“Doug MacDougall doesn’t come anywhere close to fitting the user profile for Rush,” I said, thinking aloud.
“He wasn’t taking it for recreation. He was taking it to kill himself. Which would explain why he took it undiluted and intravenously rather than orally.”
“He’d no reason to kill himself,” I said, giving voice to the thought that had been going through my head all morning.
“We’ve worked together for two years and four days, yet there are lots of things you don’t know about me,” Paula said. “I think it’s safe to assume there’s a great deal you didn’t know about someone you only had occasional contact with.”
I would have dearly loved to find out some of those things I didn’t know about Perfect Paula, but now wasn’t the time to ask. So, instead, I said, “Don’t you feel the least bit curious about why Doug MacDougall would have taken his own life?”
“No,” Paula said. “His reason was probably pathetic. It’s certainly academic. The case is closed, Travis.”
CHAPTER 5
LOVE, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
THE CASE MIGHT BE CLOSED FOR PAULA, BUT NOT FOR me. For the rest of the afternoon we had the usual mix of minor incidents and dramas to deal with, each demanding my complete attention. But, when I got back to my apartment at the end of the shift, my thoughts soon turned back to Doug MacDougall.
I tried reading one of Calum Tait’s travel articles but the words didn’t register, and when I looked at the photos they dissolved into Doug MacDougall’s face or Paula’s.
I put on a Meg Ryan film, but for once she didn’t win my heart or make me laugh, and my mind kept straying to the scene I’d walked into in apartment 331 that morning. I switched the movie off halfway through and sat there staring at the blank wallscreen, projecting my own thoughts onto it. The result was a mystery that seemed insoluble. Doug MacDougall simply wasn’t the sort of guy to mess with drugs. He got his rush from looking for plants and sharing his love of them with other people. To me, that made an accidental overdose a non-starter. If it wasn’t an accident, then it had to be on purpose. Which meant suicide or murder. Suicide didn’t make sense, either. The autopsy failed to reveal any life-threatening physical ailments that might have led him to end it all. His body had far more toxins in it than was good for him, as you’d expect in someone who spent so long Outside. But, although those toxins would have taken twenty or thirty years off his life, he’d still had a good ten years left before it was an issue. Meantime, he wouldn’t have felt anything worse than a shortness of breath and recurring sore throat.
Of course there was always the other kind of ailment, the kind that afflicted mind rather than body. In my job you become a good judge of character. You notice things other people miss, tell-tale signs of stress and worry, guilt and shame, fear and doubt. I’d never seen any of those signs in Doug MacDougall’s face or body language. I’ve been wrong about people enough times to know my intuition isn’t perfect, but I’m right far more often than I’m wrong, and I’d back my judgment with my life. Those aren’t empty words, because sometimes I’ve had to do exactly that. If I was wrong about Doug, then I could be wrong about anyone, and I’d never be able to trust my judgment with the same certainty again.
I’d lose faith in a whole lot of things if I was wrong about Doug MacDougall. I suppose he’d come to symbolize all that’s best about people in my mind, and if he had a dark side of pathological proportions, then we all did. If he had a fatal weakness, a fundamental flaw, then all Names did, just as Perfect Paula believed. If she was right about that, I was wrong—and truly human beings had no future.
The trouble was that if Doug’s death wasn’t an accident or suicide, that only left murder, and the facts didn’t fit a murder, either.
I used my computer screen to review the haven records one more time, checking the movements in and out of Doug’s apartment. He was the only person to enter or leave it over the last few days. I tried to find ways around that, but there weren’t any. Even if the apartment hadn’t been on the third story, the windows don’t open—they’re sealed units to keep out the toxic atmosphere. As for the door, the only ID card used in it was Doug’s. I’ve never heard of anyone getting into an apartment without a card, but there’s a first time for everything. So, for the sake of argument, I imagined someone had found a way to sneak into Doug’s flat. If they had, they would have left a trace of their presence behind somewhere. Without realizing it, people leave traces of everything they do in the Ecosystem database. We call them ghosts. Well, actually, I call them ghosts. Paula calls them EBTs, which stands for electronic bio traces, or something like that. Anyway, after all this time on the job, I have a good idea where to look for ghosts. I started the search by saying to my voice-activated computer, “Give me the thermal records for apartment 331.”
Almost instantly a histogram appeared on the screen. The processing power of the Ecosystem never fails to astonish me. It has to monitor half-a-billion citizens in communities around the world, and yet it can tell you the most intimate details of any one of those lives in the blink of an eye. What it was effectively telling me now was when Doug MacDougall’s apartment was accessed, and by how many people. The histogram showed temperature on the vertical axis and time along the bottom. To save energy—we’ve learned our lesson from the past—apartments are kept at the ambient temperature when no one’s in them. The temperature is raised by body heat when someone enters, which in turn tells the sensors to provide cool air until the room reaches 23C if you’re a Name, or 22.5C if you’re a Number; they really are colder than us. The resulting chart is made up of characteristic spikes and plateaus. The more people who enter, the more pronounced the spike and the longer it takes to cool the room to its optimum temperature. “Indicate occupant entries,” I said.
