by Sage Walker
Helt tried to imagine an Archer that young, that naive. He couldn’t.
“It was ridiculously rational of me to think that,” Archer said. “I would say, modestly, that I’ve done a good job with communications. Common sense, however, still seems to be in short supply. So I picked you to run interference between the departments. You have a gift for accepting the irrational.”
“Thank you,” Helt said. As compliments went, it was a little bothersome.
“Have you picked my successor, Helt?”
“What?” Helt scanned his mentor’s face for signs of illness, incipient death, or clinical insanity. Archer displayed none of the above. He looked both competent and healthy. “What are you asking me?”
“You know SysSu will need a division chief when I retire.”
“Retire? Are you planning to do that?”
“Not this week. At some point I’ll want to get rid of the administrative load and just sit in a quiet corner and play with code. That skill set seems to be holding up, even now in my dotage. Clean code is my version of art, I suppose.”
It was his strength, certainly. Jerry called him a cautious, careful, deliberate developer. His code was lean, tight, and concise. Archer couldn’t tolerate kludgy messes of spaghetti code. He rewrote the sprawling epics of others until they were pared down to tight, elegant haikus of code that achieved the same results. His work took anyone else a week to read and understand, but, oh, did it work.
Archer’s pet project was capturing images of Earth-based systems and storing them for comparison to Kybele’s.
As a precaution, Archer pulled Earth-based systems for storage on Kybele at measured intervals and filed the results, for Kybele’s internal operating systems were diverging, rapidly, from Earth-written programming.
It was much like Venkie’s documentation of the speed of language changes, Helt supposed. Kybele was a bottleneck that created, or perhaps forced, wide divergence from parental sources.
“Quite selfishly, I want to know we’re on our way outsystem before I step down, though,” Archer said.
“But I thought—”
“Certainly you didn’t think you would be next in line. It’s obvious that you have to stand outside SysSu’s turf to do what you do.”
Well, yes. And yes, he’d been looking at Jerry and Nadia, evaluating how they would fit in his place, in Archer’s.
“Nadia Tay, now, she might do well at it. She’s a calming influence, even on me. Your young firebrand, Jerry, would not be happy as a division head. He lets himself go off on tangents, and he pursues a problem until he’s beaten it into submission, and pays attention to nothing else while he’s doing it. Nadia’s better at pacing, at looking at temporality. At looking around to see what’s happening.”
“The big picture,” Helt said.
“That’s your specialty, I know. You have a fascination with currents, ebbs and flows, initial conditions.” Archer nodded to something on the wall.
“The ebbs and flows of currents, a butterfly’s wing that sets up a storm. Initial conditions. We have a lot of those,” Helt said. “Unintended consequences, now, those are a heck of a lot of fun to extrapolate. But if you’re aware of possible consequences, are they, then, unintended? I worry about the answer to that question, sometimes.”
“You urge us to caution. We need that. I like watching you work, Helt.”
The compliment startled him. Archer didn’t give them often and now he’d offered two in one day. “Thank you,” Helt said.
“You’re almost a separate division, something apart from SysSu. Sometimes I worry about that.” Archer waved his hand in Helt’s direction and focused on his desk screen again. “Now go back to work. I’ll say something rude to Doughan.”
“Thank you,” Helt said. “May I bring you more coffee?”
Archer looked around for his cup. It was on his desk, half-hidden by a Koosh ball, a baby blue one to match his cardigan. Nadia must have brought it to him, or Jerry. Helt wondered which one had thought to do it.
“No, thanks. Go away.”
“Yes, sir,” Helt said.
19
The Midwife
Helt’s shoulders were sore. He stretched them on the way back to his office. So Archer had Nadia as the next IA, Jerry as—what? SysSu exec. Jerry had the people skills. The tangent thing was manageable. Everyone in SysSu went off on tangents, some more frequently than others.
If Jerry didn’t control them himself, Nadia would call him on it. That would leave Helt as? As the former IA who didn’t solve a murder in time. Maybe Mena would put him to work. He could troll for fluctuations in residential methane production secondary to changes in the canteen menus. Well, hell. It would be useful information.
Archer’s speech about tangents sent him wandering on a tangent of his own, a long view on transfers of power, the human need for hierarchy, a SysSu whose scent would be different than Archer’s. No help for it, a designated leader leaves marks on everything, and the pack sniffs them and behaves accordingly. Or picks a different leader.
The methods used to pick leaders on Kybele were designed to balance merit and approval, an effort to keep the power of personality checked by the reality of competence. Merit, in that a seeker for a job had to test out as able to do the job. Anyone who wanted, or would agree, to represent a group at any level of a division’s hierarchy was elected by coworkers via secret ballot. Approval was involved in that. And on up the chain of command, so that division heads were selected, essentially, by their future replacements, by people who were qualified to do the boss’s job but weren’t doing it yet. Approval, for division chiefs, also meant that every three years they faced a ship-wide Vote of Confidence.
Doughan’s obvious replacement was David II. David II would fit so well for the years past Saturn, years of constant, steady acceleration via systems that would need careful tending but, fate willing, not much else. There would be years, decades, for building and sculpting and “moving in” in a real sense.
