by Eric Brown
“Mr. Vaughan, please. I appreciate your concern. Your desire for the welfare of the child cannot be greater than mine. But we must face certain realities. Fate conspires to bring down events upon our heads which we must face with fortitude—”
“If you don’t tell me what’s wrong with Tiger...” His grip on the little Hindu’s upper arm tightened.
“Mr. Vaughan, Tiger overdosed on a drug, colloquially known as rhapsody, a substance imported from one of the colony worlds.”
“What’s it doing to her?”
Rao stared into his eyes. “Mr. Vaughan, I’m sorry. There is no antidote, no cure for doses as massive as that which Tiger took. The drug is corroding her major organs, heart, liver, even her brain. She was comatose for a day after taking the substance, then wracked by severe internal pains. She is relatively comfortable now. I have treated her with a powerful morphine cocktail.”
Vaughan heard himself saying, “How long?” A ridiculously matter-of-fact statement at odds with the pain he was experiencing,
“I am truly amazed that she is still with us.”
Vaughan pushed Rao away and stepped back into the bedroom.
Tiger was smiling, something knowing in her expression. He sat down on the bed beside her.
“Jeff...” Her big eyes stared up at him. “You never told me...” She paused, marshalling her breath, her strength. Then, after a delay of ten seconds, “Never told me about you... Always so secret.”
A sharp pain like laryngitis gripped his throat. He managed, “What do you want to know?”
She said, “Want to know...why?”
“Why? Why what?”
“Why me?”
Because... How could he make her understand his enigmatic psychological obsessions? How could he explain that because of her similarity to someone he had once known, he had been compelled to seek solace from her, and at the same time driven to push her away?
She would not, could not, understand. The truth would only hurt her. He shook his head.
She smiled up at him, something martyred in her expression now. Her eyes were soft-focused with tears. He felt the tune of her mind fading, slipping away.
He sat with her for an hour while she slowly died.
He cursed himself for not letting her stay with him a year ago. He knew it was impossible to look back and say what he should have done, but he could not help the retrospective wish-fulfilment, the fantasy in which he had been able, then, to let her remain with him.
He felt self-pity and grief lodge like a pain in his chest.
He held her insubstantial hand while her eyes lost focus and her breath became laboured. Her mind drifted away, became almost silent, but for the occasional soft sound, a grace note played far off, and then nothing.
He gave thanks that he was not augmented, could not ride her mind towards the ultimate annihilation that put an end to all identity, all vestiges of consciousness.
He stared at her stilled face. Where before had been life, music, there was now the terrible silence of oblivion.
The thought of it brought back terrible memories and filled him with horror.
He slipped his hands beneath Tiger’s shoulders and pulled the lifeless child to his chest, buried his lips in the fragrance of her hair.
Later, he lay her down gently and closed her eyes, then looked around the room at the pathetic collection of her belongings: a dozen tattered posters of skyball heroes, two faded Calcutta Tigers T-shirts, a pile of ‘ball magazines, and an effigy of Siddhartha Gautama.
He saw the bag of rhapsody on the bed and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Behind him, the door scraped open.
Dr. Rao stood on the threshold, the Buddhist monk behind him. He glanced at Tiger’s body. “I’m sorry, Mr. Vaughan,” Rao said. “If you would like more time alone...”
“I’m fine.” He looked back at Tiger, but found that he could not contemplate her face. He stared at her small hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled.
“I’d like to attend the funeral.”
“We had not planned an official ceremony, Mr. Vaughan. The monks are taking her for Contemplation. Perhaps, in a month, a small service might be arranged.”
His heartbeat loud in his ears, Vaughan stared up at the doctor. He could hardly believe what Rao had just told him.
“Contemplation? You’ve sold Tiger for Contemplation?”
“Not Tiger, Mr. Vaughan. Tiger is no longer with us. Her essence has moved on. I have merely sold her remains.”
“No way.” Vaughan was shaking his head. “No, you can’t—”
“I have the welfare of the children to think of, Mr. Vaughan.”
He could not let the monks take Tiger for Contemplation. He imagined Tiger’s naked corpse laid out for the inspection of the monks, the subject of an exercise in which they contemplated the body and in so doing came closer to understanding their own mortality, the fact of their own place in the passing show called life. The remains would then be taken away, and ten days later brought out again. This time the monks would contemplate not only the fact of death, but the stench and corruption of the flesh. It was considered a worthy deed to sell the corpse of a loved one to the monks. The very idea sickened Vaughan.
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you do this.”
“Mr. Vaughan—”
He stood and pushed Rao and the monk from the room. Rao tried to brace himself in the doorway, but Vaughan took his wrists and twisted. The old man capitulated and backed into the corridor. “Mr. Vaughan! You are making a grave mistake. In the name of an ancient and noble religion, please think again. It is an honour to be the subject of Contemplation in the Buddhist faith.”