A series of red crosses appeared along the timeline. Each marked an insertion of Doug’s card into the slot beside his door. Every cross corresponded to a spike, and each spike was the same height, indicating only one person entered. It confirmed only Doug MacDougall had been in the apartment.
I let out one of those long sighs that are punctuating my days with increasing frequency. Since I was getting nowhere, I decided to go somewhere. When things are getting the better of me I like to take out my frustration by beating up some prisoners in the station holding cell, so I headed there now.
Just kidding. I work out my frustration on an exercise bike, so I went down to the gym.
When I got there the first thing I did was look around for Paula, and my heart sank when there was no sign of her. I was surprised at that—not her absence, but how much it disappointed me. After all, I spend my working days with her, so her face is the last one I should want to see at night, especially since I don’t even like her.
I headed for the only empty exercise bike. All the others were being ridden by Numbers, each pedaling faster than the next. It was as if they were being chased or were chasing someone. They’re ridiculously competitive, and take as much pride in their physical condition as they do in their mental prowess. They also hate lying awake at night, because they get bored and restless, so they like to work-out to the point of exhaustion. That’s one of the few things about them I can relate to—although I like to work to exhaustion because I think too much when I lie awake at night.
Making myself comfortable on the bike—or as comfortable as it’s possible to be on a bicycle seat—I decided not to be childish, and just to go at my own pace.
But of course, once I got warmed up, I inevitably found myself going faster and faster in a futile effort to match the Numbers on either side of me. I never learn.
The Number on my right turned to sneer at me. It was a Pareto. I don’t know if it was the same one who’d shown up in Doug’s apartment that morning—they really do all look the same to me. He certainly had the same sneer. That sneer was like a challenge laid down, and I’d no choice but to accept it.
What followed was the work-out equivalent of a staring match.
I’m in pretty good physical condition, but I couldn’t live with him for more than five minutes. And I was only working at level eight resistance, while he’d be on level ten. They always work at level ten. With my legs turning to jelly, I had to slow down. In a pathetic attempt to save face I turned my head to one side and pretended I’d just got a call on my hear-ring. I went so far as to pant, “Okay, I’ll be right there.”
The Pareto was watching me and sneering big-time now. He knew there hadn’t been any call, and he knew I knew he knew, and I knew—
Well, you get the picture.
I couldn’t meet his eye any more than I could match his pedaling power. Feeling every one of my forty years, I got off the bike and walked slowly to the showers. My little act should have involved rushing, but I couldn’t have managed that even if Perfect Paula had been waiting for me in the showers, ready to express a heretofore stoically suppressed love with enough passion to turn ice-cold jets of waters into clouds of steaming mist.
The shower cleansed the sweat from my skin but not the lactic acid from my muscles, so I had to take the elevator, although it cost me pleasure points I’d rather have spent on a timesphere trip. I was about to tell the lift to take me to level two, because that’s where my apartment is, but on the spur of the moment I said, “Three.” I wanted another look at Doug’s flat to see if I’d missed anything first time around.
When I got there all his personal possessions were gone, which was a bit strange. It usually takes longer than that to clean out the apartment of a deceased. I tried imagining where everything had been. First I envisaged the body, then the plants.
And as soon as I thought about the plants I again had the feeling of something being not as it should be, just like when I’d looked at Doug’s rolled-down sleeve. I don’t know how long I stood there, trying to put a finger on what was bothering me, but it was long enough to realize I could stand there all night and not get any further forward.
And it was long enough to start thinking about Paula. Not about anything she’d said while we were in the apartment that morning, but how she’d looked as she stood there. I seem to have been ending every day by thinking about Paula lately. I used to think about her to stop thinking about Jen, because it hurt too much to think about Jen, and because Paula was an ideal object of desire—physically beautiful yet so emotionally cold I could never get close enough to be hurt by her.
However, somewhere along the line I’d started thinking about Paula in her own right, rather than as a distraction from Jen. I started looking for things in her eyes, signs that she had thoughts and feelings I could relate to. Most of the time I only saw the same gemstone coldness or mocking sneer that was present on the face of every other Number.
But increasingly there were times when I thought I saw something else—a look that might have been longing, though for what I don’t know. Then again, it could have been a figment of my imagination. Whatever, it never lasted long enough for me to be sure it had really been there; it changed into that gemstone coldness the instant she realized I was watching her.
I thought about Paula’s response to the Pareto that morning; the way her eyes moved over his body, and his moved over hers. There was no getting away from it. I was jealous. I felt a sliding sensation in my guts. The kind that comes from facing up to an unpalatable truth. I’d always had a crush on Perfect Paula, but it had been a purely physical thing. Now it was turning into something more, which frightened me for all sorts of reasons.
