The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  And right now, Elena was hovering in the background while Susanna Jambekar kept watch over a woman in labor. Elena, Susanna, Mena, they worked together. Helt wondered how close they were, wondered if they shared that friendship thing women had sometimes. Women shared intimacies about the physical state of their bodies and the ups and downs of their emotions sooner than men did, was Helt’s impression. As an outsider.

  “Do you think either woman could have killed Cash Ryan?” Jim asked.

  “Anything’s possible,” Severo said. “I hope Susanna didn’t. She delivered my daughter, for one thing. She kept me from getting scared while she did it, for another. Well, at least I wasn’t so terrified I went ballistic, anyway, and that took some doing.”

  What Severo wasn’t saying was that Susanna Jambekar, who didn’t like Cash Ryan, was on the Seed Banker list. Did knowing that make a difference to Severo? Would it make a difference to David I, or to Dr. Jim Tulloch, if they knew? Not much, Helt figured. The Seed Bankers complicated things but the knowledge that there were some on board didn’t change the reconstruction of Ryan’s personality. Severo might get upset if he knew Doughan’s order was disobeyed, even with the group of people in this room, who had to know sooner or later. While Helt tried to weigh pros and cons on speaking out, Jim leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

  “And that’s where we are,” Jim said. “Cash Ryan comes across as a secretive man, a loner, and before his death he hadn’t managed to form a successful relationship with a woman, or a man, as far as we know. We know we need more information about him. I certainly do, before I can say anything helpful, much less brilliant.”

  “I have learned a few things that might be of some slight value in your efforts,” David I said.

  Archer’s fingers stopped their keyboard dance. He looked up at David I.

  “Please,” Jim said. “Go ahead.”

  David I leaned forward in his chair. “I became interested in Charles ‘Cash’ Ryan when Kybele informed me of his death, doubly so because David II had hired him to work on board again.”

  “I didn’t mention it to you,” David II said. “Of course, now I wish I had.”

  “I would have had little to say, because he had not come to my attention after leaving Kybele.

  “Cash Ryan made several trips to Svalbard from his home in Palo Alto, but the time he spent in Norway was less than six months, all told. I was unable to find where he was actually employed during the years he lived in Palo Alto, if he was. He moved to Vancouver after four years in California. He did not work on the construction of Kitimat until three months before you hired him and brought him to Kybele, David II.”

  “I would have to say that your information is of rather more than slight value,” Archer said.

  “He faked his résumé,” David II said.

  “So it seems,” David I said.

  “The feat is not easy to accomplish,” Archer said. “Or rather, it is, but it’s difficult to do it well. I’ll see if I can sort out how he managed it, and who, if anyone, helped him.”

  Helt reached for his pocket interface and pulled up Elena’s fact sheet. After her time at MIT, the record showed:

  MD/PHD IN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, STANFORD, PALO ALTO, CA, 2185

  RESIDENCY, INTERNAL MEDICINE, VANCOUVER GENERAL HOSPITAL, VANCOUVER, BC, 2187

  She had worked in Vancouver for two years and then spent a year splicing genes in London before she came to Kybele.

  Oh, damn. Helt felt muscles in his shoulders tighten, felt his jaw tense up. It seemed pretty clear that Cash Ryan had lived where she lived, moved when she moved. He had stalked her. Helt felt a sense of revulsion that made even the cold, digital facts about the man disgusting.

  “Helt?” Jim asked.

  Helt put the dates up for them with David I’s addresses for Cash Ryan during those years as sidebars. “It looks like he followed Elena to Palo Alto. It looks like he followed her to Vancouver. I think it’s possible we’ll find him in proximity to Susanna Jambekar on Kybele, once I set up the parameters to look through the records. I think he might have been a stalker.”

  And if that’s what he was, and Elena knew it, would that make it more likely, or less likely, that she killed him? What about Yves Copani? Would he have killed Ryan to protect Susanna from his attentions?

