by Sage Walker
In the three weeks before his death, there were no paired captures of either woman. Damn. Ryan knew something was up or he was busy planning whatever he planned, too busy to keep track of Susanna or check on Elena.
“Clean water,” Elena said. She opened his bottle for him and pushed it into his hand. He was here, in part, to look at her resilience to trauma, to help her grieve, if he could do that, and she was taking care of him.
“The universal solvent,” Elena said. “It helps.” She blinked and looked at the screen, but Helt had vanished the dates, with that intriguing gap at the end.
Helt drank. The water was icy cold, a shock to his throat. “If Ryan was only an abuser, then we’re safer. Kybele’s safer, I mean. But then there’s the deliberate manipulation he did on his credentials. On what his work history was.”
“He changed stuff?” Elena asked.
“Yes.”
“And he got away with it.”
“That he got away with manipulating records is one of the scary parts about this. Jim, Jim Tulloch, is willing to call him a long-term plotter, a planner. Jim’s word is “psychopath,” and that bugs me. Someone hated him, or feared him, enough to kill him, and I don’t know why, much less who. Someone thought he was dangerous enough to kill, and they are still walking around.”
“Ugh. You make me feel very safe.”
“Sorry. If Ryan was murdered by self-appointed vigilantes—”
“Like Susanna?”
“—like Susanna, whose reasons would be hard to argue with by some standards, we’re still in trouble until we find his killer. Killers.”
“Killers who could have just waited for him to be gone forever. That’s crazy. If only they waited. He was leaving!” Elena said. She looked down and squeezed her water bottle a little, watching the liquid inside rise and fall. “That’s the plan I had for him. To stay away from him until he left.”
“I believe you just wanted to write him off. We don’t know about the sanity of his killer.” Helt was getting a firm bias toward the belief that Elena hadn’t killed Cash Ryan. Her reactions just didn’t have the ring, the feel, of someone trying to hide something. Proving she hadn’t done it was the challenge. If he couldn’t, if she’d killed him, his belief in the validity of his own perceptions, his belief in his ability to see people and patterns, would be thoroughly shaken. It would be a difficult lesson, and he didn’t want to have to learn it. And that meant he had to watch out, be careful, try to make sure he wasn’t overlooking things in an effort to push his internal narrative into an unfounded edifice that left Elena innocent if she wasn’t. “You, however, seem to be sane. To you, he was just an unfortunate incident of your wanton youth, and he wasn’t bothering you.”
“I’ve never been much of a wanton, really. I’ve been a deliberate loner,” Elena said. “I wanted to scatter my wild oats up here. I wanted a lifetime to live in my work, and to find richness in love outside it. For the pleasure of whatever love does, of course, but it fills the well of energy for work, too. So I’ve heard.” She spoke as if she had known him for years. The glimpse she offered into the cost-benefit analysis of her worldview startled him. It was an intimacy she had no reason to offer so soon, not to someone who might hold her future in his hands. She seemed to like Helt and trust him, and he hoped it was not just the best acting he’d ever seen. It felt real.
She shook her head, chasing away cobwebs. “Dreamer,” Elena said. “I dream, always. The dream I’m living right now is a nightmare.”
Mareritt, mare-ride, nightmare was an old word and hadn’t changed much. “I’m sorry,” Helt said. “You said you didn’t sleep those first two nights. Are you sleeping at all, now?” Are you damaged? Will your work suffer because we’ve doubted you? Will you heal?
“I don’t have nightmares while I sleep, not that often,” Elena said. “And then, like most humans, I dream of things that happened long ago, scrambled and placed out of context and into strange places. Right now, these past couple of nights, I’ve been sleeping at night. Nights are okay.”
Helt wondered if they really were. His doubt must have showed on his face.
Elena looked into and beyond a monitor screen, now blank. “It’s the waking hours that are hard. I’m catching myself obsessing about what’s happened and when I do that I’m about five years old. Like, ‘I didn’t do it! It’s not my fault! It’s his! He started it!’” She used the voice of an outraged five-year-old, and then she looked embarrassed and she smiled a rueful little smile.