Firstly, I’ve had my heart well and truly broken once before, and I’ve no desire to go through anything like that again.
Secondly, if there’s one thing I’m sure about, it’s that a Name wanting anything more than a one-night stand of no-holds barred carnal knowledge with a Number is asking for a world of trouble. I’ve seen it so often in my work. I’d say 90% of crimes cross the genetic divide, and about 90% of those also cross the gender divide. It’s a case of opposites attracting—briefly and unequally—and then repelling with far greater force than they attracted. The conventional wisdom is that, due to their superior physical condition, Numbers are better lovers. Because of that, and their physical beauty, they’re sought after by Names. Where we score is in being far more emotionally responsive, which apparently never fails to amuse and strangely arouse Numbers. On the face of it, that should mean everyone is happy.
However, the resulting matches are made in Hell rather than Heaven. Numbers are apparently incapable of matching their lovemaking with affection, and their contempt and sense of superiority always show through. Once they’ve made love with a Name, the novelty wears off and they get bored. They’re simply incapable of connecting emotionally—probably because they’ve no hidden hopes and dreams to share. So the morning after, while a Name might experience the kind of crush you can have for physical perfection, the Number is bored and ready to move on. The kindest interpretation is that Numbers don’t care about whatever hurt the subsequent brush-off involves for their Named partner. But I’m pretty sure they actually enjoy toying with our emotions, which they can do with impunity as they can’t be hurt this way in return.
I think it’s another way in which they try to make themselves feel better for not having our capacity to love, dream and wonder—they try to make those things seem like worthless, pathetic self-delusions born of weakness and need, and so convince themselves they’re better off without them. They build themselves up by constantly bringing us down, never missing a chance to find fault with us or mock us; to point out our illogicalities, frailties and foibles. In other words, the things that make us human.
And nothing makes us more human than love.
Whatever else we are, we’re not stupid and we know it’ll end in tears. But our hearts rule our heads—I suppose that’s the difference between us and them in a nutshell—and we’re capable of loving people who we know can never love us back. Sometimes I think that might even make them more attractive to us. I know it makes Paula more attractive to me.
And then it dawned on me: maybe Doug MacDougall had lost his heart to a Number. He had a lot of heart to lose, and maybe he hadn’t been able to go on living without it.
Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine Doug falling for a Number—he’d fall for a Jen.
But then again, I’d fallen for Jen, and was also on the brink of falling for Paula.
Go figure.
Unrequited love of a Number wasn’t a satisfactory explanation for Doug MacDougall’s death, but it was the only one I had. If it hadn’t been for what happened when I got back to my apartment, I might have settled for it.
It’s funny, you can bring all your experience and analytical powers to bear on a problem to no avail, and it’s when you’ve given up and are doing something else completely that the answer finally comes to you. I’d made my final cup of coffee for the day and was about to pour the last of it into my pot plant when it hit me. Not the pot plant, but the thing that hadn’t been right about Doug MacDougall’s apartment.
CHAPTER 6
LOGIC PUZZLE
DOUG HADN’T WATERED HIS PLANTS.
There was undoubtedly much I didn’t know about Citizen MacDougall, but there was one thing I could be certain of—he would have watered his plants before killing himself.
Now I was sure it wasn’t suicide.
Unfortunately, I was equally sure Paula wouldn’t be convinced by my certainty. She wouldn’t understand Doug MacDougall’s love of living things. She wouldn’t understand that, even if he was capable of harming himself, he’d never have harmed the precious plants he’d gathered around him. Not even by a sin of omission like failing to water them before he took his own life.
I was nowhere near establishing a case, let alone breaking it, but I came painfully close to breaking the only piece of evidence. The syringe. Paula had obviously dismissed it from her thoughts as an irrelevance. I’d simply forgotten all about it. I didn’t remember again until I was getting dressed for work the next morning and put both feet in t
he same leg of my coveralls. I barely managed to get a hand out in time to break my fall and avoid crushing the little plastic tube in my pocket.
My excuse for forgetting about the syringe is that the call-out to the apartment of the Slo-Mo lovers came right after I put it in my pocket, and what we found in the apartment was enough to make anyone forget about anything.
My excuse for putting both feet in the same leg of my coveralls is that I’m not a morning person, even after a good night’s sleep—and, instead of a good night’s sleep, I’d had a dream that was nearly as messed up as the world at the end of the Old Days.
In the dream I was in Rio, going around the places mentioned in my favorite travel article. As so often in dreams, things had gone crazy somewhere down the line. For instance, the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer on top of Corcovado was in fact a statue of Doug MacDougall, and when I walked along Ipanema beach it was with Paula, not Jen.
Tomorrow’s World Page 5