  “Someone who had the balls to fake a dossier to get himself employed on the most publicly examined construction project in human history,” Jim said. “Someone no one knew, or seemed to want to know. Someone whose communication records are a little too bland to be real, or so Nadia tells me. Someone who may have stalked two women. Do the women have anything in common, Helt?” Jim asked.

  “They both have dark hair,” Helt said. “They walk the same way, if that means anything.”

  “It might,” Jim said. “We don’t know enough. We know we don’t know enough, but, as a working hypothesis, I think it will not be harmful for us to look for the killer of a well-integrated psychopath. Not a sociopath, but the big brother of the syndrome, a psychopath.

  “It’s hard to get inside the worldview of a psychopath, but it seems that, to them, other humans are only objects to be manipulated. Many of them enjoy causing pain. Psychopaths don’t develop the neural circuitry for empathy. Some of them learn to fake it, because they want to avoid punishment. Some are extremely charismatic.

  “They are good at deception. Lies mean nothing to them. They assume everyone is lying because they do. They tailor their stories and their personalities to fit what they think their victims want to see, want to hear. And to them, all of us are potential victims.

  “They have definite goals and they will do anything, anything at all, to obtain what they want. I think we should find out what Cash Ryan wanted, and why he wanted it. And then we can get on with the business of finding out who thought the only way to stop Cash Ryan from doing what he wanted was to kill him.”

  “This psychopath worked on our reactors, and then on the stabilization engines out on the skin,” David II said. He looked like he wanted to check every one of the systems that controlled every one of them, right now. He looked like only courtesy was keeping him in his chair.

  “We have work to do,” Jim said. “Helt, you’ll call us in again when we know more. And we will.” Jim grabbed the arms of his chair in preparation for getting out of it. “Thank you, gentlemen. Good hunting.”

  17

  Chimeras

  David II went to look for Doughan after the meeting. Helt set his system to alert him if they made contact.

  If Doughan had found this afternoon’s Seed Banker, the man named Oriol Bruguera, he hadn’t posted it. There wasn’t any capture of Doughan’s day, either. He was supposed to keep his interface live, and he wasn’t doing it. Maybe he had good reasons and would explain them later. Maybe he hadn’t thought about turning it on.

  Safety inspections and drills are an interruption of anyone’s work schedule and the most boring things in the world, unless they aren’t. Navigation’s records for the systems Cash Ryan might have known about or touched were up to date and unremarkable and had been done on schedule. Doughan and David II would certainly look everything over again, and Helt knew staring at equipment or specs for most of those things was not his job, because he didn’t know what he’d be looking for unless someone coached him.

  Helt went looking for a stalker.

  Good old Bayesian probability. His search for situations where Cash Ryan and Susanna Jambekar were found in “near-miss” proximity on Kybele’s public space cameras paid off. Ryan had been in too many places just before her, just after her, for chance to be an explanation.

  He did the verifications with his own eyes, capture after capture, with any and every view of the surrounding areas and events near those times examined. He kept going until his eyes felt sanded, and the theory held. Helt sent the stalker hypothesis to the Murder Mess construct, stretched his arms wide, and felt the knots in his shoulders complain.

  There
was still Elena Maury and her history and the time spent in Vancouver and Washington state, in the deserts west of the Cascades, briefly, with side trips into faces and friendships captured in passing, and the music of the years when those faces had been younger. Her family surprised him. It was a company, with maybe monogamous pairs in it and maybe not but it was hard to tell from the outside.

  He was still in his chair in the SysSu conference room. He was thirsty.

  He looked for David II and the locator found him in Doughan’s office. He didn’t call him.

  “Helt?”

  It was Jim Tulloch’s voice, out in the dark hall.

  “Here.”

  Jim brought a tray with him, loaded with containers that smelled good. A wine bottle was on it, lying on its side, and two coffee cups. One had a logo of a cracked pot on it. The other featured Victorian cover art for The Secret Garden.

  “Is that coffee?” Helt asked.

  “No.”

