The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  “He was drugged more than a standard dose and he had a drink or two.” He’d been lured up here, or carried up here.

  “Yeah,” Severo said. “So let’s see how hard he would be to haul. Nadia, Jerry, show me how that could work.”

  Nadia slipped one hand into Jerry’s armpit, grabbed him just above the elbow with her other hand, and lifted. Jerry squawked. He stretched up on tiptoe; his toes remained in contact with the floor; he twisted to face Nadia and his free arm grabbed her in a bear hug. Nadia let her knees sag and then pushed up like a weight lifter. Jerry’s feet left the floor, but came down again. Nadia threw herself against Jerry’s chest and he simply stepped back on one foot and lifted her. They must have watched a performance of the Ballets Russes at some point in their lives, because Jerry kept on lifting. Nadia sorted out how to balance her torso on his lifted hands and held her arms wide, her back arched and her legs curved up behind her, a woman diving toward an invisible pool. Jerry turned beneath her and displayed her imaginary wings to the audience. The backdrop for the performance was a panorama of the distant curves of Center and the bars of shadow that sectioned the distant terrain below. Two of the four curved legs of Athens tower could be seen from this part of the platform, now a stage, in this sky, rising through the blue air to intersect at an unseen point far above.

  Nadia giggled and cued Jerry to put her down. He did, and the audience of two applauded.

  “My ribs are going to hurt.” Nadia gasped.

  “Oh! I’m sorry!” Jerry’s look of alarm and regret was completely unfeigned.

  “Not from being thrown around. From laughing,” Nadia said.

  “So much for the theory that you can haul someone around if they don’t want to be hauled,” Helt said. “Okay, next plan.” He walked to the elevator, opened its door and set it to stay open. “I’ll go limp, Nadia. As in, really limp. Show me if you can get me from here to the wall and over it if I’m out cold.”

  Helt stretched out on the floor of the elevator. His perspective changed to views of feet and trouser legs and little lights in the elevator ceiling.

  “Ready?” Helt asked.

  “Sure,” Nadia said. She knelt near his head.

  Helt closed his eyes and felt the radiated warmth from Nadia’s thighs on either side of his face. In other circumstances … never mind. He opened his eyes and stared up again.

  Nadia braced her feet on the floor. With her knees high on either side of his head, she slipped an arm beneath his neck and then slid both arms down his back until she had an elbow under each of his armpits. He could feel her breathing against his neck. She pushed both forearms against his ribs and tried to lock her hands together over his chest. Her arms weren’t long enough for that, so she locked her elbows at right angles. She duck-walked backward until she hauled him out of the elevator and then managed to stand in a crouch, her arms still tight against his chest, and she backed up until she reached the wall.

  Helt had been dragged, semi-sitting, his head lolling forward over his chest, over the smooth floor. His belt had kept his trousers more or less on, and Helt was grateful for that.

  “Just like practice rescue sessions,” Nadia said.

  Helt kept on playing possum. Nadia managed to work her arms around his torso so she faced him, one leg on either side of his torso. She hauled him up so his back rested against the wall.

  Feigning unconsciousness requires thought. Helt thought about floating in salt water. He wondered whether a truly unconscious person would sag to one side or the other and slide down into a fetal position, or whether that would require some voluntary motion on his part. While he was thinking about that, Nadia lifted both his knees and pushed them toward his chest. She leaned her chest against them and he didn’t slide anywhere.

  “Don’t hurt your back,” Severo said.

  “Won’t.” Nadia grabbed Helt’s torso in a bear hug, inhaled and lifted. She scooted his back up the wall and he tilted forward, ending up slumped with his head over her right shoulder. Nadia sighed.

  “Okay, now what?” Jerry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nadia said. She let go with one arm and got it under one of Helt’s thighs. He let himself sag in all directions, an unwieldy bundle of arms and legs with its back against the bumpy surface of the glass brick wall. Nadia held him against the wall and pushed him up it, but then she stopped pushing and let him slide to the floor, gently. “I could roll him up the rest of the way, maybe,” Nadia said. “But I don’t want to hurt him.”