“In my family, the speech that followed was always, ‘I don’t care who started it. Just stop it,’” Helt said.
“Mine too.” Elena’s smile changed to one of memory and nostalgia.
“But I am not asking that of you. It is not your job to stop anything at all.”
She nodded. “Except the obsessing. The doubt that shows up, sometimes, I could be guiltless in this. I found him attractive once. That must mean I thought what he was, who he was, was good, beautiful, worth having sex with, even. What does that tell me about me?”
He couldn’t let her stay in this space, but to make this go away, she needed to talk. “Perhaps that you, like many people, find physical beauty … well, beautiful?” Helt asked. He was afraid she would stop talking, but she seemed to hear that fear in his voice, or maybe it was the ache to comfort that she sensed.
“I even wondered, once, if I had some sort of fugue, some variety of psychotic episode, and killed him. Even that.” Her voice was flat, exhausted, bitter. She shook her head as if to clear it. “But I knew, even when I was that terrified, where I was that night and what I was doing, and I knew that particular fear was irrational.” She spun her chair and looked at him. “That’s what you walked in on, when you came here before. After the funeral. I’m sorry. I wasn’t at my best.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t with you then.”
“You had a job to do,” Elena said.
“Yes,” Helt said. “Guilt, shame, don’t accept them from yourself or from anyone else. It is not your job to make this go away. It’s mine.”
“Can you do that?” Elena asked.
Helt’s list of undone tasks nagged at him. Get the Seed Bankers out of this picture. Talk to David II about what Doughan thought was more important, yesterday afternoon, than interviewing a Seed Banker. There was Zaida the coworker, who might know something about Cash Ryan, and even if Severo had cleared her Helt wanted to talk to her. He hadn’t looked over Severo’s first interview of Zaida, or the interviews of the others in Ryan’s work crew, either.
“I don’t know,” Helt said. “I’ll try. Let me see the work you’ve done on your missing hour.”
Elena pulled a list to the screen and even as the data came up she was all business, clinically detached, and apparently relieved to get on with it. “Nineteen hundred to 2000, that was the SM, right?”
Helt nodded.
“I looked through the other tower cameras for that hour as well,” Elena said. “They’re not there. The hour isn’t there. They were turned off, too? No one told me that.”
“It’s not public knowledge yet. The space where the tower elevator videos should be has had a lot of hits,” Helt said.
“Are you monitoring who’s looking for themselves?”
“There’s a count. Yeah, the names are filed.” Nadia had reviewed them. The elevators from Level One to Center didn’t get much traffic at night, usually. Nadia had stories from people who said they’d been there. All of them checked out as business as usual.
“You said you were here in the lab and then you went to Athens to get samples from the tower. There weren’t any entries on anything in here during the missing hour.” Helt waved his hand at the lab.
“I was on the train for most of it,” she said. “The trip to Athens from here runs around forty minutes. No one got on or off at Petra. I was alone on the train.”
“But there’s no entries for”—he checked again—“forty minutes—before 1900, either.”
<
br /> “I got a sandwich out of the fridge at around 1800. It was grubby,” Elena said.
Helt must have frowned.
Elena smiled at his frown. “I mean, the fridge was grubby. Not the sandwich. So I ate the sandwich and then I cleaned the fridge. Then I remembered it was time to get samples from Athens tower, and I grabbed a rack of plates and left.”
“But the time, as far as the records go, is still blank. We need something else. You were working late…”
“Not really. I’m always here by seven in the mornings and I stay until lunch. After that, sometimes I come right back, but sometimes I don’t get here until thirteen, fourteen hundred. I sleep, or walk, or … after lunch or after a nap is when I clean up, shower. It gives me a second day, is my theory.”
“On Wednesday?” Helt asked.
