by Sage Walker
He went back to his displays. There would be other nights. There would be days when he wouldn’t feel guilty about the time he’d spent with her when he should have been working on the Murder Mess.
The scent of freshly brewed coffee reached his nose. His first cup this morning had been a large mug that Elena had brought him.
She had padded into the bedroom carrying it in both hands. She wore a sarong thing around her hips that looked like white beaded buckskin. He sat up to watch her and couldn’t decide if she looked like a figure on an Egyptian frieze or a dancer from one of the pueblos in the American Southwest, carrying her treasure of precious green sprouts, or in this case, coffee, with downcast eyes and tiny, toed-in steps. Elena sat on the edge of the bed and they sipped from the mug, one and then the other. “Yes, it’s beaded buckskin,” she told Helt when he reached out to touch it. “I brought it with me from the family place. It’s repurposed, you might say.”
“Pilar’s?” he asked.
“No. My mom got on into ancestral crafts for a while and learned to work leather. The patterns are North American plains tribes, not Canadian northeast. But I like it. So you’ve looked up Pilar, have you?”
“I’ve listened to her music,” Helt said.
“She was unique,” Elena said.
Butter-soft leather studded with little nubs of cool, smooth glass beads, and warm skin beneath. Shortly after that, they shared a shower and then they went back to the bed.
Helt got his fresh coffee, took a deep breath, and shook his head to clear it.
He returned to a full-room surround of the news since yesterday morning. None of his sensors showed alarm. No one was chattering about Yves’s sculpture, either. Some things stayed under the radar longer than might be expected.
His sensors said all was well, but his programs had missed a murder. They were designed to catch early frictions between departments, and they had, but from now on more was needed. Much more. He needed different parameters to mark stressors for the expert systems to highlight. The system knew to look at interface points between hardhats, nerds, and farmers; but he’d been looking at conflicts and not paying enough attention to the hybridization going on there. Bonds of shared purpose, of amicability, of mutual obligation were as important as conflict, and he wasn’t observing the shapes, the possible outcomes. Damn. He would set some markers to observe the patterns in motion in his copious spare time, once this murder was solved.
He felt so alone. He wanted to be an eye in the center of the world, the focus point of a neural network, with tendrils of awareness that extended into every crevice of this spinning hollow rock, this world of his. He realized he thought of Kybele as a world now, world, not ship, and that startled him. This was home. He had wanted to come home for so long, and now that losing it was so very possible, he knew that his doubts, his reservations, his distance from the new world around him was gone forever, even if he went into exile.
His worldview program showed him flashes of sound and light in unexpected places, a visual of naked axons and dendrites writhing, blurred, seen through a translucent gel. An icon appeared that looked like a stylized pinecone on a staff, and where the heck did that come from? Mena? Dionysus, the god of insanity, he remembered, while the thyrsus darted from place to place, desperately striving to impose order on what it saw, heard, felt. And Helt, in the center, spun from view to view, gulping data from one place and the next because he felt, he knew something was happening behind his back, something that might be important, might take his world away from him, but the something was always gone before he turned to see it, hear it. Half blind. Half deaf.
Whoa. RESTORE. He’d cued the display with an unplanned jerk of hands and a vocalization. He must have.
His world returned to normal.
No, not normal. He had a murder to solve. NSS was spending a lot of time sorting out who didn’t do it. Fine. That would leave only a few players standing at some point, but surely there was a better way. Hypothesize a motive for killing the man and test the hypothesis, sure. Come on, think.
“What did I just see?” Elena asked. She was in her lab in Stonehenge and he had called her with a twitch of them.
He started to wipe his face with his hand, but maybe Elena wouldn’t see how sweaty he was. “Nervous fingers,” Helt said.
“It looked like you were inside your own brain.”
“I hope not. I miss you,” Helt said.
“Soon.” Elena smiled and vanished.
It was still early. SysSu was deserted unless someone was crashed in the bunk room. All the “Occupied” markers on the office feeds were dark. He didn’t want to wake anyone up if they were home asleep, and even if he wanted to talk through his unease, safe candidates for that weren’t available right now.