  Helt, the him in question, said, “Don’t hurt me, and don’t hurt you, either. I’m ready to stop this.” Nadia backed away. Helt pulled himself up and sat with his back against the wall. It was a comfortable enough place to sit and he wanted to come back at night, sometime, and watch the world sleep from here.

  “I could do it,” Jerry said.

  “If Nadia can get him that far up the wall, a larger woman could get up to the top and push him over,” Severo said.

  Elena could have. Helt remembered the look of defined muscle beneath her soft, smooth skin. She had been on the Athens elevator that night. Ryan had been her lover, and her stories about that interlude were too unemotional, too distanced; they bothered Helt and he couldn’t say why. She could have rolled Ryan up the wall if she was cold and calm about it, more easily if fear jacked up her adrenal output.

  The elevator door began to beep.

  “I think you just need a little practice, Nadia,” Jerry said. “Tonight, at home? I’ll be cooperative, I promise.”

  “Men.” Nadia sighed. She went to the elevator door and released it to go get whoever waited below.

  “I think Dr. Maury could have done the job,” Severo said, “if Ryan was unconscious. She could have had a harness or something along with her.”

  “Heh,” Helt said. “Yeah. She’s a doc; she would know how to package an unconscious man for transport. Two people could do it, easy, if the guy was unconscious. Two people could toss him over, even if he was awake, do you think?”

  “You and I could,” Severo said. “Thing is, we didn’t.”

  The elevator door opened. Calloway stepped out.

  “Hi, doc,” Severo said.

  “Hi, yourself. You guys, too.” Calloway nodded to Jerry and Nadia. He ambled over and sat down beside Helt.

  “I went over to SysSu and they said you were out sightseeing. Damn, it’s hot up here.” Less than a minute, and the big man’s forehead already glowed with a fine film of sweat. “I wasn’t sure you wanted this public, so I thought I’d tell you and let you decide. Here’s the deal.

  “Remember when Elena put her hand in Cash’s chest and said he was cold? He was cold, all right. We went through post-mortem cooling files. You can only measure the rate of cooling after death by being there and measuring it; and if you aren’t there to do that, everything’s a guess. Cold air, cold room, cold soil if somebody’s outside, different body mass for each case, every variable changes every time. And then there’s stuff like even a fever before death, that sort of thing would change the rates of cooling. Clothing. Water immersion. Too many factors. But there’s some data that says the cooling rate of an undisturbed corpse at room temperature can be estimated at one measly degree Fahrenheit per hour.”

  Severo was frowning. “You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying you can’t get a man that cold, alive or dead, by throwing him on the ground for an hour.”

  “The scope-and-speed? Tell me about that, Calloway,” Helt said.

  Calloway found something interesting to look at way, way in the distance.

  “We don’t talk about it much. The PA who looks after the surface crews has a quota that he gets from Pharmacy. It’s not good for people, but it’s less harmful than hurling inside a closed suit, maybe.”

  “Would the cold alone have been enough to knock him out?” Helt asked.

  “Oh, yeah. If he was alive when he got up here, he was way too cold to be functional. Let me put it this way,” Cal
loway said. “In my humble and recently researched opinion, no way he could have made it off this elevator by himself.”

  “I think I hear you,” Severo said. “He was cold, and you can’t walk when you’re even halfway that cold. He was drugged and part drunk, and you can maybe stagger around when you’re drugged and part drunk, but not if you’re drugged, part drunk, and cold. Any way you look at it, somebody helped him get dead,” Severo said. “It was murder.”

  11

  In Absence of Directives

  Going down. The elevator didn’t say that aloud once its doors were closed. Helt stared at the wall and felt down get more defined during the controlled fall of the elevator cage inside its shaft, felt his feet and the muscles of his legs begin to adjust again to the job of balancing his seemingly increasing weight upright against the floor. One of the bright and beautiful and lucky who lived down there had murdered another, and ridden this same elevator, down, after the job was done. He had a video of one woman who might have done it.