“Susanna came by after lunch. She’d checked on Zhōu, and she was a little exasperated. Zhōu wanted to deliver at home; almost everyone does. But a primip—the first birth is the hardest, a test run, if you like. We have the veterinary surgical suite up here, but the only full operating theater for humans is in the Athens clinic for now, and the risk of losing a mother or a child trumps getting to deliver at home.”
“I thought hospital deliveries were ancient history,” Helt said. “A relic of the bad old days when clinicians were cold and uncaring.”
“Maybe we still are. C-sections are rare now, but the fact remains that if you need to do one because the kid’s brain is dying from anoxia or the mother is bleeding to death, you need to do it fast.”
“And we can’t afford too many damaged children,” Helt said. Or life imprisonments, for that matter. He thought about the plans for prisoners on Kybele, confined to their homes under electronic surveillance, permitted visitors, fleshtime, only at specified times and with supervision, year after year after year.
“No. We can’t,” Elena said. “Anyway, Susanna took Zhōu over to the birthing suite at the clinic. They counted chairs, and brought in extras, and tables so visitors could bring in food and play those gambling games her friends like so much. Twenty-five people stayed at the clinic for those twenty-three hours of labor, Helt. It was cozy.”
“I take it that’s an understatement.”
“No, not really. It was colorful, people in dress-up clothes, and candies and treats. Some women were sewing little red clothes, silk clothes for the baby, by hand. Some people were painting banners. It was tribal. It was good. I stopped in now and then.”
“Mena stopped by,” Helt said.
“Of course she did.”
Both of them in the background, but close to the clinic. Just in case. And Elena hadn’t slept last night, either, although she said she was getting enough sleep. She seemed to be recovered now, but she was running on reserves, had to be. Helt wanted to see her rested, truly relaxed, not working on habit and courage, not spending bitter coin on maintaining an appearance of normalcy when she could not possibly be feeling normal.
“But Wednesday afternoon, Susanna got her talking out. She left around 1600, I think. That’s why I was doing rounds on my blastocysts in here a little later than usual.” Elena glanced at the closed doors to the embryo lab with what looked like longing and regret. This could be lost to her; someone else could be working here all too soon, unless.
“I worked for a while in the embryo lab. I’m trying to build a baby for a couple in Stonehenge. They’re both too damned bright, of course, and they said random material from the vaults is okay for the third parent addition. This new little colonist will be all human this time, no totem animal components, which should make it easier. But both birth parents’ genomes display strong tropes for osteopenia and that’s just not going to be a good thing here. We keep bone mass up but it’s borderline, even with the daily cocktails we pass out. I want to mute that, and it’s tricky without getting into other traits that I’d like to keep.”
Her voice was different when she talked about her work. Her words came more easily, free of the choked tensions she’d been trying so hard to hide.
“I can put a cell or two into a neuron-derived matrix now. I do that rather than let the test blastocysts go on and develop until there’s enough cell mass for me to work with.” Go on developing as an embryo with all its potentials, she meant.
Elena looked at him, and Helt watched the hurt come back, the realization that she was still under suspicion as the possible killer of an adult human. She was aware of taboos and how tenacious they are. She must know that a considerable portion of Earth’s population thought that she and her colleagues committed multiple premeditated murders, a lot of them. Jim had said it yesterday. “Elena culls defective embryos. In some ethical systems, that’s a form of murder, and she does it every day.”
“That’s what I was doing Wednesday evening,” Elena said. “And then I thought I might go over to Athens and look around Center. The place where I’d seen you watching me. I thought you might be up there again.”
“I wasn’t there,” Helt said.
“Neither were the deer. They’d moved. So I didn’t go up.”
“I was going to take a stroll up there, but then Yves—Susanna’s boyfriend—came to ask if I could turn him into a colonist with a wave of my magic wand,” Helt said.
“Have you?” Elena asked.
“I’m going to try.” He could tell her that Yves had done the sculpture on the Petra cliffs. He decided not to, not yet, not here. “He’s a talented man and I hope we can keep him. And get you free of this mess.” If we don’t, Helt didn’t say, you’ll be leaving, too.