So, no hypothesis yet. With or without one, he had a to-do list.
The surveillance warrant authorization to spy on Yves had not gone to Severo yesterday. Damn. Helt pulled up the boilerplate, signed the warrant, and sent it over. NSS should have been keeping track of Yves and Susanna since early afternoon yesterday. The timeline showed that Severo hadn’t tagged Yves for 24/7 monitoring until 1500 yesterday, two hours, more or less, after Helt had sent his request. So Severo had checked with Doughan before he gave the order. Okay. Doughan hadn’t talked to Severo yet about Helt’s priority in the investigation, maybe. It was just something Helt needed to work around.
Severo was at his desk in NSS headquarters now. Helt left him there, undisturbed.
The two remaining Seed Bankers in NSS had not been questioned this weekend. Doughan was going to set up meeting times, but he hadn’t, yet. Records of Doughan’s interface said he’d spent the night in his bachelor quarters in Athens and wasn’t there now. Helt found Doughan in the Navigation offices on Level Two, looking scrubbed and rested and ready for the week.
“About Bruguera and Ueda,” Helt said. “If possible, could we set up a time for that?” Doughan’s face didn’t show surprise or hostility.
“Sure,” he said. “1400.”
“I’ll be there.”
The two Seed Bankers in SysSu, the ESL teacher and the day-care worker, hadn’t been questioned this weekend, either. And there was one left in Biosystems, Andrea Doan. Mena’s unhappy brewmaster had not yet told her story. That needed to be done today. Helt had a gut feeling that questioning Doan and the rest of them was going to be another example of finding out who hadn’t murdered Ryan. But their innocence would narrow the pool of suspects by three, at least.
He found Mena, a shapeless snowman in a white coverall, in a seed vault under the Wilderness tower, in one of the frigid corridors set deep in Kybele’s rock. Rows and rows of drawers and lockers lined each side, strobe-lighted for now by helmet lights and soon to be dark again. Another shapeless snowman walked beside Mena. The second snowman had Elena inside it.
“Good morning, Helt,” Mena said.
“Hi, Mena. Hey, Elena.”
The snowman containing Elena waved a thick glove at the security camera. He wouldn’t be able to be alone with her again for hours.
“Mena, do you think we could talk to Andrea Doan today? This morning?”
“I think so. Let me get these pumpkin seeds put away,” Mena said. She opened a locker, the big lever on its door designed for manipulation by hands in thick gloves, and pulled out a steel box. The nitrogen-filled box with the seeds in it was marked with a drawing of a pumpkin, the words PUMPKIN, LONG ISLAND CHEESE, and a number. The number was in Biosystems records. The icon and the all-caps name were there in case humans lost the location files, Helt supposed. Like so much on Kybele, the vaults were designed with as few moving parts and as much redundancy as possible. Mena dropped the packet in the box. “I’ve been stalling on Andrea. How about eleven?” Mena asked.
“Sure,” Helt said.
“I’ll go up and talk to her myself. Human to human. I’ll bring her to you. Eleven, in my barn, then, unless something changes.”
“Sounds
good,” Helt said.
Elena closed the door of the locker.
“We wanted something else here, didn’t we?” Mena asked.
“Lychee seeds,” Elena said.
“Oh, right. For the new baby’s family. I can’t believe we haven’t started growing lychees yet.”
“And some local soil for me to vet before we seed the plot with it.”
“Right. Always. Which vault are they in, Helt?”
Mena could ask her helmet and get the info, but it was as easy for Helt to do it. “413. Three vaults spinward to the next corridor, then turn left. Bye, you two,” Helt said. He hoped they would pick a lychee stock with bright red shells, so the little boy could have fun throwing them.
Not every kid gets a tropical forest to play in, but the kids on Kybele would have their choice of several. Well, plantations, not tropical forests exactly. The tropical food habitats would stay wet and warm, even during the periods of near-arctic climate planned for Center from time to time. He would ask Mena someday if there was a useful liana, like, one that produced food or something. Swinging from vines was just such a cool thing to do.
