The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  Highlighted with weird infrared colors, Elena opened the door of what looked like a cabinet fridge and took a covered Petri dish to a microscope nearby. “I should have around eight cells in the good ones. I’ll send a view to your interface.”

  Helt looked at a blob on his screen, yellowish, trembling. Elena fiddled with the focus depth, and he saw six translucent grapes. No, eight.

  “That’s a take,” Elena said. She sounded relieved as she jerked the plate away from the microscope stage and put it back in the black box, not a fridge but an incubator. “If there’s one healthy one, there are likely to be more.”

  “What was I looking at?” Helt asked.

  “An oyster.” In this light, Elena’s nose was white, her cheeks and throat were red, and her eyes circles of yellow and blue. She looked up at Helt’s puzzled face. “No, really. We have Bluepoints and Kumamotos, but Mena wants to start some beds of Belons. European Flats. The tidal pools are working so well, so well. Maybe someday we’ll have salmon.”

  Helt doubted salmon could possibly taste right this far from the fjells and fjords. But by the time Biosystems grew them, they would probably taste wonderful because he would have forgotten the originals.

  “I thought boy sea critters just spread their wealth in the water,” he said. “Didn’t require human intervention.”

  “They do, but the waste is amazing, and we don’t have that many samples in the vaults. If these blastocysts develop normally, I can put them in a liquid medium and then they can grow into little critters and swim off into their cozy tidal vats. Sans oil waste, sans fecal bacteria. They’re going to taste so good, Helt.”

  “I was getting hungry until you got to the fecal bacteria part.”

  Her face developed a faraway look. “I shouldn’t stall anymore. We have to go to the tower. I have to do this.”

  “Yes,” Helt said.

  On the train to Athens, he could tick off more of his to-do list.

  Elena closed the two doors behind them and got the rucksack out of the fridge. She added bottles of water to the stash and started to lift the bag.

  “Allow me,” Helt said. He took the rucksack.

  * * *

  Helt went back to his interface once they were on the train. Elena didn’t object. She pulled out her own and they were separate for a while, following the passenger etiquette that takes over in close, anonymous spaces. He got lost in Oriol Bruguera’s CV. The guy had worked at Svalbard for a while, on the pebble bed reactor that kept the place cold in summers.

  Even so, he was aware that she was beside him, within reach, and he liked the feeling.

  He checked the Athens agora cameras and looked down at Mena, Archer, and Doughan, sitting at a table with cameras, cranes, and assorted crew around them. The overhead view reminded him of ants nibbling at a cookie. He listened to Mena’s feed and caught a few phrases about how arbitrary it was that the canteen chefs were assigned to Biosystems rather than Systems Support. It was standard documentary chatter.

  Helt glanced at the screen in Elena’s lap but he couldn’t see the text. After a few minutes she leaned back and closed her eyes.

  “Did you see me on Wednesday night?” Elena asked. “At the station?”

  “The cameras were dead when you got on the Stonehenge elevator. Stonehenge, Petra, Athens, all the cameras were offline. The next thing we see is the view of you coming down”—he checked—“at 2026.”

  “Right,” Elena said. “I must have stopped somewhere to get Cash Ryan’s body. I must have stashed it somewhere close to the tower.” She didn’t try to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “I hauled it up to the platform and shoved it off. Then I collected my samples and hung out to come back down when the cameras went back on.”

  “Because you had checked for the SM and wanted to make sure you’d be seen afterward,” Helt said.

  “Oh, Helt, no one looks at those schedules but you.”

  “Not even me, sometimes.” He hadn’t looked for the timing of Wednesday night’s SM. According to the log, neither had Elena.

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Helt said. “I didn’t look at the notice. It’s routine. It’s boring. Sorting out who did pay attention to when the SM was going to happen doesn’t tell me much. The list includes everyone who has some responsibility for keeping systems running.”

  “That’s a lot of people. That’s all the execs and a lot of other key players. And me,” Elena said.