When Ryan’s first tour came up in the psych autopsy, David II had gone on full alert about Ryan’s possible exposure to anything related to the propulsion systems, but Cash Ryan hadn’t worked on any of them. Maybe David II had talked Doughan into checking them anyway, yesterday afternoon.
But David II had gone to Doughan’s office, and as far as Helt knew, they hadn’t begun to check hardware. He’d ask Doughan about that.
It was past time for Helt to set up the information scatter on Ryan’s death to suit himself. He built a planetary system of the NSS and SysSu factoids about the murder, centered on the enigma that was Cash Ryan. He watched as swarms of data dots aggregated into more or less two groups, one of possible motivations, one of personal relationships. At the scale he used, the construct told him that what was known, as opposed to surmised, about Cash Ryan and his death was at about an Oort cloud distance from a solution.
Helt nulled the display on his screen, leaned back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head.
Setting the murder aside until the doors that led to Earth were locked would be such luxury. Once Kybele was on her own, legal blueprints were clear on the matter of murder, of treason. Keeping the culprits on board to face Kybele’s nascent justice system would happen by default if they weren’t found before departure.
If only putting the Seed Bankers on the shuttle wasn’t the easiest way to get rid of them. If only it were possible to start out without a killer, or killers, on board. If only there wasn’t pressure to look good to the Earth that had put so much into this edifice of stone, seeds, and hopes.
Favors could be called in to keep the Seed Bankers’ sudden appearance on the off-list looking like just another transfer back to Earth, despite the last minute shuffling of names.
There had never been a desire, when someone left Kybele, to bring attention to people’s failures, to publish the reasons they were leaving. There had never been a turnover of seven or more people charged with treason or murder befo
re, either.
Media hounds would go into a feeding frenzy if Kybele were locked up and on her way having sent their troublemakers back to Earth. The news would harm nothing and no one here, but information and data sets from the ship were part of the expected payback to her parent planet.
The way Kybele would handle this mess was an example, fortunate or otherwise, of how a society forms itself. It would be ungrateful, distasteful, wrong to hide information on how well, or how badly, it was done. But hiding information about the Seed Bankers was the plan. No charges, no explanations, just “You’re fired.”
Fine, great, so the alternative would be to keep everybody here, sort out the Seed Bankers and trace their connections, if any, to Cash Ryan, in a calm, slow, deliberate fashion.
Helt needed a time travel device. He needed to go ask a living Cash Ryan why he got himself killed. Or at least he needed the man’s personal data stash. Helt shrugged his sore shoulders and began to look for it, again.
“Boss?” Jerry was slumped against the doorframe of Helt’s office. His hair was after-shower damp and tied into a sort of braid that hung over his right ear. His ragged Levis had gone mostly white and his Henley shirt had seen better years. Maybe it had been neon green once. Faded seemed to be this year’s high fashion. He dangled an empty coffee mug by the handle. “You got coffee?”
“Sure. Come on in.”
Jerry poured himself a cup and slouched into Helt’s visitor chair. “You’re working,” he said.
“I’m looking for Cash Ryan’s personal cache. We need his interface, since his access codes to it weren’t on that desk unit Archer has stashed in his office. We don’t have them,” Helt said.
“You’ve traced the sites he went to,” Jerry said.
“Oh, sure. You and Archer did, too, Wednesday night. Work, work schedules, recreation, poetry sites, porn. That’s what you found. He had to have a personal stash, encrypted, that he accessed with an alias.”
“Yeah, the alias,” Jerry said. “Usually it’s letter substitutions or something in a biography. Nickname or whatever. We didn’t get in because he didn’t access his stash from his home screen. He used his interface; that’s obvious.”
“You here to work?”
Jerry’s lack of enthusiasm was marked. He looked sad and tired.
“If you are, I appreciate the help,” Helt said. “I may have to add extra shifts all over SysSu. I’m going to ask Legal to research a bunch of stuff for me that’s not directly related to the murder, but I need it.”
He wanted to see how Legal would play keeping the Seed Bankers on board and charging them with treason here as one of the first court procedures on Kybele. It was such a good idea, except for the little problem that Cash Ryan, or one of the newly scheduled off-listers, might have sabotaged something that would go boom before the shuttle even left.
“For collating the info on the murder scenario, putting together what NSS finds and what SysSu comes up with, there’s you and Nadia,” Helt said. “You’re working too many hours already.”
“She’s with Martin this morning, something about feedback circuits to modify axon potentials. I want to truly not like that guy, but that sort of stuff intrigues me in spite of myself.”
Suspicions confirmed. Jerry was losing his girl. “So you’re alone,” Helt said.
“Yeah.”
But, damn. If friction between Jerry and Nadia butted into the work they were doing on the murder, the fact was that Helt couldn’t shift them off onto anything else. Not without a considerable cost in time and efficiency, and he didn’t have wiggle room for it, not now. He could leave it alone, or he could push the envelope of a friendship that was too new, that might not survive if he overstepped Jerry’s limits of trust.
“Martin’s the problem?” Helt asked.
“How’d you know that?” Jerry asked.