“Damn you!” He wanted to go on, shout that Rao would know the sham of all religions if he could only look into the human mind as he had, read the fear and the guilt and the universal desire to be saved.
Something in Vaughan’s stance caused Rao to back off further, raising his hands in a gesture of self-protection. “Mr. Vaughan, I am not a violent man...”
Vaughan turned and stared into Tiger’s room, repeating Rao’s claim and trying to summon a suitable reply. He turned and stabbed a finger at the doctor. “You’re not violent?” he said. “Are you trying to tell me that what you did to those kids out there—what you did to Tiger—do you mean to say that wasn’t violent?”
Rao spread his hands. “Mr. Vaughan, I ensure that my children suffer no pain. It is a sacrifice they willingly make. I look after them, take care of all their needs.”
Vaughan dropped his head and closed his eyes. He let the seconds build up, fought to control his rage. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you go through with this.” He paused, contemplating Rao, then said, “How much?”
Rao blinked. “Excuse me?”
“How much is the monk giving you? I’ll give you more if you’ll let me arrange Tiger’s funeral.
The monk tipped his head towards Rao’s ear, whispered something that Vaughan didn’t catch. Rao replied with a whisper of his own. The monk bowed with impeccable serenity, first to Rao and then to Vaughan, and retreated down the corridor.
Dr. Rao said, “I can see that Tiger’s funeral means much to you, Mr. Vaughan. The monk would have paid me five hundred Thai baht.”
Vaughan felt nothing but contempt for the Indian. “I’ll give you six hundred. I want Tiger taken to Level Eleven where she can be collected. I’ll make all the arrangements.”
Rao placed his palms together before his face, performed a servile bow.
Vaughan took out his wallet, counted out six one-hundred-baht notes, and thrust them into Rao’s palm.
He turned and stared through the door at Tiger’s small body laid out on the bed. He wanted to run, to get as far away from here as possible, but something, some absurd notion that do so would be to show Tiger disrespect, forced him to step into the room and sit down beside the dead girl.
He took her hand, tried to find the words to express what he was feeling. His throat was
constricted; words would not form—not that any expression of sentiment would mean anything now. Images of Tiger in life came back to him, and he saw in his mind’s-eye brief flashes of Holly.
At last, in silence, he released the cooling hand and stepped from the room.
Rao was nowhere to be seen. Vaughan retraced his steps through the ship and found his guide squatting in the entrance. The boy jumped to his feet. “Dr. Rao told me show you out.”
“Take me to the nearest inhabited level.”
Thirty minutes later he was riding a crowded upchute to the surface, packed between dozens of Indians on their way to work, the unintelligible noise of their minds loud in his head. He left the upchute station and walked into a warm dawn, the wash of brightening sunlight dazzling after the gloom of the lower levels. He felt as if he had just awoken from a nightmare, that if he went to Nazruddin’s and sat in his booth then sooner or later Tiger would turn up.
He boarded a mono-train heading west and alighted at the edge. There was a quiet park above his apartment where he sometimes went to be alone.
He sat on a bench overlooking a greensward that sloped towards the edge of the Station. The sky was still dark out over India; the sun was rising behind him, streaking the shadow of his head and shoulders far out across the sloping grass.
When the morning became too hot he would make his way home and go to bed, first taking a good dose of chora to help him sleep. Later, when he awoke, he would attend to the arrangements of Tiger’s funeral.
A voidship rumbled overhead, a great freighter in the orange and green livery of the Chandrasakar Line. Its shadow took minutes to slide over the greensward; Vaughan looked up and regarded the passage of its great curving underbelly. Through long viewscreens he made out the tiny figures of the ship’s crew, going about their work, oblivious of his presence, of Tiger’s death.
The ship moved out over the sea and circled south. Minutes later it was a kilometre from the Station and could begin its phase-shift manoeuvre.
The ship shimmered like a mirage, gained solidity, became faint again—and then transferred into the void and did not return. There was something spectacular in the disappearance of so colossal an object; it was as if the laws of physics had been disobeyed, as if magic had occurred.
A year ago, when Tiger had tried to get closer to Vaughan, she had followed him to the park and sat quietly beside him, her unsure silence suggesting that she knew she was invading his privacy. They had watched the ships for hours, and every time one gave itself to the void Tiger would gasp with delight.
It came to him that there would be many things now that she could no longer witness.
In his mind’s eye he saw again the image of her tiny body lying on the bed. Like a persistent phrase of remembered music, he recalled the failing, fading music of her mind.
He told himself that it was over now, that Tiger had confronted the fact of her oblivion and passed on. But he could not banish from his mind the terror Tiger would have experienced upon apprehending the oblivion which awaited her.