  The train slowed and stopped at Athens Level One.

  They walked to the elevator. It didn’t stop at Center as they rode it up. When the door opened to the observation platform they stepped out, side by side, into cool air, a breeze. The curve of the world below, the secure lacework of the pillars that held up the sun held him spellbound, as mountain skylines, as wide swathes of desert, as the sight of islands rising from the sea had always held him spellbound. A few clouds moved anti-spinward, gold-topped in the afternoon light. Their shadows were black on the ground.

  Elena glide-walked without hesitation to the rail, to the exact place on the circumference where Severo said Cash had gone over. She pushed both palms against the glass bricks. Helt felt his breath catch in his throat. She had stood there, almost exactly there, on Wednesday night. That’s where her fingers had left a complete set of prints. She had watched Ryan’s body catch the wind and spiral away, limp and helpless. It must have been a pleasant surprise that he fell so far away from the base.

  Helt put the rucksack down, close to the elevator doors.

  Today’s breeze loosened a strand of her hair and she brushed it aside. “It was breezy, but I didn’t think I would go sailing off…”

  The wind had been dangerously high Wednesday night, high enough to carry Cash Ryan’s falling body half a k from the tower. She had fought against it, Elena and her partner, if there was one, must have fought against it, fought to keep their balance up here.

  She had killed him.

  “I looked for where the deer had been when you and I were talking. Over there.” Elena pointed out and down. “The deer weren’t where they had been. They weren’t by the creek. They went over there after we left.” She pointed out and down to the dark green mass of ponderosa where Cash Ryan’s body had landed. “They moved into those trees.”

  She knew where he’d fallen.

  She knew because. Because she had been standing right here Wednesday night, breathing hard from the exertion of lifting Cash Ryan’s body over the guard wall. He felt the fear Elena must have felt as she fought the wind and dragged Ryan’s body to the very edge, the unprotected drop, and pushed it over.

  She knew, had to have known, that Ryan was a sick bastard who could not be permitted to be here, and she had culled him and gone back to work. She would have waited for the dull soggy sound of the corpse hitting the ground and heard, instead, the sharp cracking of the branch that had impaled him. She’d climbed back over the guardrail and looked back from right here, safe behind the barrier of this wall.

  An instant later he realized Elena had viewed every report, seen every capture of the man in the tree, probably more than once. It should be no surprise to him that she could point out the exact location where he came to ground.

  Elena looked at the tower, the landscape, the trees below as if she wanted to memorize them. Tears were standing in the corners of her eyes. “It’s so beautiful,” she said.

  She was saying good-bye.

  “Severo didn’t see any deer,” Helt said, as gently as he could. “He would have told me. I didn’t see any sign of them when I was running that night, when I was on my way to see where the body had come down. But I doubt I would have. There had been people in the area before I got there,” Helt said.

  He didn’t know she’d killed him, he didn’t know anything for certain except she had left the Athens elevator at 2026. “Did you see anything at all in the trees that night?” Helt asked.

  “You mean damage? No. I didn’t. Nothing shows from up here, does it?�
��

  They turned and walked back, following the curve of the guard wall, and looked down again at the ponderosa.

  “No,” Helt said. “That’s what Jerry and Nadia said Wednesday night after they came back up to Center. They went to the staked-off area and when they came back they told us nothing had changed. Everything was calm and peaceful again.”

  “No visible scars,” Elena said. She gripped the top edge of the guard wall. The tendons on the back of her hand stood out in high relief. She turned her head away so that Helt would not see her face. He watched a muscle in her jaw tighten.

  “There are scars if you know where to look,” Helt said. “Broken branches. A white circle where they sawed off a limb to get the body down. Look at me, Elena.”

  She turned and faced him. Those golden eyes blazed in her face. “So you can see my scars? Scar tissue takes time to form. I’m not sure I’m at that stage yet.”

  “We didn’t find an alibi for you here. Not yet. I hoped we would.”

