by Sage Walker
That Ryan hadn’t used the table interface in his quarters for anything like that was odd. But he hadn’t. The money was on the missing pocket interface.
Severo turned his head from side to side, slowly. His mournful face made the “no” gesture more emphatic.
“So we’re searching public data, all of us,” Jim said. “I hoped to have some of the flavor of Ryan’s childhood for you. Early history helps; I hoped to talk to his mother and flesh out the school records and such we have on him. So far I’ve failed to make contact with her.”
“You ended up with that job? I was willing to sign off on the death announcement,” David II said. “But Doughan said that because it looked like a suicide, and it did, at the time, the death announcement should come from Biosystems.”
“Yes, because it seemed to be a medical death, Mena sent a formal announcement to his mother. That’s who was listed as next of kin. My name was given as the contact on Kybele for a more detailed account. I waited forty-eight hours and then tried to contact Ryan’s mother. I tried several times. She didn’t respond.” Jim was looking out the window, mostly, while he talked, but he was keeping track of David II’s expression. It was neutral. Helt wondered if the two of them had ever discussed family relationships. David II’s were complicated.
David II had been born in Singapore, a clone child of David I. When you saw the two of them together, they looked like father and son, closely related but not identical, but because they were clones you looked for identity—and sometimes found it. That the younger David was a clone had not been mentioned until David II scored higher than anyone else on the set of exams and interviews for David I’s position.
The cloning problem, Mena had said twenty years ago, was a non-problem. No, Kybele didn’t plan on cloning humans; maintaining a heterogenous population was the idea, certainly for several generations. But David I wanted to retire, and the observations of David II’s life would be interesting. Denying the position to the best candidate was foolish. End debate.
“Go on,” Helt said.
“I poked around a little, and found that a Cynthia Ryan lived in Idaho, where the records said she lived. She’s the right age. I didn’t know why she wasn’t interested in her son’s death. Most mothers are. I came over to talk to you about it, Helt, but you weren’t here, and Nadia saw me wandering, so she helped out. SysSu had already put tags on all e-mails that mentioned Cash Ryan, and she was able to tell me that the message to Cynthia Ryan had been opened at destination, not just trashed.”
“Tagging is standard for some situations,” Helt said. “Every mention of Cash Ryan’s name is tagged for recovery and has been since the night he died.”
Of course we did that. Helt felt defensive for no good reason; the practice was common, routine. Surely no one alive assumed that e-mails were private. But, he realized, we didn’t announce that we were doing it. Transparency is a sacred cow for us, but we’re hiding stuff. Since this death, SysSu has been making too many assumptions about what SysSu thinks is a given. SysSu and the execs.
So it’s time for another round of announcements about what we do, time to bore people with announcements of the obvious. But they won’t bother to read them anyway.
Helt knew Jim had noticed that he’d tensed up with that statement. The psychiatrist was a damned good clinician, and he might ask Helt to tell him what was going on, later. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
“You can be angry at your son for a lot of reasons,” Jim said. “You can never want to hear from him again, although that’s not so common. I wanted to know what was going on between this mother and son, so I asked you, David II, what Cash’s severance pay was going to be.”
“You did,” David II said. “I sent the figures over.”
“And I used them as a bribe. ‘Talk to me and money will come to you.’ Just like a lost fortune scam, except with Kybele’s verifiable insignia all over the communication.
“The message was viewed by the recipient. So far, there’s still nothing.”
It was fishy. It felt fishy to Helt, and he knew it would seem fishy to Severo and David, too. They sat impassive and kept on listening.
“As far as facts go,” Jim said, “I can tell you that Charles ‘Cash’ Ryan switched schools several times between age eleven and age fourteen, and that his mother kept the same address during those years. Dad? I don’t know whether he was around or not. His name was Charles James Ryan and he died four years ago. So I can assume adolescent turmoil, but it’s an assumption. I don’t personally know a clinician in Caldwell who might have seen the kid in those years. I’m working the Old Boy network to try to find one.”
