known. She was terribly, achingly familiar, and she was a stranger.
Helt wanted to know her, mind, body and bone, and he knew, in some part of his brain that analyzed and assessed and would not leave him alone, ever, that he would never know her at all. Never, really, understand anyone. At all.
Helt reached for his screen, collapsed it, and put it in his pocket. “Okay. It’s enough. Thank you.”
“Is that it? Am I interviewed?” Elena asked.<
br />
“For now. For tonight. Would you like another brandy? I’m buying.”
“Yes. But not tonight.”
So Helt walked her to the train station.
“No one has come to the clinic to ask about Cash Ryan. No one is planning a memorial service for him,” Elena said.
“I know,” Helt said.
The doors opened and the train told her to watch her step.
“What name did you use for your poetry?” Elena asked.
“I didn’t tell you I wrote any. Am I that easy to read?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have to know you much, much better before I tell you that,” Helt said.
She smiled and sank into the padded upholstery of the seat closest to the door.
* * *
How, why were his responses to this woman so strong? Had he been lonelier than he knew? It was the damned death, perhaps only that, a major glitch that had interrupted plans for a departure, but he couldn’t stop it. When the ship moved out, it would mark paid to any doubts about the life he’d been so busy choosing all these years. He would feel the big engines fire up to move them out; every human on board would feel them, every animal, probably even every fish. He would feel in his flesh the reality that there was no turning back, no retreat to Earth, ever. There would be no way to test another set of options in the list of What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.
So he wanted retreat, shelter, the safe haven that can seem real for a time in a bed where someone else breathes beside you. And he had just met a remarkable someone. And she was capable of murder. Helt had no doubt about that at all.
Helt watched the cars slide out of his visual field, traveling toward Petra, toward bed, rest, solitude, sleep. He could go home. He could get his laundry out of the bunkroom at SysSu and then go home. It seemed like a lot of bother. When half a block of walking was too much work, it was time to go to bed.
* * *
“Helt?” Mena’s voice asked his pocket.
“I’m here,” Helt said, through a yawn he had in no way planned. He was still standing on the stone floor of the train station platform and his feet were getting cold. Helt hauled his interface out of his pocket and blinked at Mena, apparently in Stonehenge, apparently wide awake.