by Sage Walker
“I haven’t been here before,” Helt said. “Not this far up the canyon. I’ve seen the plans. We’re in a space that’s planned to be left unbuilt, I think.”
Elena nodded. “The next group of houses will go in beyond that bend.” She pointed ahead. From here, visually, it seemed they were nearing a wall of solid rock.
What blocked the view ahead was not a wall, but a massive stone outcrop, a triangular wedge that jutted out from the side of the canyon and climbed the entire height of the gorge. The river lapped its pointed foot. Helt stopped and looked up. There were no setbacks, not even near the top.
Elena was well ahead of him when he brought his eyes back to the ground. He thought she was walking into the water at the base of the wedge, but he saw her foot find a stepping stone, and another. Helt, when he reached the river’s edge, stuck his fingers in it. The water wasn’t quite ice and it was only ankle deep this near the shore. Beyond the rock barrier, the valley widened. Elena stayed on the path that ran close to the canyon wall. She climbed a waist-high mini mesa of sharp-edged stone, a mega-shard that had obviously fallen from the rim during the violence of the canyon’s recent birth, and stepped into shadow.
“Where’d you go?” Helt called.
“I want to show you something.” Her voice rang, not quite an echo, but the sound held the suggestion of a hollow space.
Someone had cut rough steps into the big fallen rock that had hidden Elena from his sight. The steps led down to the canyon floor and into a little setback in the canyon wall, tucked in against the back of the outcrop. It was large enough to be a generous courtyard, floored with the ubiquitous black sand of Petra. The wind had shaped its surface into waves that looked liquid in the moonlight, although the night was blessedly still. The air was getting colder.
Someone had sculpted part of the back wall of the space. A column of intertwined, stylized figures, perhaps, no, surely aquatic, rose from the sand. They sheltered beneath a stone tree whose roots spread out from a point on the rock wall three times a man’s height, although some of those roots seemed to be creatures as well. On the trunk of the tree, creatures unknown to zoology texts climbed and played. Above them, their offspring climbed higher and higher, jumped or leaped or napped in niches or on branches, if those were branches and not arms. Higher up, very high, birds spread sheltering wings over the creatures below, or those wings were leaves of this thing, lifted in an unseen wind or with a will to soar.
It wasn’t any historic style that Helt knew. When he blinked, he wasn’t sure it was a sculpture. There was something organic about it, and his mind brought him the concept of an accident in the breaking of this stone, a by-product of explosions that had cut the canyon into Kybele’s hide, but no. That couldn’t be. He walked up to one of the aquatic things and laid his hand on its hide, and felt the familiar cold smoothness of laser-carved asteroid. He turned away.
Looking out from this alcove, the view was of canyon walls marching on upriver, roofed with stars. From here, the waterfall at the far end of the canyon could just be seen, a white, vertical, silent slash on black.
Elena had returned to the steps and she waited for him on the lowest one. She didn’t look impatient, but she looked as if only an act of will was keeping her on her feet. She had jammed her hands into her jacket pockets and hunched her shoulders against the cold.
Helt walked back and stopped on the sand below the first step, to be, for a little while, exactly Elena’s height and no taller. “It’s magnificent,” he said.
He watched traces of anxiety in her face soften into an expression that seemed a little more relaxed. He took a drink of his wine, hoping she would copy him. She did. Her hand trembled on the cup.
“You’re cold,” he said. The cups were empty. He reached for hers, flattened both cups, and stashed them in a pocket. “I would stay longer, but we should go back.” It wasn’t so far. It wasn’t far at all to return to warm rooms and soft bedding. He climbed the steps and they walked away.
“Except for the sky, it feels like an old, old cave in there,” Helt said. “Lascaux, or Altamira.”
“This isn’t in your blueprints, is it?” Elena asked.
“No. I would think photos of this would be everywhere. How long has it been here?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been watching it change as it’s worked on, for months.”
They reached the stepping stones and Helt kept quiet until they were both back on dry land.
“Are you going to report it as vandalism?” Elena asked.
“Hell no,” Helt said. “Not a world-tree like that. We’ve used that motif since Minoan Crete.”
“Longer. Assyria,” Elena said.
“Egypt.”
“The Parthenon, stone columns scored as reminders of tree bark.”
The walking had warmed Helt a little, and Elena wasn’t shivering any more, at least not that he could see. “Yggdrasil. I think I saw Ratatosk in there.”
“Who’s that?” Elena asked.
“He’s a squirrel. A messenger, runs up and gets gossip from the eagle, runs back down to tell the snake gnawing the roots. Gothic cathedrals,” Helt said. “The arches in those old churches look like a forest with really high branches, some of them.”
Lamps on either side of the river marked the approach of the town named Petra.
“Gaudí,” Elena said. “I want you to note that I did not say phallic. Not once.”
“Noted,” Helt said.
Elena smiled up at him. They continued past the empty house-to-be, and walked by silent, dark courtyards. “My house is the next one.”
They stopped at her door.
“Who’s the artist?” Helt asked.
“The people who know about him say he calls himself a welder.”
