by Eric Brown
Jenson hesitated, quickly calculating his options, before deciding on hospitality. “Gentlemen, please. It’s getting cold. Come in.”
He led them into a comfortable lounge, an open log fire radiating warmth. He indicated an overstuffed sofa, saw Vaughan looking at the flickering flames in the hearth. “A hologram, I’m afraid. But very realistic, yes?” He seated himself in an armchair, an authentic book laid print-down on the arm where he’d left it to answer their summons. “Gentlemen, how might I help you?”
Chandra cleared his throat. “We’re investigating the abduction of your daughter, Elly, from Verkerk’s World.”
On the mantle-shelf above the fire, Vaughan saw half a dozen framed graphics of Elly and Lars Jenson. In all of them she was smiling, a pretty dark-haired girl in the arms of her father. He looked at Jenson, an ungovernable emotion, somewhere between anger and incredulity, building within him. He would have given anything at that moment to have been able to read the man’s mind.
“But I assure you,” Jenson was saying, “that my daughter’s departure from Verkerk’s was totally legitimate.”
“We believe she was selected by the Church of the Adoration of the Chosen One as the Chosen One.”
Jenson inclined his head. “That is correct. Of course, I was both honoured and amazed when it was found that she was the Chosen.”
“You yourself belong to the Church?”
“I am a member, yes, Mr. Chandra. Unfortunately, my time being strictly limited with my business commitments, I cannot worship as often as I would like.”
“Your daughter went willingly to Earth?”
“Of course. Do you think I would have sent her otherwise?”
Vaughan almost interrupted, but stopped himself. He recalled Elly Jenson’s terror at being taken from Verkerk’s World.
“Did she travel alone?” Chandra asked.
“Of course not—she was accompanied by two highly respected members of the Church.”
“Can I have their names, please, Mr. Jenson, and their present whereabouts?”
“By all means. They were Jen Freidrickson and his wife, Olga. They will be on Earth now, of course, with Elly.”
Chandra tapped their names into his handset. “You don’t have their current address on Earth?”
“Unfortunately, no. You see, they will be travelling from church to church over the next few months.”
“Mr. Jenson,” Vaughan spoke for the first time, staring at the man. “You mean to tell me that you let your daughter travel to Earth, stay there without you for months—you agreed willingly to this?”
“Mr. Vaughan, you don’t seem to understand what a great privilege it is to have one’s daughter selected to be the Chosen One. It is the equivalent, in Buddhism, of having one’s son pronounced the incarnation of the Dalai Lama.”
Chandra said, “How is the process of selection made, Mr. Jenson?”
“The Council of High Priests retires for three days and undergoes a long, rhapsody-induced trance. In this trance they are contacted by the Godhead, and the Godhead informs them of His choice. This time, praise be, Elly was Chosen.”
Chandra stared at his manicured fingernails, at a loss for the next question. Vaughan stood and took a pix of Elly from the mantle-shelf. With her brown eyes and long dark hair, her resemblance to Holly was quite remarkable.
Jenson was saying: “If that will be all, gentlemen. I really am quite busy—” He stood, indicating the door.
Vaughan turned on him. “I think what you’ve just told us is a pack of lies, Jenson.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Jeff...” Chandra warned.
“You heard me—” He made a grab and Jenson ducked quickly, avoiding Vaughan’s reach like a boxer. He came up against the chair, and this time could not back away from Vaughan’s next lunge. He caught Jenson by the shirt front, ripped at the material. “If you’re not lying, then you won’t mind if I throw your shield away.”
“Jeff—what the hell!” He felt Chandra’s arms around his waist, pulling him away.
Aggrieved, Jenson arranged his shirt. “If this is the way you conduct your investigations on Earth—” he began.
“Don’t give me any of that righteous bullshit!” Vaughan said. He pointed at Jenson. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, then get rid of your shield.”
“Jeff, he’s quite within his rights,” Chandra said.
“Thank you,” Jenson said, arranging his shirt collar. “As a matter of fact I have certain information—involving my business transactions here on Verkerk’s—that in the hands of competitors from neighbouring systems would be highly disadvantageous to my home planet’s economic security.”
“That’s one hell of a long-winded excuse, Jenson—”
“I’ve had about enough of this, Mr. Chandra. If you don’t leave and take this madman with you, I shall have to call the legitimate police.”
Chandra turned to Vaughan. “Jeff, for pity’s sake—this is getting us nowhere.”
Something in Chandra’s expression, a look between concern and despair, spoke to Vaughan’s reason. He closed his eyes, nodded. “Okay, yeah.” He shrugged off Chandra’s hand and moved to the door. He pointed at Jenson. “You’re lying, Jenson. Whatever you’re up to, I’m on to you.”
Vaughan strode down the hall and pulled open the front door. An icy blast of wind met him, chilling the exposed flesh of his hands and face. He could hear Chandra inside the house, trying to smooth over his outburst.
He walked down the garden, his footsteps crunching frost, stopped by the roadster and stanchioned his arms on his knees, hanging his head and closing his eyes against the tears.
