The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  David II was at his desk. “May I come down?” Helt asked. “Now, if possible.”

  That could have been an instant of irritation on David II’s face, but it lasted only an instant, replaced by a look of interested anticipation. “Of course.”

  “This should only take a few minutes,” Helt said. “I’ll be right there.” And he asked himself, on the elevator, why he wasted words in polite disclaimers. Some of Doughan’s time was unaccounted for. David II might know where he’d been. And once Helt knew that, he would know what to do next. Right.

  * * *

  Hardhat Athens was a different space from Level One. Its agora didn’t provide a view of buildings meant to be admired. In fact, buildings couldn’t be seen. The elevator opened on a garden, vertical and lush, trees and vines, some of the foliage browned by autumn. An array of chrysanthemums, vivid in their pots near the elevator, were probably destined for display on the Athens agora above. Behind and above them, bright berries of holly prepped themselves for the winter season. Helt stepped onto the rough multicolored aggregate in front of the elevator. “David II’s office, please,” Helt said, and some of the pebbles lighted themselves to lead him across the aggregate and down a wide path through the maze.

  David II’s office was, like Mena’s, remarkably unassuming, a portable construction just beyond the gate in a broad industrial hangar. Bare lights illuminated crawlers, sweepers, and, as usual, things Helt didn’t recognize. Today, there was a boxy, spiky apparatus on a pallet, waiting to be loaded and shipped somewhere to do something.

  “Come in,” David II said. David II worked standing. His workstation was chest high and had a treadmill beneath it. There were a lot of objects fastened to the walls and there was very little space for anyone else to stand.

  “This is sensitive,” Helt said.

  David II walked past the workstation and opened a door, and then another one, and led Helt through an oval door. Today Helt recognized it, for the first time, as what it had always been. It was a decommissioned airlock, and he realized that David II’s private office was a repurposed artifact from Kybele’s earlier years.

  In the larger room, chairs surrounded a folding table equipped with workstations. David II motioned to one and sat down at another. “Sensitive. Yes. Otherwise, you would have continued our conversation from a distance.”

  “Has Severo asked you for an alibi on Wednesday evening?”

  “No,” David II said. “I’ve located some traces of myself, very boring ones, during the time in question. I’ll send them up to NSS now, if you like.”

  Meaning, “Showing videos to you now will waste time that I don’t have.” “That will save time,” Helt said. “Yours and mine. Mena, Doughan, and Archer were asked, Thursday morning, to keep their interfaces live 24/7. But I have very little information about their whereabouts on Wednesday evening. I’ll find some, I’m sure. As a matter of record, their whereabouts will have to be verified.”

  David II was quick at processing. Helt had offered cross-checking Doughan’s whereabouts as something procedural, routine, but he hadn’t made a procedural, routine request. David II’s expression remained neutral, calm.

  “They’ve been lax in providing documentation,” David II said.

  “They are busy people.”

  “Yes.” David II smiled. Sure, there may have been some resentment about the task, and it hadn’t been their idea, but still. They were busy people. They were execs. David II had dealt with execs all his life, and he was becoming one now. “I have very little social contact with the heads of Biosystems or SysSu. But as it happens, I saw Doughan, briefly, Wednesday evening. Let me look. He came into The Lab around…” David II consulted his records, the ones he would be sending up to NSS. “A little after 1600. I don’t have the time to the minute.”

  “You mean The Lab that’s a bar?” Helt asked.

  “Yes. I was there with Simmons. One of the earthworks architects. We’ll have to change that name, earthworks, someday.” The statement was made in complete seriousness.

  Helt didn’t know Simmons. The earthworks people who modified Mena’s croplands had their offices in Stonehenge now. Eight years ago, Helt had spent a few workdays wandering around here because of some dissatisfaction about what the earth movers were doing. He’d suggested the move, and now that they knew exactly what high winds did to seedlings, day by day, relationships between them and Mena and her farmers were just fine, thank you.

  “Did you speak with Doughan?”