  Helt looked at the contents of the cracked pot cup. It was filled to the brim with red wine.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Nissa. We were talking over dinner and my dear companion thought I seemed distracted. I told her I was worried about you, so she kicked me out with food. She told me to come back when I could pay attention to her for a while.” Jim picked up the other cup. “Cheers.”

  Helt raised his cup and drank some of his wine. Nissa was an engineer, Russian, and had been a soldier in the Arctic when Jim was stationed there. They hadn’t met until Nissa came on Kybele as a colonist. Their memories of the north and the conflict there were so different, Jim said, that they had material for arguments to last at least another twenty years.

  “Please thank Nissa for me,” Helt said. “Ryan was stalking the midwife.”

  “That’s good,” Jim said. “I mean, I’m glad it fits with what I thought I was seeing, through a glass, darkly. The brain slides may tell us if there’s anatomic evidence to back me up. Psychopaths sometimes have anatomic markers. Deformations and decreased mass of the amygdala, that’s common. So is increased activity in the ventral striatum, bilaterally, but that won’t show on an autopsy.”

  “Could you unpack that a little?” Helt asked.

  “Oh. The amygdala does a lot of things with emotion, and one of the things it does is tell you when you’re afraid. So psychopaths don’t fear punishment much. Parts of the ventral striatum make up the pleasure center. Psychopaths anticipate pleasure more than most of us. A sort of addictive behavior, actually.”

  “Thank you,” Helt said, but he was thinking of Elena and her frozen sections. She was doing the work as fast as she could, he knew that. She would tell him the instant she found something like that.

  Nissa had sent a large portion of pasta topped with red sauce. Helt tucked in. Jim unwrapped some garlic bread for him.

  “How is it even a couple of bites and I feel better?” Helt asked.

  “It’s not Nissa’s sauce Bolognese, it’s the secret powers of glucagon and insulin,” Jim said. “The buzz isn’t in the sauce. You made the endorphins yourself.”

  “Please tell Nissa I’m grateful for the high. I only hope it lasts.”

  Jim rolled one of the chairs nearer so he could use it as a footstool. He kicked it into the position he wanted and stretched out with his cup resting on his belly. “We can segue directly into your postprandial depression, if you like. You never really thought everyone would play nice, just because we have a new world to play in and plenty of food, and bright, capable people to play nice with.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You knew something like this would happen sooner or later.”

  “We all knew that. It’s part of what we work on, SysSu, Biosystems, the execs, all of us. We’ll have varied climates so life, and diet, for that matter, won’t get too boring, and construction that will never be finished. We’ll maintain a balance of head work and muscle work, and neither will ever be just busywork. The work is completely reality based; without hands-on maintenance, Kybele will die. Research. That won’t stop and we think we have the cerebral mass and the materials to keep on doing it. A shared destination. A shared goal.”

  “And we’ve known it won’t be enough,” Jim said.

  “Sure. Most of the gloom and doom scenarios for generation ships were played out by science fiction writers long ago, and they always came down to the same ugly thing. It’s not the machinery that will be the problem. It’s the people.”

  “Warlords. Feudalism. Slaves. Cannibalism for kicks. Am I missing anything?” Jim asked.

  “Corrupted information, religious fanatics, and inquisitions. Right now, right here, I’m watching power games get played, secrets kept in violation of the transparency we said we would keep. We aren’t. I’m worried, Jim.”

  “People keeping secrets from you?”

  Doughan wasn’t playing by the rules on recording what he was up to, but that shouldn’t be a problem once Helt let Doughan know the gaps were showing. He had to do that soon.

  “Probably not consciously,” Helt said.

  Jim glanced at him and then away. “But you’ll call them on it.”

  “I will.”

  “Another risk for isolated populations is terminal boredom,” Jim said.

  “I don’t think we’re in danger of that this week,” Helt said. “Once we get the Matter of Governance nailed down so we can survive each other’s company for a couple of hundred years, then, maybe, I’ll get bored.”