  The silence was heavier than the air.

  “I’m sorry I spoiled the party,” Calloway said.

  “You didn’t,” Severo said.

  “Did, too.” Nadia looked up at Calloway with an exaggerated pout. “I was planning to put this away and spend more time helping Martin with a project he has going.”

  “Martin? Martin Kumar? He’s supposed to be studying pathology any time he’s not on duty as my clinic grunt. What’s he up to?” Calloway asked.

  So she meant Martin, the night tech on duty for the autopsy. Of course he was Calloway’s apprentice; Calloway had said so. The professions on Kybele, of necessity, would be taught in a sort of guild system, apprentice, journeyman, master. The system had worked in the past, and worked well. The problem was that strong personalities, willingly or not, imprinted their biases on what was taught.

  Some IA, someday, would have to adjust for that. Visions of darkened rooms, chants and candles and incense, and magics born of wishful superstitions drifted up from Helt’s cache of remembered histories. But new diseases, new neuroses, would develop over time in this milieu of the unknown, and perhaps the fight against them would exert enough pressure to keep the rational alive.

  Helt realized he had just made a case where some future human might need to get exotically sick to improve a database. Develop an alternate scenario, he told himself. Simulations? Sure. Simulations at the level of metabolic pathways. Was Biosystems already on this? Surely. But he would ask.

  “Martin’s designing neuro-prosthetic interfaces for some appendages humans don’t need yet,” Nadia said. “But someday, somewhere, we might.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Calloway said. “I guess I’m not pushing him fast enough. He’s already testing out at second-year med student level, and he’s doing his thirty hours a week in the clinic. If that’s not keeping him busy enough, it’s time to put him back at the books.” Calloway’s pride in his apprentice was a clear subtext in his grumbling. “I want a look at these things. What’s he building? Arthropod legs? Gills? I’ve always wanted gills.”

  “You’ll have to ask him.” Nadia looked away and smiled.

  Jerry, Helt noted, did not look pleased. Helt suspected jealousy. The elevator touched down and opened on a bright afternoon that felt cold.

  Jerry was first out the door. He headed back toward the SysSu building. Nadia hurried to catch up with him.

  “Love,” Severo said. “I guess it’s never easy. Don’t know if I would want my Sonia in the same office with me all day, though.”

  “What are you going to tell your guys in Security?” Helt asked.

  “Nothing, for now,” Severo said.

  “Heh. Yeah. It’s going to take some careful wording.”

  “And some careful timing. We’re going to get different answers about Ryan if people know they’re talking about a murder, not a suicide.” Severo nodded to Helt and Calloway. “Later, guys.”

  “Calloway, about this hypothermia—” Helt began.

  “Gotta get back to the clinic,” Calloway said. “Mena’s coming over for Ryan’s interment, and I don’t want Martin to be the only person around for her.”

  Oh, damn. “No, of course not. She shouldn’t be alone. I’ll come with you,” Helt said.

  “If you’ll stay, I’ll get back to work,” Severo said. “Doughan wanted at least six people at the service; you’ll make the right number. Calloway says he wants his student there. Me, I’ve seen more funerals than I want.”

  * * *

  Calloway led Helt to a room in the Athens clinic, not far from the morgue but not adjacent to it, not a chapel, not anything else but what it plainly was, a room with a door for the living to enter and the closed doors of a low rectangular elevator, centered on the opposite wall, to serve as a final exit for the dead. Its ceiling was blue and its lighting calm. The wall murals suggested greenery and distance. In the room was a gurney, and on the gurney was Cash Ryan’s body, wrapped in a covering that seemed to be woven of reeds. On one side of the gurney, Martin Kumar stood at a sort of parade rest, looking stoic. On the other, Mena continued to loosen the wrappings that covered Cash Ryan’s head. She glanced up at Helt and Calloway and looked past them, to nod at Archer Pelham and Wesley Doughan as they entered the room. The newcomers watched in silence as Mena reached into her pocket and pulled out two coins, paper-thin, gold, placed them on Ryan’s closed eyelids, and smoothed the wrappings back into place.