  “He didn’t look too sociable. He went straight to the bar and got a go-cup. On his way back, he stopped by our table and said hello. We invited him to join us. He said he’d had a rough day and was going home.”

  Helt entered DOUGHAN, WEDNESDAY 18, THE LAB. 1630. (BARTENDER? PURCHASE?) “That’s helpful. That’s really helpful.” He wanted to ask where Doughan had gone yesterday, and last night. There had to be a way to get that information elsewhere, even if Doughan’s interface didn’t show it. He wanted to ask what David II thought of Doughan, truly thought of him. He wanted to keep the wealth of information that was David II available to him, and time was short. “Cash Ryan seems to have been a loner, perhaps pathologically so. You were at the psych autopsy. If we make the assumption that he was unstable, could he have done any real damage to the ship?”

  “Unstable. Both that and psychopath are euphemisms for the term madman.”

  “Yes,” Helt said.

  “If it turns out to be so … No system can be made proof against attacks from madmen,” David II said. “But a single madman would have difficulty killing this ship. We’re big, and we’re redundant. We have five reactors in reserve close to the skin. Access to them is not easy. We have section seals and drones to carry foam to breaches. We could lose considerable air reserves but we could make more, and quickly. There’s a seed bank beneath each of the six towers. Even if the ship dies, it is likely some of them would survive.”

  “What about outside?” Helt asked. “He worked outside.”

  “We who live inside are protected from the airless void by four kilometers of nickel iron and we plan to add ice and a plasma shield.”

  “It is vulnerable? The plasma shield?” Helt asked.

  “Not from outside, not at this time. We won’t be printing the mesh for it until we’re under way.”

  “Thank you,” Helt said. He hustled back to SysSu.

  Someday he was going to ask David II if David I had ever told him why Petra canyon was twice as deep as the original specs said it should be. Someday there would be time for that.

  * * *

  SysSu was a division whose job was to stay invisible as much as possible. To guard communications, but, whenever possible, to be discreet about it. Should solving a murder case be SysSu’s job? Via backup for NSS, via the communications node that Helt was supposed to be, well, this time, yes. He had to do what the execs expected him to do, and a lot of other things at the same time.

  He needed some help that couldn’t come from NSS. The specs for all sorts of clever devices for spying on people were on file. Helt picked out a few and started the printers in SysSu’s parts shop.

  What he planned to do was something he had sworn he would never do. Unauthorized surveillance was forbidden by Kybele’s privacy regulations, her code of transparency, and it was just flat wrong. He was the Special Investigator. He had the authority to break rules. And it was still wrong.

  This was and was not a Trolley Problem. He’d spy on the execs and he would be spying on a lot of other people, and always know that the name, the integrity, the honor of the man he’d just pushed in front of the trolley in order to save the people in the car was Helt Borresen.

  After a blink or two, he became aware that Nadia’s office was now occupied. He filled his pockets with spybots, picked up his coffee cup, and went over there.

  Jerry and Nadia were at their usual workstations, close enough to touch each other but apparently oblivious to that and to the world around t
hem. They looked comfortable in each other’s physical space. Helt didn’t pick up any signals of hurt feelings between them.

  “Coffee’s fresh, Helt,” Jerry said.

  Jerry’s T-shirt this morning was a brown so dark it looked almost black. It must be new. His braid was wrapped in a complicated way that looked like he hadn’t done the job himself. More evidence that the two of them were okay with each other. That was good.

  Helt topped up his coffee, sat down, and investigated the clutter on the table for something he could push out of the way. One of the objects seemed to be a rubber chicken. Plucked. Helt moved it aside to make space for his coffee mug and decided not to ask.

  “Help me think,” Helt said.

  “So we can get this murder solved in two hours and get back to our lives?” Nadia asked.

  “Exactly,” Helt said. “And so I can get up to Stonehenge this morning. Mena and I are questioning a Seed Banker.”