“Jim, you’ll need waivers and stuff to open the records if you do,” Helt said. “I’ll see if we can preempt the permissions.” He did a quick draft of the request to Kybele’s UN ambassador.
“Thank you,” Jim said. “Let’s take a look at our subject, Helt.”
Helt put Cash Ryan onstage, courtesy of videos Jerry had tweaked into holo displays. A boy with dishwater blond curls, maybe ten or eleven years old, shifted his feet and craned his neck to look up at something. He was a well-built child with big feet and big hands; probably he would be a little clumsy until the rest of his growth caught up with his feet. Just a kid, Helt supposed, handsome, but not beautiful enough to be obvious pedophile bait. He was utterly expressionless.
“What was the context, Helt?” David II asked.
“A school trip to a local museum.” Helt retrieved the original flat video, a group of children nearing the turmoil of puberty, looking up at a sort of wagon with red wooden wheels taller than they were. Its bare wooden carriage seat was perched over a cylinder that looked like a bomb.
“That’s a Stanley Steamer,” David II said. “No, it’s not. It looks like a homemade version.”
“Looks dangerous,” Helt said.
“Ryan’s high school records show he was bright; no surprise there,” Jim said. “Advanced placements in physics, math—No disciplinary kerfuffles that show on these records. He was bright enough to get into MIT when the time came. Show us more, Helt.”
Jerry’s displays showed Cash walking, slowly, through snow and black-trunked trees, water in the background the color of steel, a blurred wall of buildings beyond it. The tag read “Back Bay.” He was alone, head bowed, hands stuffed into the pockets of a dark green puffer jacket. He was bare-headed, the blond curls of childhood now a brown mop, and he’d grown a beard. He looked at the camera once, unsmiling, and then walked on. He’s posing, Helt thought. The artist as a lonely young man.
“At MIT, Cash Ryan majored in engineering, minored in instrumental music. Applied for colonist status on Kybele but didn’t make the cut.”
Onstage, the young Cash Ryan, obviously tense, hunched over a guitar and played for an exam. He was good.
Archer came in and sat down next to Helt. Helt started to tap controls and close down the music, but Archer shook his head, no.
Cash Ryan’s fingers, long enough to look spidery, walked the neck of a guitar. The recording caught the man’s breathing, a sharp intake before some apparently difficult fingering at about the three-minute mark. The solo was a wistful piece, slow in tempo, melodic with a late romantic feel.
Helt was beginning to like the guy. He didn’t want to. Cash Ryan had been in bed with Elena, long ago and far away, so Helt wanted to hate him. But he came across, in his music, as shy and sensitive, someone who wanted approval. It was possible, just possible, that Elena had been intrigued for good reasons.
It was just possible that Helt was not going to be objective about Elena Maury until he knew her better.
The music ended. Helt faded out the display. Next up in the queue, if Jim stayed with a chronologic order of business, were captures of Elena and Ryan together. Helt wanted to hide them, brief as they were, but they had to be shown, and anyway, Severo had been through them. Probably Jim had, too.
Archer pushed his white eyebrows down and lifted his nose to sq
uint at the empty stage. “I’m sorry for the delay,” he said. “David I wanted to review what you’ve done so far. If you’d care to have him join us, Helt.”
“Now is fine,” Jim Tulloch said.
Helt brought the Vancouver link from David I’s home office to the stage. There would be time delay, but it was such a familiar one that the use of it had become almost an art form.
“I believe Ryan’s piece was Villa-Lobos, Prelude Three,” Archer said.
Which meant he knew damned well what it was. Helt sharpened the focus on David I’s smooth dark face and softened the setting, a cordovan leather overstuffed chair placed in front of a window. The light outside was the deep blue of evening. The view from David I’s window was a forest of distant skyscrapers with a snow-capped mountain in the background to dwarf them. It looked cold out there. “It’s a good choice for a student recital,” Archer said. “Andante, so careful practice can get you through the arpeggios even if your speed isn’t up to virtuoso standards.”