A welder. The sculptor was Yves Copani. It had to be him. I will not have us keep a Cash Ryan, Helt decided, even a dead one, and send this artist away.
“That’s all I know about him,” Elena said.
“Not his name?”
“No. There are some things I want to know but I save them until I can savor them.”
Well, damn, Helt thought. He was just tipsy enough to have thought for a moment that delayed gratification, tonight, was a bad idea.
“There are things I know that I wish I didn’t,” Elena said. “That river.”
Helt looked over his shoulder at the river, black, its ripples silvered with manufactured moonlight.
“I know which waters feed it; I know it to be pure, drinkable; I know how it’s purified. I know the sources of the reclaimed nitrogen that will enrich Mena’s fields someday, but most of the time I can forget. When I’m here,” she said.
Helt knew exactly how it was done, the schemata for the holding tanks in the rock beneath the Athens clinic and in other places, the carefully monitored bacteria in the water where Cash Ryan’s body floated in the dark now, the deadly brightness of the banked UV lights that burned away the water’s life when the sludge had been mined for its values and stored away. He knew, and he wished he didn’t.
Elena held up her hands, palms forward, as if to push him away. “There’s another thing. When you find whatever you find that gets me off the suspect list, what if it’s something that has only your word to verify it?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I think we could become lovers.”
She said what Helt’s body knew. He could not read her statement as an attempt to seduce. It was an acknowledgment of shared reality. Helt thought of himself as honest, but her honesty was less cautious, and perhaps more real, than his.
If Elena Maury needed to kill someone, she would make her reasons known, loud and clear. A still small voice said, She’s got you, boy. You want to believe anything she says.
“If we are lovers,” Elena said, “will your word be as believable as if we are not?”
Well, yes, and then again, no. Her thinking was a little paranoid, but then again, she might have something there.
> “I suffer from excessive caution,” Helt said. He knew, as well as anything he had ever known in his life, that if he hugged her, if he held her close, she would have no defense against his desire or hers; she was too exhausted for that. “So we will find proof you didn’t kill Cash Ryan, and then we will find a way to verify that proof. Even when we are lovers.”
He knew one thing he could do to reassure her. If it didn’t seem reassuring to her, but a threat, then possibly she had things to hide from him. That would be terrible, but it would tell him a lot. “Let me see your interface.”
She looked up at his face and frowned, but she reached into her pocket and gave it to him. She was so alone, facing this suspicion. There was risk in what he was going to do, but the risk was hers more than his—if she had anything to hide.
Helt entered the access codes that would reach him, day or night, at SysSu, at home, anywhere.
“You can watch with me, work with me, see any file I see when I see it. I will not hide from you. I will not do that.”
She took her interface back and left her palm open, her fingers wide as if she were afraid to close them, as if the little machine might bite them.
“You can delete the codes if you want,” Helt said.
Elena nodded.
Helt closed her fingers over the interface and kissed them.
He turned and walked away, no easy thing to do, and heard the sound of her door closing, and looked back to see that she was safe inside.
13
The Sane Suspect
At some point in the night, Helt put his hand on his cold face and felt moisture on his cheek. It was dew, so the dawn would come soon, and it was cold out here. He blinked at the night sky and burrowed deeper into his sleeping bag, hoping the waking dreams would stop.
If that’s what you called them, the incidents he never realized he remembered until they replayed in half sleep when he was waking or trying to drift into sleep. They came razor-sharp, complete with every emotion he’d felt at the time, shame, or guilt, or anger, raw and unmuted by the defenses a waking mind uses to get through a day.
“I’m trying to reconstruct how it felt,” his mother said. “I’m trying to act as if I love you. But it’s an act now. Don’t ever think I mean it. If it weren’t for the boy…”
“Once he’s older. Once he’s older, we won’t bother you again.” Jørn Borresen’s voice came from the depths of the green armchair where he sat in the evenings, close enough to tend the fire, but this was summer and noon, and nothing was right and maybe Jørn wasn’t in the chair but on his way to the door.
“He knows, doesn’t he? He knows I don’t love you. He knows I don’t love him,” his mother’s voice said.
“Of course he knows.”
“He’s becoming as stoic as the man I see now. A cold Nordmann who will be trained to be polite and honest to a fault, and never let anyone know whether he loves them or hates them or could care less. Just like you. Leave me for a while. Leave me. Please!”
The chair belonged at home, not in that tiny apartment with a door that opened on this long hall with a nursing station at its end. Helt felt the shame of eavesdropping, but he hadn’t meant to. He was in the hall waiting for his father and the walls were thin. He felt ashamed that he had wanted to pull away from the kiss on the cheek his mother had offered, because she was following a script that says a mother should be fond of her twelve-year-old son. She didn’t know, really, who he was. Not in any way that counted.
And now he really was awake.
A terrorist’s bomb had sent a shard of granite from a carving on a Quebec stair into Lily Borresen’s head when Helt was ten years old. It had been tiny, and sharp, and it had obliterated a small part of the medial temporal cortex in the right side of her brain. He remembered, ten years old and lonely, looking up the words and the pictures of his mother’s brain that went with them.