Elena’s lab was not that far from Mena’s barn. Helt could stop by her lab before eleven or after the interview. Yes. Just to say hi. Yes.
On down the to-do list was nudging Severo or Doughan about NSS plans to shield the deportees as they left. Severo could be asked to spy on his boss and the other execs, but. But Helt wasn’t going to do that, not yet. If what Helt could find turned paranoia into provable concern, then, yes. He decided to bother Severo anyway.
Severo was alone at his desk.
“You’re early, Helt,” Severo said.
“You’ve moved some more people off the SM hour list this weekend,” Helt said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Severo said. “Dr. Maury’s still on it.”
“I talked to her again yesterday,” Helt said. “The stuff about the stalking is new.”
“Ryan stalked her and the midwife both, yeah.” Severo leaned back in his chair and looked at the Helt on his screen. “So maybe the doc and the midwife got together and offed Ryan. I won’t rule it out, Helt. Neither should you.”
“I won’t,” Helt said. “But I think from her reaction that Elena didn’t know it.” The possibility that Susanna and Elena could have killed Ryan together seemed so unlikely to him that he wasn’t even looking at how they might have done it if they’d wanted to. And he had just lied to Severo with a straight face. It was seriously time to look at what Helt Borresen was trying to hide from himself, if that’s what he was doing. “And from what we know, Midwife Jambekar was at home with her boyfriend.”
“Maybe Susanna sent him to do the job. Maybe that’s why you added him to the surveillance list.”
“Doughan said to,” Helt said. “We’ll hand you whatever information we get out of Doughan’s two remaining Seed Bankers by this afternoon.”
“You still have two Bankers under the SysSu umbrella and nobody’s talked to them,” Severo said. “You want me bring them in?
“I’ll do it. You want to be there?”
“Sure.”
“Nudge me to set up the meetings at least by tomorrow, okay?” Helt looked at the to-do list on his screen. Final passenger list, interviews, news of path slides, and on, and on. “In return, I’ll nudge you, this morning, about how you plan to handle getting the Seed Bankers on board the shuttle.”
“A little extra security, but that’s all. Plainclothes, plus the usual honor guard stuff we do when anybody leaves.”
A combination good-bye, thank-you, and welcome aboard ceremony, with videos to show the relatives, were traditional when contract workers left and new ones came up from Earth. This time the welcome aboard part would be missing.
“Groan,” Helt said.
“Groan why?”
“Groan because the execs haven’t come up with their lists of replacements for the Seed Bankers. I don’t know when the execs plan to give out the news to the new colonists, either. But I know it has to be kept quiet.”
Oh, fuck. Mena had said loud and clear that she was going to keep Susanna unless an actual criminal charge was filed against her. If that happened, one more colonist hopeful would be headed off-ship. And if there was a criminal charge against Elena, add Helt to the off-list.
That meant more last-minute juggling.
“You’d better remind them. Write it down on your to-do list,” Severo said.
“I just did. Bye.”
Helt picked up his coffee cup and took it to the waiting pot, but he didn’t want more coffee, not really. He cradled the cup in his hands and went into the hall. His sense of frustration felt like a knot between his shoulders. He had lied to Severo about his certainty that Elena was innocent. He lied, and he had always wanted to think of himself as an honest man.
He sent a reminder to the execs.
Helt. Need final personnel assignments for the shuttle.
He made a circuit of the lobby and looked, in passing, out across the agora, where tendrils of morning fog were lifting from the flower pots and dewdrops were beginning to sparkle on the eaves of the Library. He had lied to the NSS chief because he wanted to hide something from him, and, by extension, from himself. So what was it Helt Borresen didn’t want to look at?
That he’d been testing Elena, not just for facts about a murder, but for damage the suspicions had done to her. And hadn’t found it. That he had, last night, and this morning, even inside his lair in SysSu this morning, known for the first time since his childhood what homecoming means.
He noticed he was in the hall, walking past the bunk room, which was empty, and into the lounge, holding a quarter cup of cold, useless coffee. The coffeepot was empty and unwashed, and there was a murder to solve to keep his home safe.