David I nodded serenely. “I bow to your superior knowledge of the subject. Did he play it well?”
“He didn’t play it like a Spaniard. He played it like someone who’s spent time listening to Spaniards.”
David I smiled. “Archer, please introduce me to your colleagues. David II and I are well acquainted, of course.”
David I and David II nodded to each other. The synchrony of muscle motion, the so-similar faces and expressions were bothersome but by no means a match, and one face was definitely forty years older than the other. Watching the two of them should have been no more intriguing than watching identical twins, but it was.
Archer said names; everyone nodded to one another, including David II.
In the spaces between intros, Helt checked the info on the music anyway. Villa-Lobos, as Archer had said.
“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Luo,” Jim said. “So, we have the young Cash Ryan, a disappointed colonist. This is when he knew Elena, right, Helt?”
Here it was, damn it. This had to be done. He put up a still of Cash Ryan with a mike in a Cambridge coffeehouse, the young Elena at a front-row table. Her face and those beautiful amber eyes looked up at the poet with rapt attention. “They met at the beginning of their senior year at MIT,” Helt said. “They shared an interest in coffeehouse poetry. Here’s what Elena said.”
He showed her in the Frontier diner with a glass of brandy.
“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.”
“We’ve heard him do that,” Jim said. “I’ve listened to Cash Ryan’s poems. You have the transcripts.”
“Do we have to listen to them?” Severo asked.
Helt wasn’t sure Severo was delivering a straight line. Apparently everyone here had read the poems, or skimmed them. To Helt, they seemed much as Elena had described them. They seemed young and anguished. Lines from one of Ryan’s poems came back to him.
The curve of your sleeping back
Sweats tears of past surrenders
“No,” Jim said. “But you have to hear what I found in them. I ran them through a speech pattern analysis developed for terrorist screening. It doesn’t work; too many false positives, but it’s a workaround for reviewing concerns a therapist might miss hearing. Even I, as well adjusted and sociable as I am, choose to brush off certain kinds of problems if I can get away with it. But I know I do it, so I check myself now and then.
“Cash Ryan’s poetry uses these words, or close alternatives, fairly frequently.” Jim put them onscreen.
HAUNT
BURN
SEVER
RIP
BLACKEN
“His usage is well within the frequency of other angry poets, and within the convention that action verbs are important. There’s a different usage that’s more bothersome.”
CRUSH
ENSNARE
DELUDE
DEVOUR
“His point of view is always that of the outsider, the alien. The fantasy that we’re changelings, dropped into the wrong family by mistake, is common enough in the struggle to grow up. But Ryan seems a tad more alienated than most, someone who studies people’s responses in order to use them.
“How long did his relationship with Elena Maury last, Helt?”
“Three months.” His voice sounded detached and clinical and he was pleased with himself for pulling that off. “And then she went to Stanford for a couple of graduate degrees. Cash Ryan stayed at MIT and left, ABD, all but dissertation, four years later. Dr. Maury has stated, several times, that she had no further contact with him until she dodged contact here on Kybele. Three years ago.” Helt wondered if anyone here believed she had managed not to run into him, except for that single incident of seeing him once in a crowd. Helt wondered if he believed it himself. But so far, the public video records confirmed her story. There were a few captures where they had crossed the agora at the same time or traveled on the same train, but never in close proximity to each other.
“You hired him, David I, right after he left MIT. Why?” Jim asked.
The time delay from Vancouver made David I’s answer seem more carefully composed than it probably was. “I hired him,” David I said. “I brought him up to do manual labor, essentially. His qualifications were no better than many others, but his humility, his desire to touch the stone of Kybele, to be part of her birth, convinced me that he was willing to take on humble tasks, that he wanted to be proud of his work. I was, perhaps, overinfluenced by his video interview. I remember him as an intense young man.”