She winced.
“Elena, the cultures from that night. You said you have time and date stamps on the ones you brought here.”
She screwed the cap down on her water bottle and gave it an extra, impatient twist. Helt wondered if it could be opened again without a wrench. “I’ll show you. Maybe you can see something I don’t see.” She got up and opened the door into Bacteriology. “They’re in here.”
The microbiology lab was a vast space. Its walls were covered with supplies and incubator cabinets above counters with sinks and hoods. There were enough workstations for twice the five people who were assigned to it now. Helt recognized light microscopes at desks, but some of the other gadgets and machines, large and small, were unknown to him.
Elena went to a keypad and queried for Wednesday night tower samples. Their locations glowed red on a 3-D view of the lab cabinets. It was an answer to the eternal question, “Now where did I put that?” Not so easy to do with the files SysSu dealt with.
“If I’d thrown some of the plates away on the way back here, there would be no way to trace them, but once they’re here, they’re on record. Some are in different locations now. We pick them up on transfer media, and then move them to different substrates. How’s your bacteriology, Helt?”
“I think I remember that anerobes won’t grow very well in room air, and that funguses, I mean fungi, grow slow.”
“Some do, some don’t. We monitor the tower platforms to see what the wind is moving up there, different soil organisms, things that grow on humans and cows and chickens and wheat. You name it. This batch isn’t showing anything out of order in the bacterial spectrum. It will be weeks before we can get much out of the fungal cultures.”
“NSS tells me you’ve looked for DNA in this batch,” Helt said.
“Severo called in the roster of people who had some background in forensics that night. They took samples all over the tower, but that was after I came down. We’ve scanned for concentrations of it, from the handrails and the elevator doors, everywhere.”
“You didn’t find any,” Helt said.
“We found traces here and there, but there were no collections of fluids left in one place, spit or mucus or whatever, no scraps of skin or teeth or hair that could be traced back to an individual. There’re fingerprints. Mine, for instance.”
“Most of the prints were smeared, the techs said. The rails get washed down now and then
and they were cleaned two weeks ago. Yours and Evans from NSS were clear enough to identify. Evans made security rounds up there on Monday; her visit is verified. There was another set. One of Mena’s people came up to get infrared photos of plowed fields. He was up there Tuesday.”
“When we were in the meadow?” Elena asked.
“No, earlier.”
If there was anything else to look for in here, Helt didn’t know what it might be. He was on his feet, and he turned in a circle, looking for inspiration, but he didn’t find it.
“We’re finished in here?” Elena asked.
“Sure,” Helt said. “Let’s go up to Athens tower. Show me what you did there when you went up to get the samples.”
“I don’t want to go back there.” She motioned Helt back into the office and closed the lab door behind her.
“We might see something, think of something.”
Her deep breath wasn’t quite a sigh. “Let me check the embryo lab before we go. Everything was fine when I left this morning, but. But I may not get back here until tomorrow. Do you want to come in?”
“Sure. What do I need to do? Wash my hands or something?”
She took both his hands in hers and looked down at his palms, the backs of his hands, his fingernails. He caught a glimpse of her impish grin again. “I don’t think you’ll contaminate anything.” She dropped his hands and opened the outer door of the embryo lab. Helt followed her into the small passage that served as a light-lock.
“Close the doors, please.” He did, and closed away the light. Elena opened the inner door. The lab wasn’t pitch-black; it was more a gloomy cavern, with little pips of indicator lights starring the darkness. She handed him a pair of night-vision goggles. “I want to do a quick check on some ova I fertilized this morning.”
Her matter-of-fact assumption of the role of a man or a rooster startled Helt. A bit of male insecurity might just have surfaced there, but then he’d never spent much time in a genetics lab so he wasn’t desensitized to the concept. He wondered what nouns and verbs about the process would go colloquial, like, “I knocked up twenty geese this morning. It took me five minutes.” He’d have to ask Venkie about that.