  “I’ve searched his papers, Mena. He left no directives and his papers list no religious preference,” Doughan said. Doughan walked to stand near Ryan’s head and fixed his gaze on the closed elevator doors just beyond the body’s feet. “As the executive of Navigation, who held his contract, it’s my duty to be here, and to speak for him. I’ll be brief.”

  “Thank you,” Mena said.

  Helt had never seen Doughan look like this. His posture was imperial. He was impeccably groomed, as if he had shaved and combed his hair moments before. The left front of his Navigation uniform was loaded with medals Helt had had no idea he had earned.

  Helt was suddenly aware of how much sweat the heat of the tower had brought to his skin, now thankfully dry in the carefully monitored Athens air, and of the grubby windbreaker he wore. He wanted to rub his hand over the possible beginnings of afternoon stubble on his chin, but he didn’t.

  Doughan held a tablet reader in his left hand. He glanced at it, briefly. “People have come to Kybele from many cultures and many places. However different from one another we may be, we are alike in our love of challenge, our pleasure in examining and enjoying the complexities of life, our longing to understand and make known what is unknown. Charles ‘Cash’ Ryan was one of us, and worked with us, and is no more.

  “A prophet said, to every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

  It was the old language of the King James Bible, part of the history of the West.

  “A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal … a time to weep, and a time to laugh, and a time to mourn…”

  A time to kill. That was in the text. Helt listened to the stately rhythm of the old words.

  “… A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

  Wesley Doughan straightened his erect shoulders a fraction more and took a deep breath. Archer Pelham kept his sharp gaze on Doughan’s face. Mena’s eyes were bright with the shine of tears. Her face was stern. Calloway and Martin looked neutral and attentive.

  “In the midst of life we are in death,” Doughan said. “Privileged as we are to witness and cherish the miracles of birth and death, with humility we commit the body of Charles ‘Cash Ryan’ to our ground; from our Earth to this new earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Part of the air, part of the soil, he will be part of Kybele forever.”

  Doughan stepped away from the body and
marched to the wall. He pushed the button near the rectangular doors. They opened on a dark tunnel with solid walls.

  “Will you assist me?” he asked the room in general.

  He wanted six, Helt realized, because that’s the traditional number for pallbearers in Western culture. Doughan, Mena, and Archer took their places on one side of the bundle of reeds that was Cash Ryan’s last shelter, Martin, Helt, and Calloway on the other. Doughan nodded, and the six of them, three on a side, rolled the gurney to the edge of the open, waiting door and slid the reed-wrapped body into darkness.

  The doors closed. Doughan raised his eyes and looked pointedly at the door that opened to the hallway. Calloway, as if on prior orders, opened it and motioned the group out into the hall.

  The body would stay in its cupboard until the mourners were gone, and then it would be dropped into a tank for reclamation. Probably Calloway would push the button for that.

  In the hallway, Mena took one hesitant step toward the clinic waiting room. Archer stepped to her side and put his arm around her waist. Doughan caught up with them and slipped his arm around her waist, too.

  “The coins, Mena. For the ferryman?” Archer asked.

  “For Charon, yes,” Mena said. She spoke softly.

  “Are you going ethnic on us?” Doughan asked her.

  She looked up at him and Helt saw her smile, the smile of a woman who has found her facade of resiliency and competence and has glued it firmly in place. “I do, now and again. I wanted my roots for this. Reassurance, guidelines, tradition.”

  “Your traditions shaped the West,” Arthur said.

  “They had some effect, yes. But I was relieved by what you chose, Wesley.”

  “Thank you,” Wesley Doughan said.

  “I like it when you feel Greek,” Archer said. “The side effects, like the galaktoboureko you baked for me Wednesday night, are agreeable. Let me amend that. Superb.”