Pause, while the link synced voice and face and the next batch from Earth arrived.
“Cash Ryan worked hard. He was assigned to the construction crews that were assembling the reserve reactors, the ones that are mothballed now.”
“But you didn’t extend his contract.” Jim said.
David I’s eyelids were at half-mast. If expression resides around the eyes, his expression was well guarded. “We wanted to offer as many people as possible the opportunity to be a part of the building of Kybele,” David I said.
That was the spin speech the execs put on sending someone away, in those years, and would repeat, even with this last pruning, to avoid saying why some were chosen to stay aboard and some were not.
Jim didn’t challenge David I, didn’t ask for his reasons, and Helt wondered why. Respect for an elder authority? An attempt to do something to David I’s head? Perhaps, for surely Kybele’s former chief engineer was ready with an answer to the unasked question, “Why did you send him away, really?”
David II was not looking at anyone in the room. He was intent on something on his desk screen. Severo leaned back in his chair and linked his hands over his stomach. Archer’s fingers were busy on his keyboard, which was standard for him in any meeting. He never seemed to look up, but from long experience, Helt knew he missed very little.
“David II, what do you have on the years between Cash Ryan’s first and second tours?” Jim asked.
David II’s hesitation lasted only a microsecond, but it was there. “He didn’t complete his PhD. I didn’t know that when I hired him, but I know it now because you sent me the records, Helt. He worked reactor maintenance at Svalbard for a couple of years, and then he worked on the building of the Kitimat reactor in BC.”
“Do you have anything on his personal life before you hired him? Relationships, peer review reports?”
“No.”
“Severo?” Jim asked.
“Nothing from those years. We’re looking,” Severo said. “Why did you hire him, David II?” Jim asked.
“His qualifications were good. He’d been here before, so his ability to work in low g was known. There would be no period of adjustment to the cond
itions on Kybele.” David II looked up from his desktop screen to the life-size image of David I. “His interactive interview with me presented energy, longing, and humility. I found him charming, much as I think you did, sir. He was, as you said, an intense young man.”
David I nodded. “He had a degree of charisma, yes. I will be extremely interested in what you find about his recent activities.”
“Severo?” Jim asked.
“He never ended up cited by NSS for anything. Public cameras show that he went to work and came home. The neighbors in his compound never complained about him. They knew him by sight. They saw him come and go. None of them report any conversations with him that were more than standard greetings.
“He ate in the canteen and in restaurants in Athens. He went to the stadium for futbol games sometimes. He played pick-up games with a couple of engineers, Oriol Bruguera and Masaka Ueda. We’ll be talking to them.”
Severo looked at his reports on screen. “We know that Cash Ryan went to work Wednesday, four days ago. His neighbors didn’t see him come home after work, which doesn’t mean he didn’t. We just don’t know. A couple of hours later, someone, or probably more than one person, tossed him off the Athens tower. We have some blank spaces to fill in.” Severo kept the flat cadence of someone reading a report. Hours of overtime and calling in off-duty personnel were part of the equation Severo didn’t mention. “The cameras in Center were offline for an hour, and it’s likely the fall happened in that hour,” Severo said. “Dr. Elena Maury was the first person seen leaving the Athens tower elevator after the death and after the cameras came back online.”
Well, Severo had to say it. Elena was on the elevator after Cash Ryan died. She’d been his lover once. Four days after the death she was still the only person on Kybele with known personal links to him.
“She’s still a suspect?” Jim asked.
“Yes,” Severo said. “Dr. Maury didn’t like the guy. She’s said that. There’s another woman on board who didn’t like him. We’ve only known about that since last night. Her name’s Susanna Jambekar. Susanna’s a midwife. She hasn’t been questioned yet, so we don’t know why she didn’t like him.”