  “Okay,” Jerry said. “Monday morning review.” The room became a projection of Helt’s Murder Mess. Helt didn’t know when the name had officially changed from Murder Management, but what Jerry was showing was private to this room, and the name fit. The sphere, with its Oort cloud of facts at the periphery, was still too empty.

  “Motive, method, and opportunity,” Helt said.

  “We have method,” Jerry said.

  The method had been messy. Cash Ryan had been chilled down and thrown into a tree. If someone had seen Ryan hit the tree and hauled him in for treatment, that artery could have been stitched back together. Maybe.

  “Do we?” Helt asked. “What Calloway said was that Ryan bled to death from a cut artery in his chest. But the fall was sloppy thinking; the killers couldn’t have been certain the fall would kill him. I wonder. If somebody saw him fall and cut him down, might he have survived?”

  He’d ask Calloway.

  Calloway was in the clinic lounge with Martin Kumar.

  “I hate to disturb you, but,” Helt said.

  Calloway grunted. “But none of the hale and hearty citizens of Kybele happen to be here this morning. We’re goofing off. I was just gonna call you.”

  “We really need to know when Cash Ryan died. A four-hour window is turning out to be too large to close.”

  “And you think I have the answer.” Calloway leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Maybe I do. He was dead when he was thrown off the tower. The cause of death I saw at autopsy wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the whole story. Actually, Ryan probably died of v-fib. Ventricular fibrillation, for layman types like you.” Calloway looked across the table. “And yes, Martin, I jumped to a conclusion. It’s a bad thing to do.”

  The statement got Martin’s attention. Helt’s, too.

  “If someone had seen the fall? Could you have saved him at that point?” Helt asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Calloway said. “Thing is, the human heart is designed to work at thirty-seven degrees Celsius. It gets confused if you chill it down toward twenty-seven. Instead of a pump, you get a sack of wiggling individual muscle fibers that don’t pump anything anywhere. At which point your blood pressure drops, your brain doesn’t get oxygen, and it’s game over. Five minutes of anoxia and you’re brain-damaged even if someone puts you on life support. Except if you’re chilled, your brain is sort of protected, so the window to get stuff back together is longer. A lot longer, hours, but that’s if you have a good team to get you on a heart-lung machine early, like in that first five minutes, and keep your brain oxygenated while you warm up.”

  Helt called up the autopsy report again. “His chest cavity was at twenty-eight degrees Celsius at autopsy.”

  “He’d been hauled out of a tree, intubated, and breathed with ambient air and rehydrated with a couple of liters of room-temperature saline before Martin here pronounced him dead. Room temperature was about twenty degrees Celsius that evening. That didn’t change his core temperature much. But he was flatlined when the EMTs put the ’trodes on him, no cardiac function at all except for what you get from chest compressions. He was flatlined for brain activity, too. He bled more into his chest than most corpses would, but that’s because he was tilted head-down in that tree.”

  “Postmortem bleeding,” Helt said.

  “Yeah,” Calloway said. “But he left his shift alive and warm that afternoon, and he could not have chilled that much on the ground after he died. The soil temp that night was around ten degrees Celsius. Lay on it naked for three hours without a heartbeat and you might get from thirty-seven to thirty-five, if you’re skinny. To get as cold as he was, you’re looking at a fast freeze. Thing is, there’s no evidence of frostbite. He got really cold, really fast.”

  “Thanks, Calloway.”

  “You’re welcome.” The big man gave Helt a toast with his coffee cup.

  * * *

  “Really cold, really fast,” Jerry said.

  “Cold with an air supply,” Helt said.

  “Why air?” Nadia asked.

  “I’m making the assumption that the murderer had a compelling reason to kill Ryan rather than send him away forever,” Helt said. “If so, whatever information Ryan had could not be safely exported to Earth—in the killer’s opinion. Or had to be obtained from Ryan before he left Kybele. And if someone was after information, they needed his personal data stash, which is missing, or they needed a private place. A private place with air in it, so they could both talk. Must have been cold air. Very cold air.”