  “So did I. We found nothing.” Elena walked to the elevator and stabbed the Down button. “Let’s go home.”

  Helt stood beside her. They stared at the closed door. “Anything I say is going to sound wrong,” he said. He picked up the rucksack and wanted to choke it by the throat.

  “Anything I say is going to sound angry,” Elena said.

  “With good reason. I don’t know who murdered Cash Ryan. You’re right to be angry with me. I’m angry at me. If I’d figured out who the killer is by now—”

  “By now? You’ve had five whole days to sort this out,” Elena said.

  And he knew so damned little.

  The elevator doors opened. They stepped in and turned so they faced the door. There were only four buttons to watch, Tower, Center, Level One, Level Two.

  “That’s not right.” Elena looked down at the floor and shook her head. “You’ve had five nights and four days to sort through information that’s been hard to find, at best, about a man who lied, we’ve now learned, about anything and everything if it suited his purposes. You’re doing everything you can. No one can do more than that. I wish I could help you.”

  She wasn’t crazy, and she knew Ryan was leaving. If she’d killed the man, he might never know her reasons. There must have been a compelling need to do it, if she had. He believed that.

  “You came down this elevator after Ryan died. That’s a problem.” He watched her jaw tighten again. “I won’t rest until I know that you were only doing your job up here.”

  She looked up at him.

  “You knew Cash Ryan. That’s a problem, too,” Helt said. “That’s one I won’t ever be able to solve. But I won’t rest, I won’t stop, until I know what happened up there.”

  “And if that’s not possible? Elena asked.

  He was up against it. It was too soon to say this. It was a decision he must have begun to make when he wondered what Yves Copani was going to do when he learned that his Susanna would be exiled. It was a decision Helt had made over years, made in the process of sorting his still unanswered questions about sanity, loss, love, and the limitations of reason. It was a decision finalized in his sleep. It was a decision made today, here, while he watched a woman stay on her feet and maintain her dignity, her courage, even her sense of compassion, while her eyes caressed everything around her and said good-bye to it.

  However it had happened, he knew what he would do. He knew that what he was about to say was the absolute truth. “I’ll go back to Earth with you,” Helt said.

  He could see a no begin to make its way toward her mouth. He dropped the rucksack. “Please. May I hold you?” Helt asked.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. In the circle of his arms, he kissed the no away. Elena was warm and her lips were soft and her hair was warm. He pushed a strand away from her throat and kissed the silken resilience of the skin it had hidden.

  Elena slipped her arms beneath his jacket. He heard the clatter and bounce of her interface hitting the floor. She slid the palms of her hands up his back and pulled his shoulders forward to bring him closer.

  He kissed her again.

  The elevator door beeped to tell them it was tired of staying open.

  Elena backed away, leaving a cold space on his chest where her warmth had been. She picked up the rucksack and her interface. It probably wasn’t broken.

  Helt followed her out of the elevator, into the afternoon chill of Athens plaza. No one was outside at the tables and he didn’t see anyone strolling in the shadows beneath the Library colonnade. Venkie’s cart had been rolled away somewhere. He wondered if the string quartet would move inside this evening for its Sunday concert, and now, he was saying good-bye, too.

  He retrieved the rucksack and took Elena’s newly freed hand in his. He pulled her to his side, too far away but at least a little closer. His office was just across the agora. He should go there. Jerry was probably still there, working.

  “No,” Elena said.

  “No, what?” Helt asked.

  She must have seen him glance toward the SysSu building. “No, not back to work. Not yet.” She tugged him toward the Athens station. “I want to go home now. I want you to stay with me for a little while.”

  22

  At the Roots

  The windows on Kybele’s trains were large, designed to offer a good view. The route the train followed through raw stone wasn’t scenic yet, but someday it would be, with pillars of stone left as supports and wide vistas of fields, crops, play lands, dwellings, landscapes not yet imagined, beyond them.

