The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  Helt nodded. “So I came down to plant surveillance bots on your door. Your lab was bugged already, but these are all mine. Only special people get them.” He touched her lip with a finger.

  She looked him over and sighed. “I’m glad you included me in the elite. Let’s get lunch, shall we?” She shooed Helt out the door and closed it behind her. “We can take the next train to Petra if we hurry.”

  They went up the stairs to Center at a jog-trot and made it into the seats before the door closed. Elena stretched her legs out in front of her and took a few deep breaths. They shared the passenger car with about six people, all in Biosystems coveralls, all of them absorbed in their interfaces.

  “How was your morning?” Helt asked.

  “Other than having someone bug my lab, it was good.”

  “You’ve kept your interface open and you’ve kept it with you. It’s possible not everyone’s done that.”

  She was watching his face. She nodded. “I slept in a little. I only put in an hour at the lab so far. That’s not so good.” She scooted back in her seat, propped her right ankle on her left knee and rubbed her calf muscle.

  “Hurt?” Helt asked.

  “A little. I broke my ankle when I was a kid and sometimes my calf cramps up.”

  “May I?” Helt covered her hand with his and she let him take over. He worked his fingers down the two long ropes of muscle below her knee and found the knot. He kneaded it, gently at first and then a little harder.

  “That’s it,” Elena said. “Right there. Oh, ouch. Good ouch,” Elena said.

  He felt the knot soften.

  “Should I stop?”

  “For now.”

  Helt let his hand rest where it was. Elena’s smile was a promise. Her eyes picked up the colors of her jacket, topaz gemstones incised with radial lines of dark gray, and Helt could hardly wait for the door to her house to close behind them.

  “Distract me.” Elena lifted his hand away. “Tell me what you should be doing somewhere right now instead of massaging my leg.”

  Helt sighed and reached for his interface. He checked to see if the surveillance camera showed Andrea Doan on her way to Athens. She was. Yves Copani was with his work crew. His crew was on camera; it was a safety regulation.

  “I’ve seen your appointment schedule,” Elena said. “Tell me what’s not on it.”

  Test Yves to clear him or implicate him in the murder. Spend a couple of days sussing out Earthside Seed Banker connections and politics before we question four of ours this afternoon. Find out where Cash Ryan died.

  “Cash’s story about himself isn’t on it. Not your fault. Jerry’s looking for it; we all are.” Elena’s hand was beneath his on the armrest between them. He traced the ovals of her nails with a fingertip. They felt like smooth, warm pearls. He traced them again.

  “You thought about that before you said it. It’s something else. You have a suspect and you don’t want to tell me about it,” Elena said.

  “Yes.”

  “You can keep that sort of secret. I don’t mind. But you aren’t smiling.”

  “There’s something else, something wrong that won’t be fixed by kicking the murderer off-ship. Something about governance and power. We carry an atavistic drive to exclude outsiders rather than embrace them. A need to feel safe from external threats, even when there aren’t any. This tri-partite system of ours sounds good, a government based on the practicalities of getting us to destination. Food and clothing, that’s Biosystems Shelter, and power to make stuff, that’s Navigation. Keeping information flowing and available so the other two divisions can do their jobs, that’s SysSu. The divisions need each other, so they’ll play fair, is the idea. It’s a good theory, but there’s not much historic precedent to say it’s going to work.”

  “As in none, not really,” Elena said. “The Jesuit experiments in South America tried to do that, be fair as they saw fairness; they ruled with the counsel and consent of the governed. But they weren’t as isolated as they needed to be to survive.”

  Helt was pleased that she knew of them. They had worked in an isolation that could no longer exist on Earth, and their intentions had been good ones, better than most, at least. “They had an invisible god to set limits when the Jesuits wanted them set. We don’t.”

  “Helt, we have Buddhists and Muslims and Christians and Neo-pagans and adherents to religions I can’t even pronounce on this ship.”

  “When we need to get married or birthed or buried, some of us have marked down a preferred ritual, yes. A small minority. But the colonist contract gives precedence to reason.” Outside the window, the pillars for the Petra section seal passed by, a lethal guillotine waiting to wall out disaster. It meant they were close to the station.