  “Or a closed suit,” Nadia said.

  “Not a closed suit. It would have kept him warm,” Helt said.

  The three of them viewed Kybele’s hollow Center, its towers and fields and forests. “Not in Center,” Helt said. “It wasn’t cold enough that night. Going down.” He vanished the floor of Center and they looked down into the maze of unroofed buildings of Level One, the three little villages, Athens, Petra, Stonehenge, the train tunnels that connected them. Beyond the villages there was little but solid rock as yet. The maze would be much more intricate as time passed. Habitats and shops and industries would be built at the peripheries of the towns and spread laterally from the equator line until lighter g and increasing awareness of spin made things uncomfortable.

  “Walk-in coolers?” Jerry asked.

  “Mark them,” Helt said.

  During the time with Calloway, Jerry, Nadia, and Martin had been as calm as cucumbers with one another. That was a story Helt didn’t have time to sort out now, but he was grateful the tensions between the three of them had vanished somewhere.

  That somewhere was not a place for him. Helt was a totally cisgender male and it made him feel archaic at times. He wondered how Elena felt about partners and sharing and jealousy. That family of hers, business or commune or whatever you wanted to call it, was hard to read from what they let the public see.

  Jerry set little ice cubes on the locations of walk-in freezers and fridges. They were clustered near the centers of Athens and Petra, in restaurants and food stores. Some really big coolers were in the food prep areas of Stonehenge. A few walk-ins were in the industrial areas of Level Two, beneath Athens. They were all monitored. Time and date stamps showed no activity in them during the time window.

  “Ryan got off shift at 1500,” Nadia said. “He was showered and dressed in the clothes he died in when he left his coworkers. He went up the elevator to Level One and then on to Center, if he took himself up the elevator to the observation tower. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t get on the Athens elevator on Wednesday evening, and he wasn’t in the stairwells.” Nadia ran fast clips from the surveillance cameras that afternoon. “Not at any recorded time.”

  “So he died on Level Two,” Jerry said.

  “Or in Petra, or Stonehenge,” Helt said. “But we’d have to figure time enough to get him somewhere and then chill him, and then add the transport time over to Athens tower so he could be hauled up during the SM hour.”

  “On the train,” Nadia said.

 
; There were no captures of anyone supporting an unconscious human and getting him on or off a train that night.

  “I suppose a high-speed emergency vehicle could have carted him around,” Jerry said, “but that would mean the records of it were erased and the train schedules would have been altered. A cross-check on energy use for that hour would show it—unless those records were altered, too.”

  “Any record can be altered,” Helt said. “That’s the framework of our reality, for better or worse.” He ran the energy use/trip comparisons. The SM hour looked just fine.

  “Helt?” Calloway’s face appeared. “One of the effects of phenothiazines is they stomp on the shivering reflex.”

  “I did not know that,” Helt said.

  “So Ryan might have chilled faster than the models show. He wouldn’t have fought the cold.”

  “Time frame?” Helt asked.

  “It would still take a couple of hours,” Calloway said.

  “Thank you,” Helt said. “I think.”

  Calloway vanished.

  “Back to Level Two under Athens,” Helt said. They scouted Level Two’s industrial complex, in easy reach of Athens but well beyond its borders. It was full of big spaces; warehouses, vaults for metals and ores, materials labs, shops that printed anything and everything. Hardhat country. A lot of it was unheated.

  Much of the rest of Kybele’s hide was untouched rock, pierced by the spiraling shuttle tunnel that led to the port by the elevator.

  “The seed vaults are bored deep,” Nadia said.

  “Not the seed vaults,” Jerry said.

  “Not a high probability of that,” Helt said. You didn’t go into the vaults alone, and when you entered, indicators blinked in NSS and Biosystems and the Athens clinic until you came out again. Those indicators had been on during the SM hour, and a look at them said no one had been in the vaults then.

  “What do we have on Level Two that’s cold and signal-dark, as opposed to just cold?” Helt asked.