  “There’s this matter of a murder to solve first.” Jim produced a bottle of wine that Helt hadn’t seen him bring into the room, and refilled Helt’s cup and his own. “The prime suspect so far is a beautiful woman. What’s bothering you about Elena Maury?” Jim asked.

  You bastard. Not now, damn it. Not now, not ever. We aren’t going there. “What the fuck do you mean?” Helt heard the anger and frustration in his voice but the words were out.

  “I mean you showed some tension when Severo brought her up.”

  “Well, yeah.” Helt leaned back from the table and looked out the curve of windows toward the agora, a ploy to calm down a little. Night had fallen. Saturday night, and Helt was at work, alone, as he’d been so often for so long. So it showed that he wanted to protect her, would have spared her the wounds these suspicions had given her if he could.

  He saw, whenever he closed his eyes, the texture of her skin. He felt the warmth that rose from her throat when she looked up at him to see his reaction to that sculpture in the canyon. He felt the hurt this suspicion had caused her. He feared that he would never know the woman she was before this because now she wasn’t that woman anymore. Did that show, too?

  Jim was sipping his wine, his eyes at half mast and his attention, apparently, on the night outside. The bastard was going to wait him out.

  “She says she was up there getting samples from the platform,” Helt said. “She says it was just bad luck that she was there then. And I want to believe her. I really want to believe her.”

  “Elena’s a good woman. I work with her, you know.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” Helt said. Naked, seen half-hidden through a door left ajar, Tulloch’s bony shoulders, Elena’s hair fanned loose on a pillow. The imagined scenario was instant and painful. “Do you know her well?”

  “Don’t bristle,” Jim said.

  Bristle, hell. Helt wanted to punch him out.

  “She’s a colleague.” Jim said, quietly and reasonably. “She’s not my mistress, and the answer is, no, we have never made love. To break one of my sometimes-broken privacy rules, I will tell you that she’s never been my patient, either.”

  It helped to know that. A little. “Do you think she could have killed Cash Ryan? I mean, it looks like he was stalking her, and we know they were lovers.”

  Jim sighed and took a sip of his wine. “It’s an interesting question. She’s in charge of human reproductive strategy here, and if we don’t have a good one, we�
�re toast. She culls embryos before they’re implanted, but it’s not the same thing as culling a fully developed adult who’s been out in the world for forty years or so.”

  “I don’t know her,” Helt said. “I don’t know who she was before this happened.”

  Jim nodded and his eyes were looking at something farther away than the starscape on the ceiling above Athens.

  “I’ve spent hours learning what I can about her. There’s so much damned stuff around about people if you look for it. I know a lot of drivel about her family.” It was an eclectic collection of people and had been from the beginning, a business of sorts, and documented more than most families were at the time. He knew the names, Pilar, and Jared who died, and Signy and Paul Maury and the others. Elena was the granddaughter of a doc named Jared but Jared had never known he’d fathered a child, any child.

  The next generation of the Maury family, and that’s what they used as an official surname, continued the family business model of finding something that needed doing and then picking up the skills to do it. People came and went for years or decades or lifetimes.

  “I know her grades in elementary school and what her professors said about her—for the record. But I don’t know what anyone thinks about themselves or the world around them once they become a suspect in a murder case. I don’t know what damage that does even if it turns out they had nothing to do with it.”

  “Your question may be—I’m not saying it is, but it may be—what the old-timers would have called overdetermined,” Jim said.

  Meaning, your question is about this woman and about at least one other. Jim knew who, in Helt’s life, had been hurt and damaged and stayed damaged.

  The scars on Lily’s scalp were covered with her thick dark curls and never mentioned. She never again said Helt reminded her of his father and she couldn’t love him because of it, and Helt wasn’t supposed to have heard that conversation anyway. His parents had stayed married. Jørn had traveled as much as he could in his younger years, Helt with him at one school or another. Later, the quiet man who was Helt’s father stayed home as long as he could stand it, and then found another desalination plant in need of his services, somewhere, anywhere in the world.