  “That’s a religion, too,” Elena said.

  “I know. Sometimes I think a god construct, maybe one of the divisions here, has to personify that abstraction, Reason, has to be the honcho, the Dude of Dudes. We’re built like that. We need hierarchy, whether we like to admit it not.”

  The train slowed for Petra station. A few people waited to get on for Athens. Helt followed Elena out of the warmth of the car, out into cold gray mist.

  “It’s going to rain,” Helt said.

  “So we’re promised.” Elena zipped up her windbreaker.

  Helt thought they would get lunch at the canteen and started to go in. It looked warm and crowded in there. Elena shook her head. “I made lunch for us at home.”

  “Before you went to Stonehenge.”

  “I admit to a sad lapse in my devotion to duty,” Elena said.

  “You guessed I would come and find you this morning.”

  “I hoped you would. But if you didn’t, I figured we would have lunch for dinner.”

  Whirlpools of mist rose from the river. Helt couldn’t see the houses on the opposite wall of the canyon.

  “You’re saying that when a creature is frightened, it looks for protection and calls it a god,” Elena said. “An organism’s response to threat has common pathways, whether the organism is a single rabbit or the group of humans walking around Kybele right now. Surely someone’s factored that need in, here.”

  “The best scholars on Earth helped with the gaming of this place. But they were a committee. They weren’t here. They aren’t us.”

  Drops of water were forming on the lintel over Elena’s door. A particularly large and cold one fell on Helt’s nose as he stepped in. He brushed it away.

  The warm air in the house carried hints of oregano and meat and other good things. He followed the odors of cooking, and Elena, into the kitchen. She lifted the lid from a slow cooker and stirred the steam.

  “Pork and green chile stew,” she said. “Quesadillas to go with.”

  Helt leaned over her shoulder to sniff the stew. It smelled wonderful. Elena’s neck was handy, and it smelled good, too. He pulled the damp windbreaker away from her shoulders and kissed the nape of her neck.

  “I think it could simmer a little longer,” Helt said.

  * * *

  This time, he could see her skin, all of it. He could marvel at the strong line of her hip and thigh, a curve of perfection against the window’s cloud-gray light. He could match the textures his fingers explored with the intent expression he saw on her face, wonder what she saw in his as her fingers traced the line of his jaw, the corner of his eyebrow.

  They had all the time in the world. They had the sound of rain and a shadowed room. She gripped the back of his head and pulled him closer.

  Unspoken questions asked with touch and movement, do you like this? This? Is this good? Is this better? No, wait. It will be better if we wait, but there’s rhythm, demand, the mingling of sighs and gasps, and after a time he could not tell whose breath he heard.

  We have all the time in the world.

  He looked up, later, at her lifted knee, the triangle of her leg in silhouette against the backdrop of the right angle of the far corner of the room, and it was the most bea
utiful geometry he had ever seen.

  Elena yawned and stretched and nudged him out of bed.

  * * *

  The green chile held plenty of heat to warm his throat and his belly, but it was deep rich heat and not at all painful. He ate too much of it. Contentment.

  Elena served up flan when he was finished with his chile. It was perfect, trembling, tender. He scooped up the last spoonful of caramel from his empty bowl and noticed Elena was frowning at her interface and that it was damned late and he’d better get going.

  “What is it?” Helt asked.

  “You asked about Ryan’s net stash.”

  “If we had his interface, no problem. If he’d left anything on his home screen, no problem. But he didn’t. We have every name that thirty thousand people use on this ship. Seventy-two thousand names, more or less. We’re trawling them. We’ll find him. Jerry’s pulled some lists and of course the likely files are encrypted. It won’t be easy, but we’ll find him.”

  “When someone’s picking an alias, a common thing to do is keep the first initials. But Cash wouldn’t do that. I went to the name he used for his poetry and tried initials up, initials down. Penny Dreadful, O, C above, Q, E, below. Cynric, of kingly lineage. Ryan means ‘little king.’ I think that one’s good. Now, small coins that start with ‘O.’”