His handset chimed. He pushed up his sleeve and accepted the call. Jimmy Chandra’s smiling face stared up at him. “Jeff. When can we meet?”
Vaughan said, “You’ve got something?”
“Something?” the cop said. “I have discovered enough about your Director to cause him severe distress.” Vaughan smiled at Chandra’s quaint use of English.
“I just got off shift. I need to sleep. How about tonight, around nine? Meet me at Nazruddin’s?”
“I’ll be there, Jeff.”
Vaughan contemplated what Chandra had said. Then his thoughts were replaced by the image of Tiger on her deathbed, the feel of her in his arms.
Then, against his will, his thoughts slipped back down the years, and he tried in vain to recall the special signature of Holly’s mind.
* * * *
THREE
DEATH OF A VIP
Jimmy Chandra hunched over a glowing com-screen in his office at the Law Enforcement Headquarters. The room was darkened and insufferably hot, the ceiling fan doing nothing but stirring old air into a slightly more breathable mix.
What Jeff Vaughan had asked him to do was not, strictly speaking, legal—but he owed the telepath a favour and had, a little reluctantly, hacked into the police file core.
And he’d discovered some interesting things about Director Weiss.
He sat back and considered Vaughan. He’d met the telepath four years ago, when he’d worked briefly with the security team at the ‘port. Their friendship, such as it had been, had soon dissolved in the acid of Vaughan’s caustic world-view. He’d tried to come to some understanding of Vaughan’s cynicism, discover the incidents and events in his past that had made him who and what he was. But Vaughan had blocked all his questions, reluctant to let anyone into the locked room that was his earlier life.
“If you were cursed with the ability to read minds,” Vaughan had once said in a drunken outburst, “then you wouldn’t be blessed with that damned Hindi optimism that I find so sickening.”
Chandra had said, “Hindu.”
“What?”
“Hindu optimism,” Chandra replied. “Hindi is our language.” He had been dodging the issue. He’d found Vaughan’s bitterness so disturbing and difficult to understand that he often refused to be baited, and instead sidetracked the argument or ignored Vaughan altogether.
Perhaps, of course, he feared that Vaughan was right, that humankind was evil and self-seeking. Perhaps he feared that Vaughan’s ability had given him an insight that he, Chandra, could not possess.
His handset chimed.
“Chandra.” Commander Sinton peered up from Chandra’s wrist-screen, his ruddy Caucasian features and oiled silver hair bright in the gloom. “Get yourself on to the flier lot right away. Take Lieutenant Vishwanath with you.”
“What is it?”
“A respected citizen was reported dead less than twenty minutes ago. Tread carefully, understand? Extend my sympathies to his widow.”
“Murdered?”
Sinton glared at him. “No, he passed away peacefully in his sleep. What the hell do you think, Chandra? Of course he was murdered. I want a report in my files by dawn.”
Sinton cut the connection.
Chandra downloaded the relevant files on Weiss into his handset and left the basement room.
* * * *
As Vishwanath climbed into the flier beside him, Chandra went through the familiar process of readying himself for what was likely to be a gruesome business. He cleared his mind and slowed his breathing as the flier rose, banked, and burned away from the Station, inserting itself into a red fast-lane. He told himself that the deceased was no longer suffering, had passed on to another existence, and that the corpse that would greet him at the scene of the crime, no matter how bloody, was merely the exhausted remains of an incarnation that had reached the end of its tenure in the here and now.
The preparation helped, he knew. But, no matter how well prepared intellectually, he could not prevent his body’s visceral reaction to what he was about to experience.
“Details, Vishi.”
The young lieutenant relayed the facts from a screader, his face washed crimson from the light of the fast-lane. “Victim is Rabindranath Bhindra, aged seventy-five, resident of the Sapphire complex, Wellington district, mid-eastside.”
“Exclusive.” Chandra whistled. “Sinton said he was a VIP.”
Vishi looked up from the screader, glanced across at him. “You’ve never heard of Bhindra?”
“I must work too hard. No time to spend noting celebrities. Screen star?”
Vishi shook his head, smiling. “Politician. But that’s not what he was famous for. He was one of the first voidship explorers, fifty years ago.”
“Ah, that Bhindra. Didn’t he write a book about his days in space?”
“It was made into a film, theatre drama, virtual-tape, holo-movie.”
“I’ll remember it the ne
xt time I play charades. What was its title?”
“Pass. Had ‘stars’ in there somewhere, I recall.”
Chandra nodded. He gazed down at the lights of the Station’s upper-deck as they streamed by below. “How was he killed?”
“Shot through the head with a high velocity projectile.”
“Oh, lovely, Vishi. I hope you haven’t just eaten.”
“No, sir,” Vishi said. “Bhindra was in his apartment at the time. One theory is that the assassin was in a flier.”