  The large windows of the train that waited at Athens station made it easy to see Mena and Doughan, seated at one of the four-place booths. The seats facing them were empty.

  Helt slowed his steps. “We could turn around,” he said.

  “There’s no way they haven’t seen us,” Elena said.

  “Can you handle a casual social conversation that’s going to be loaded with subtext?” Helt asked.

  “The question is, can you?” Elena asked.

  “Sure,” Helt said. He let go of her hand and shrugged the strap of the rucksack to a more comfortable place on his shoulder. “Maybe. But I don’t like to ride backward. And besides that, I had a plan for the trip and now it’s changed.”

  “Tell me?” Elena asked.

  “The plan involved an empty car where no one would watch me kiss your earlobes and then your throat, and your shoulders, and then…”

  “Stop it!” Elena said, but she smiled. “I can do this. Really, I can. You leave my subtext alone for a while, okay?” Bright-eyed and looking for all the world as if she’d been having nothing more than a pleasant chat with a friend, she stepped into the train.

  A few other passengers were aboard. None of them looked up. Mena and Doughan, however, didn’t pretend not to see them. Their expressions were pleasant and quizzical, the neutral, practiced masks worn for social greetings, and both of them were watching Helt and Elena like hawks watch rabbits. Helt followed Elena to where the two execs sat.

  “Please join us,” Mena said.

  “Helt, Dr. Maury,” Doughan said. “Have a seat.”

  Doughan’s skin looked preternaturally natural. His social mask was, in part, makeup, professional maquillage done subtly for “outdoor” light and done well. Mena’s fatigue had been carefully disguised. Mena and Doughan were still camera-ready; polished, perfected versions of themselves, but Mena’s eyes focused on one thing and then the other a little too quickly. She was on high alert about something.

  The film crew was missing, and if they had known the setup they would be gnashing their teeth. Kybele’s execs, her Special Investigator, and a—and the—highest-ranking murder suspect, gather in face-time, to discuss—discuss what? Helt watched Mena brace herself to take the lead, set the tone, of the interchange.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mena said. “You haven’t found what you need yet. It shows on your faces.”

  That shows, and signs of frustrated lust, Helt figured.
It was kind of Mena not to point it out. Elena, seated directly across the table from Doughan, looked straight at Navigation’s exec. In the working-spectrum light of the train, traces of darkness beneath her eyes showed clearly, signposts of fatigue, of sleepless, worried nights. She and Mena were both on edge, and Helt felt a moment’s sympathy for himself and Doughan. No way to duck and cover.

  “Yes,” Elena said. “It seems I’m still the prime suspect. It’s not comfortable for me. It hardly makes for easy conversation, doesn’t it?”

  If Doughan was surprised by Elena’s candor, he didn’t let it show. He looked at her with an expression that conveyed both sympathy and admiration.

  “Dr. Maury.” Doughan crossed his arms and met Elena’s eyes. “I haven’t had that many conversations with you, easy or otherwise. Mena keeps you locked up in those labs of yours. She admits it.”

  “Of course I do,” Mena said. “If I didn’t, I’d have no one to hear my side of the story, uncensored, when I get exasperated about one thing or the other. I need you, Elena, and I was hoping you and Helt could find some tiny thing, some detail of documentation.”

  Elena’s eyes didn’t leave Doughan’s face. “We didn’t. But thank you, Mena.”

  “Because I don’t know you,” Doughan continued, “this is going to sound strange. Irresponsible. Something the Navigation Executive should never say, but I’m going to say it. If I could, I would declare this death an accident and get on with business. The more we learn, the more it seems the world is better off without this man walking around in it.”

  Huh? In other words, Doughan was saying, If you killed him in self-defense or in defense of the ship, good on you. Which meant that either Doughan’s ethics were way less informed than a leader’s should be, in a way that worried the hell out of Helt, or that Doughan might be hiding information from Helt, from NSS. Information about what made Cash Ryan worth killing. And that couldn’t stand.