  “Øre,” Helt said. “But he would have used the English ‘O’; the funny norsk letter would have made the pool too small. The Swedes spell it o, r, e.”

  “Obol, octavo, ochavo,” Elena said. “More letters, if he wanted more letters.”

  Helt leaned over the table and looked at the screen of her interface. Reading upside down, he saw,

  ORE CYNRIC

  “One more,” Elena said.

  Helt moved a little closer and braced his elbows on the table.

  ODELL CHALMERS

  “Odell, the rich, Chalmers, son of the lord,” Elena said. “Cash, so words that refer to money, and perhaps when he was older he decided to give up the fantasy he was a changeling and admit he had a father. I’m just guessing here.”

  “I know,” Helt said.

  “Send it to Jerry?” Elena asked.

  “Send it to Jerry,” Helt said. She did. Helt keyed an access code for override to files with that user name. He watched the lists flash into place on the instant, locations, documents, histories, essays, maybe, cached by Odell Chalmers. Filed on the Kybele server and from an ISP near Kitimat. He kissed Elena in hopes that she wouldn’t catch a glimpse of them. This was going to help. This was really, really going to help.

  “It’s here. Do you want to see?” Helt asked.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You’re wonderful,” Helt said. “Maybe what we need is in here. Maybe this is almost over.”

  “I hope so. But you were right. I didn’t want to look. I still don’t,” Elena said.

  25

  The Seed Banker Revolt

  They began at the end of Ryan’s decoded net stash, Nadia in SysSu with her other work pushed aside, Helt in the train on his way to Navigation offices. The end was the last entry made by Odell Chalmers, posted from Kybele’s skin at 1159 on the day he died. During his lunch break, from the crawler he’d been driving that day, he’d written:

  AN UPPER HAND

  BUOYED BY PALMED SECRETS

  RISES TO POWER

  AND MOVES YOURS

  There was nothing else in that document. At breakfast, in his apartment, written and then deleted, SPIKED SAFE ON SHIFTING ICE.

  That was in a poem whose first entry had been made eighteen years before, in Svalbard.

  “Hoo, boy,” Helt said.

  “But it shows where he was, when,” Nadia said.

  Helt lifted time, date, location data out of the cache of Odell Chalmer’s/Cash Ryan’s entries and set them aside, a skeleton of fish bones. “If you overlay it on what David I found out about him, there’s a match. No secret trips.” Helt added a couple of fins to the fish. “No, a few that David I didn’t report. Trips to Anchorage,” Helt said.

  “Anchorage? I’ll look at those,” Nadia said.

  A few minutes later, she said, “It was overnights, no real break in the timeline. That was when he had a job at Kitimat.”

  Working back, again, from the end, Helt found a document stash of essays. Maybe they were essays. The entries were about coworkers who had no names, only initial letters or nicknames. T did this. Neckwart did that. The reports were flat, with actions reported in the same tone an anthropologist might use when observing apes. Just the facts, no attempt at analysis. Most had not been edited or viewed for years.

  More poems, one begun in Vancouver, five years ago.

  TO BREAK THE STAINGLASS

  HEAR THE VIRGIN’S STACCATO SCREAM

  SWEET

  BUT THE ROUSED CORE SNARLTASTES ONLY UNPAINED LEAD

  SEEKS RAZOREDGE FLOODSURGE

  BLOOD AND SALT

  Edited during the time Elena was on the Olympic Peninsula, on leave from Kybele.

  Back again to recent entries. There weren’t many. A sort of prose poem about the olive tree and the fountain outside Ryan’s quarters.

  RUSTLE OF SPEECH IN A LANGUAGE HE CAN’T UNDERSTAND, FOREVER CHANGING IN ERRANT BREEZES. SEMAPHORES OF LEAVES IN UNNATURAL LIGHT. HE WONDERS IF SOMEDAY HE’LL HEAR THE WORDS, SEE THE PATTERNS.

  Helt ran Find for the word I. It wasn’t there. Cash Ryan referred to himself in the third person only.