Lily Borresen had memories of her husband and her son, but her emotional memories weren’t tied to current experience then, not even two years after the injury.
Things got better, or Lily built memories of love that she thought she should have for her husband and her child. She moved back to Helt’s childhood home in Maine, and brought the chair with her. But things weren’t better enough, and his father’s restless travels from consulting job to consulting job started then. Helt went along. One year, two years, for so many cities. He’d learned to make friends fast and learned they would be gone soon.
Helt turned over in his sleeping bag and reached out to stroke the chilly stone beside his pillow. He was on top of a cliff that was just the right distance, a ten-minute jog, from Petra tower. It was a good place to look down at whatever came by. He’d come up here after leaving Elena, after tossing and turning for a while, after wishing he could put his hormones in storage for a few hours and get some sleep.
He had kept on thinking about certain human imperatives, like sex. No, not just sex, but sex in the context of love, a complicated endeavor.
He wanted superlative sex, the striving and the tenderness and the release and the profound relaxation that followed. Well, for a while it followed, but, as with the best of drugs, hunger always returned. He wanted to play the war game of sex with a worthy opponent, with points scored on either side in conscious and unconscious artistries of surprise and delight, triumph and surrender.
He wanted someone he could trust, up close and personal. He wanted to talk without censorship on either side. He wanted a sympathetic ear when he needed one and he wanted to be strong for the vulnerability of a cherished other, and he wanted someone who would surprise him and lead him into explorations of new territories in the art of living, things he hadn’t thought about yet, and. And resilience, and the ability to give him the occasional goad, and laughter, and, and. And his list was far too long, and he knew it. And he knew people could change, and never be the same again.
He’d been thirty-five when he decided that whatever happened would have to happen on Kybele. His imagined partner would have a good mind, of course, and he forgave himself for knowing she needed to be beautiful, at least to him. About common interests, shared recreations, he wasn’t so sure. He didn’t care if she liked the seashore and he liked the mountains. If it didn’t work out, he couldn’t try to hide from it by traveling from place to place, like his dad had. Not here.
He just wished the woman who was currently filling his fantasies, if not his arms, weren’t a murder suspect.
He pulled a corner of his sleeping bag over his nose.
* * *
The pool table sound of cracking antlers startled Helt awake in predawn light, but he didn’t get a look at the battle. While he stayed quiet and tried to find some sign of where the herd was this morning, the rest of his brain woke up, bitching.
His protocols had missed the Seed Bankers. That was scary.
Some way had to be found to spend time with Elena, to learn everything he could about her.
He climbed down from his flat rock and went home, showered and ate breakfast, and went back to SysSu.
* * *
This early on Saturday morning, SysSu was deserted. Helt made himself a pot of coffee in his office, set his interface display full-wall, sprawled in a chair to sip a cup, and looked for his deer herd.
GPS locators found them; they had already moved away from Petra and were traveling toward Second Sea, following a migratory pattern they made up for themselves.
A migratory pattern might serve for chances to talk to Elena without compromising her or him. Just happened to run into you. Right.
It was too early to wake anybody if they were working day shift, and certainly too early if this was a day off. He sent a text to Yves Copani.
Helt. Could we meet face-time today about your request to stay on board?
Helt’s search programs found a few nodes of speculation about the “suicide.” Not many, and Severo’s folk had sifted the individuals in those speculations. All of them had been alibied for the
missing hour.
The police log showed very little activity last night. People were busy with departure tasks, or they were behaving. Or they were getting surprise visits from the execs, for all Helt knew. Ripples would spread from those interviews, but so far, Kybele’s folk were doing what they usually did, except for the ones who had Things to Do in the run-up to the first firing of the big engines.
Helt, reassured, still felt a nagging discomfort about Doughan’s plans to interview Seed Bankers without telling them they were busted.
The GON list created serious discomfort for him anyway, and now it included people Helt hadn’t considered, hadn’t found. Archer’s Seed Bankers were secure, dedicated, vetted colonists. None of them had set off alarms anywhere. Vetted? Yes, by Mena, by Archer, by Doughan. And knowing that it hadn’t been Helt’s job to look them over didn’t help one bit. How far should preemptive justice go?
Once upon a time, hungry five-year-old children who stole a loaf of bread were hung by the neck until dead, and crowds came out to enjoy the show. Witches were burned at the stake. What a person thought and said about God, or a king, could draw a death sentence. Ugh was the reaction to that sort of justice now. What were they thinking? Why were they so cruel?
He wondered how history would feel about what Helt Borresen was helping his bosses do here.
In the past, people got in trouble, and were sometimes executed, because of sex. Forbidden sexual practices were culture-specific, which could cause real trouble if you didn’t know the local rules. The punishments for indulging in forbidden sex had always been terrible and sometimes bizarre, and had forever been remarkably ineffective at changing behaviors.
Helt, he told himself, you’re back to sex again. Something must be done about this.
Okay, Helt told the future population of Kybele. I tried, with imperfect tools, to select people who could survive one another’s company in this little egg, and if you’re alive to complain about my work, I did my job.