Who had murdered Cash Ryan? Not Elena, but he couldn’t prove that. Not the Seed Bankers. Not Susanna. Any discomfort Cash Ryan was causing any of them would be over when he left the ship. He told himself to ignore them for now and look at what was happening around him.
He stood in front of a sink full of hot water and suds and the coffeepot was clean except for a stain beneath its rim. He scrubbed it.
Yves; he didn’t really know Yves, but if the sculptor had found Ryan stalking his girl, he had the strength to kill Ryan and cart him up the elevator alone.
Fact. It doesn’t make any sense that there’s no record of the World Tree anywhere. Someone in SysSu could have trashed the records as they showed up; people would assume their chatter about it was still around unless they looked for it. Someone was hiding Yves.
Hypothesis. Yves Copani killed Cash Ryan.
Really? He didn’t get to stay on Kybele but neither did Cash Ryan, and killing the guy didn’t change the equation that left Susanna on board and Yves and Cash gone. Yves could have killed him somewhere on Earth, with less risk than doing it here.
Fact. Yves Copani ate dinner with Helt the night of the SM, and if he’d cooled and killed Ryan and hauled him up the elevator, he’d been really fast at doing it.
Helt rinsed the cleaned filter cup. He rinsed the coffeepot and rubbed his thumb across the shiny glass to hear it squeak. He settled it in the dish rack with exaggerated caution.
Hypothesis. Yves Copani killed Cash Ryan because he knew Ryan was stalking his girl. Okay, but that didn’t explain why the World Tree was hidden. Archer could do that, maybe, but why would he? Helt began to wonder if Doughan had asked Archer to hide the sculpture; it was too improbable that no one on ship had blabbed about it somehow, somewhere. And Doughan’s insistence that the Seed Bankers should be hounded fit the hypothesis that Doughan was hiding Yves.
Doughan’s indifference that Elena was the prime suspect was weird, too. Doughan knew that Elena was, by far, the best person to head Biosystems if something happened to Mena. Mena, as far as Helt knew, wasn’t looking at the next-in-lines to replace Elena, and that reaction of Mena’s about keeping Susanna on board? Given D
oughan’s role as spokesman for the execs for the next three years, he should be a lot more bothered by it.
The theory that 90 percent of human behavior is herd-oriented and the rest is wolf fit everything Helt knew. The wolf was in charge at the moment. Helt’s neck hairs were standing up.
Murder cannot be tolerated. If Kybele was to survive, no must mean no. If Doughan and the execs were hiding a murder, for any reason at all, they were dangerous to her survival and they had to be removed.
It was a no-brainer. It was the right thing to do. Helt had to do it. If the leader is unfit, if the leader is protecting a murderer, the challenge has to be made. But it was unlikely the murderer was Yves, so Helt was back to square one. Or sphere one, where Elena’s bubble circled closer to Cash Ryan’s than anyone else’s. Doughan was protecting Elena? Because Mena wanted him to?
The wolf was in charge, for good or ill, and in that model, the imperative to challenge the pack leader led to stability. It had to be done, but the wolf pup in Helt was whimpering.
Helt wanted the security of Doughan in charge, Mena in her vineyards, and Archer grumbling away in the office down the hall. A place for everything and everything in its place, including Helt Borresen, the little boy who still wanted home and family. The grown-up Helt who had wanted to come home, too, but had given up that dream and replaced it with the dream of having it all happen here, somehow, someday. The Helt who always thought of himself as a man of principle, had always thought there were lines in his brain that knew right from wrong.
Helt rubbed his neck.
If Doughan learned of Helt’s suspicions, Helt might not be able to get the information he needed. Therefore, everything he did had to look like business as usual. Make that, everything he did that might get back to Doughan.
He was back in his chair, the cold coffee replaced by a half cup hot from his own pot. He had no memory of seeing anything in the hall he’d walked through to get here.
It was time to talk to David II, the chief among Doughan’s successors. Unless David II was out somewhere on a project, he was just below Athens. There would be time to get there and still make it to Stonehenge well before eleven. It was time to stop worrying about Doughan, one way or another.