  “Let me overlay this on what we have from his home unit,” Helt said. There were time and date match-ups, but Cash had been careful. He’d kept the home unit neutral, for public view, a bland record that Jerry had said was “not quite there,” because the rest of it was here, and it still wasn’t enough, not the manifesto Helt wanted to find. “We need Jim Tulloch in on sorting out hidden messages in his poetry, if there are any.”

  “I saw the third person,” Nadia said. “And I see that Ryan needed the stimulation of someone else’s pain.” She sent the folder to Jim Tulloch. “Ryan was ugly, Helt.”

  And Elena had made love to him. Something dark stirred that asked how she could have, what her blind spots were. Helt felt anger rise, a reaction to the bloodlust he sensed in Ryan’s tortured lines; he knew he owned at least a trace of it himself. He wondered if it was something Elena had seen in Cash Ryan and saw now in Helt Borresen.

  Stop it. She left him long ago and the man is dead.

  AN UPPER HAND

  BUOYED BY PALMED SECRETS

  RISES TO POWER

  AND MOVES YOURS

  Created two weeks ago. Ominous, that when he knew he would be leaving Kybele for good, Cash Ryan felt himself to have wielded power of any sort. And on the topic of powerless people, Helt was on his way to a meeting with two people who had signed away their right to determine where they would spend the rest of their lives. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “Nadia? How many of the Seed Bankers are cleared for the SM hour? Andrea Doan was busy in Stonehenge; I posted that. Susanna was with Yves, we have camera on that. But the others?”

  “Interesting, that,” Jerry said. He was back in the SysSu office after talking to Zaida Krupin, and he frowned at the screen in front of him. “Severo hasn’t put anyone on it, probably because the interviews are supposed to nail the alibis down.”

  “We need their alibis run through and posted about an hour ago,” Helt said. “What about Zaida?”

  The train slowed for Athens station.

  “I got nothing new on Ryan’s interactions with the crew, just that he was quiet. That Zaida tried to introduce him around when he was a newbie, once or twice, but then she just left him to his own devices. Said he was a pig. A skinny hog.”

  Duh. Helt tapped his fingers on his forehead, but the face palm he wanted to give himself was more like a giant punch to the ear. NIDAG. Jerry had threaded his real report into the spaces of the conversation he was having with Nadia, right now.

  Reading the interstitial as the door op
ened at Athens station.

  Jerry. Zaida on night shift 10/11, overtime favor for a friend. Saw Doughan call up a Tunnelworm +/−2230 and climb in. Was curious.

  “Did she? Thanks, Jerry.”

  Helt searched the Tunnelworm logs. Doughan had ridden a worm, the fast transports that carried workers back and forth through the airless tunnels to the poles, on the night of October 11 and for three nights after. Each trip had been to the North Pole and had lasted about four hours.

  It was okay if Doughan made unplanned inspections. He was the exec. Helt didn’t know his schedule for such things, and he doubted Doughan posted one. It might be a coincidence that he’d gone to Cash Ryan’s work locations three nights running. Uh-huh. Sure it was.

  Helt looked for more trips. More trips at night. Only the scheduled trips that took the crews outside showed from then on, with the exception of the ride Severo took the morning after the murder.

  The train Helt was on in the here and now stopped at the shuttleport.

  There was no one in the lobby except Giliam. He looked small and vulnerable out there. He would make an easy target; tall pillars and shadowed alcoves surrounded the wide expanse, designed for rapid clearing of passengers and freight. Helt, very aware of the back of his neck, walked toward Giliam and tried not to look like he was checking every shadow for motion.

  He couldn’t see into the Customs office, and he wondered if it was empty or if an NSS officer was in there, maybe several of them, who just happened not to be visible at the moment. Giliam was facing Helt. The door to Doughan’s office was behind him. Helt saw it begin to open and deliberately moved his eyes there and back. Giliam raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment.

  Once Doughan was in full view, Helt nodded. Giliam turned and fell into step beside him. Their steps sent echoes to the high ceiling and back again.

  “Right,” Giliam said, sotto voce. “Let’s play it by ear, shall we?”

  “I expected to see two engineers,” Helt said.

  “Yes, well.” They were three strides away from Doughan. “We’re a few minutes early,” Giliam said as Doughan stood aside to let them come through the door.