“I didn’t know it. I guessed it when we were coming down from Athens tower.” Helt wasn’t going to tell him that Severo, too, had nailed it. The look on Jerry’s face when Nadia talked about Martin had been as clear as a shout.
“You guessed right. Sucks.”
“Has she moved out? Have you?”
“No, we’re still roomies. We haven’t staked a formal claim on a building site. But we’ve looked at plans. Architect’s blueprints, floor plans. We figured we’d spend a year or two thinking about them. Those things are time sinks, you know?”
“I do,” Helt said.
“But we haven’t done much of that lately,” Jerry said. “It’s like she’s around, but she’s not.”
“That bad?” Helt asked.
“Worse. She spends her time with Martin, or daydreaming about Martin. She wants to do him, well and truly, but she won’t until I say it’s okay. I think. I mean, she looks at him like she wants to get laid. I know that look. She used to look like that a lot when she had a crush on you,” Jerry said.
She what? That kid? Helt had never really paid attention to her in any way before this. His surprise must have shown on his face.
“I didn’t know,” Helt said.
Jerry grinned. “You really didn’t, did you?”
“But…”
“You should take a look at hunk.com sometime. Password Kybelefem. All of us sexy bachelors are on it.”
“I don’t…”
“I know. Don’t worry, Helt. I love that look Nadia gets. But I haven’t found the time or the place to let her talk it out. To let me talk it out.”
Helt leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Okay, he’d decided to push, and learned something about himself doing it, so he had to lay out a trust-offering in payment, at least that. “If I offer any advice, you should be aware it’s coming from a man who’s besotted with the ship’s primary murder suspect.”
“Are you? Dr. Maury? No shit?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“She’s beautiful,” Jerry said. “Do you think she did it?”
“I really, truly don’t know.” Helt wondered if Elena was awake yet. He wondered how she looked, waking, dark hair loose on the pillow. He could almost feel her blanket-heated skin. He could imagine her amber eyes blinking to focus on the day. He wondered if at some point she and Mena had discussed, or would discuss, what sex with Helt Borresen was like. It was a markedly uncomfortable concept. It was also a turn-on.
For an instant, Helt saw the hollow sphere of Kybele paved with interlacing tendrils of loves desired and pursued, nodes of loves in flower and stable loves going stale, dull, old branches of loves lost and connections unraveled. In such a construct, relationships that ripened and endured would be nodes of stability, continuity, perhaps. Or they might become lumps of resistance to change, to innovation, cages made of the inertia that sets in when we find what we want and hold on to it. Is there an optimal number of long-term relationships in a community, a town, a world? Could there be too many, too few?
The data would be worth looking at, over time.
“Helt?” Jerry asked.
“Oh. Sorry. Spaced there for a minute.” Telling Jerry he would survive this and become more resilient because of it would be stupid, and also it would end the conversation. Helt looked at his choices and decided to gamble. “What do you dread most about talking to Nadia?” Helt asked.
He saw a momentary flash of anger on Jerry’s face. Helt had just challenged Jerry’s courage, but Jerry recovered and accepted the question.
“I think she’s going to cry. I hate it when she cries.”
“Heh. Can’t blame you for that. If Martin were there, do you think she would cry?”
“What?” Jerry shook his head, and then thought about it. “Wow. That would be highly weird.”
“I mean, he may have things he wants to say, too.”
Jerry looked in the general direction of the espaliered pear tree on the back wall of Helt’s office. Yellow blades of fallen leaves were scattered on the floor; the sweepers hadn’t claimed them yet today. Jerry picked one up with his bare toes an
d tossed it toward the corner.
“You know, if Nadia weren’t in the picture, I could like the guy. He’s really, really bright, and there’s that oblique British humor, the stuff that comes in from the side and you catch it two, three sentences later if you catch it at all.
“I introduced him to Nadia, actually. We were drinking a beer and he started talking about what he was working on. I thought Nadia could help him.”
“It might be worth talking out, the three of you. The concept of that sort of honesty—I don’t say I’d be brave enough to try it,” Helt said.
He had been that brave, in those times where the desire to know something overcame the possible losses from knowing it. He’d done that with Mena. He still hadn’t completely integrated her honesty.
He’d been deliberately sought out, she’d told him, as a sort of therapeutic agent. A drug to assuage grief, a cocktail made of new friendship, new intimacy, new sex, and then she’d sent him away—set him free, she said—because he had a life to live and it would be better lived without the burden of an aging partner. Because she was at risk of falling too deeply in love with him, she’d said. Because she had a job to do, a living world to build, and her love for it, her duty to it, had to come first.
She was Mena, and she was superb at what she did, but he still felt resentment at the role she’d given him to play. Help me heal, and then step aside. But, to play fair, to look back at who he was then, he’d run the numbers on loving an older woman. Male thirty-something and female forty-plus had been one set, easy to deal with then. Try male fifty-something and female past sixty. It might have worked. Mena was still, by any standards, a sexy woman.
Helt wanted to tell Jerry to stay in the background for Nadia, to wait this out until it quit hurting. Someone else would arrive in Jerry’s life, or Jerry would be there if this attraction faded and she wanted to come home again. She might, someday.