He heard footsteps behind him. “Jeff, what the hell were you playing at?”
Vaughan straightened up. He focused on Chandra. “How could he, Jimmy? How the hell could he let his daughter go like that? If you’d seen her in the freighter...”
“Okay, okay. Calm down, Jeff.”
“He’s lying, Jimmy.”
“Okay, so he’s lying. We know that. But blowing up won’t get us anywhere. We’ve got to keep our heads, work out what’s going on. That’s the only way we can find him out, Jeff. Aggression won’t get us anywhere.”
“I just wanted to beat the truth out of the bastard.” Vaughan shook his head. “I don’t know how anyone can let their daughter go like that.”
Chandra sighed, shook his head. “We’ll get to the bottom of this and nail Jenson sooner or later. Come on, it’s freezing out here. Let’s get back to the house, ah-cha?”
As they climbed into the car, Vaughan said, “And how come the guy was shielded?”
“Like he said—business interests—”
Vaughan snorted. “Bullshit. You heard what Laerhaven said, pins are forbidden here. Don’t you think it a bit suspicious that Larson was wearing a shield just as we turned up?”
Chandra thought about it. “Maybe...”
“Damned suspicious,” Vaughan said, wondering how Larson could have known.
On the way back, Chandra’s handset chimed. It was Laerhaven.
“Gentlemen, I’ve been talking with colleagues in the capital, Vanderlaan. I enquired about the ex-spacer, Essex.” She paused.
Chandra said, “And?”
“Well... he’s currently under police protection in hospital in Vanderlaan. Apparently he approached the police there three days ago, claiming that his life was in danger. He was vague, almost incoherent. My colleagues dismissed his claims, sent him away.”
Chandra glanced across at Vaughan. “Don’t tell me,” he said into his handset.
“Two days ago an attempt was made on his life. He was shot at close range by an unknown assailant in a park in the city. Fortunately for Essex, a police patrol was passing nearby and heard the shot—they intervened, but the gunman got away.”
“And Essex?”
“Badly wounded, but he’ll live.”
“Did he say why someone wanted him dead?”
“He’s been in no fit state to say anything, Mr. Chandra. My colleagues are hoping to interview him when he recovers.”
“We’d like to question him, if possible,” Chandra said.
There was a pause, then Laerhaven said, “I’ll give you the address of the hospital, and the code of the officer in charge of the case. I don’t foresee any problems.”
Chandra thanked her and was about to sign off when Vaughan said, “Lieutenant Laerhaven, Vaughan here. Did you by any chance mention to Lars Jenson that we wanted to question him, and that I was a telepath?”
The reply was immediate, “No. No, of course not.”
Chandra said, “Thank you, Lieutenant. We thought not.” He cut the connection.
Vaughan glanced across at Chandra. “Did we?” Vaughan asked pointedly.
“You think she might have mentioned it to Jenson?” Chandra asked. “You don’t think she’s in with him?”
Vaughan shrugged. “Not necessarily—but she might have mentioned it inadvertently.”
They continued the drive in silence.
Later that evening, after a passable curry cooked up by Chandra with the meagre ingredients available in the house, Vaughan stepped through the French windows and stood on the frost-crackling lawn.
Alerted by movement above him, he stared into the sky. He laughed, the sound harsh in the silence. Snow was falling and, through the sudden flurry he could see—like snowflakes that had elected, en masse, to defy gravity—the still points of light that were a million stars. Unbidden, the recollection returned of a night very much like this almost twenty years ago, when he had stood beneath the vast Canadian night sky and stared up into the heavens. Now he was overcome with the recapitulation of the feeling he had experienced back then—the overwhelming optimism of a young boy at the start of life, with all of the hopes and none of the fears, with all the cosmos at his fingertips.
He thought of Holly and Tiger. He wanted to be able to stand with them now and stare up at the teeming stars. He wanted to experience, however vicariously, their delight at being young and alive.
It came to him that the tragedy of their deaths was not so much the termination of what they had been, but the ultimate and irrevocable termination of all that they would have become. That was the terrible tragedy.
The wind blew, bitter cold, and at last Vaughan turned and walked into the sanctuary of the warm-wood house.
He lay on his bed and listened to the muted thrum of mind-noise from the city. It was nothing like as concerted as what he experienced on Bengal Station, but he told himself that he could do without it, nevertheless.
He reached for his chora, poured a dose into his beer, and drank.
* * * *
SEVENTEEN
ABSORBED
Jimmy Chandra had expected Vanderlaan, the administrative capital of the northern continent and the largest city on Verkerk’s World, to look something like the cities of Earth with sprawling suburbs and a busy, built up centre. He should have guessed that, with a population of little over fifty thousand, it would be just another version of Sapphire Falls. As he drove into town along the coast road, two hours after setting off at dawn, he wondered if he’d been somehow turned around during the journey and was arriving back in Sapphire. There were a few differences to assure him that he was in Vanderlaan, however: the sea, to the left, filled the bay with a million scales of reflected sunlight, and there were fewer warmwood houses here—for the most part, the buildings were constructed of polycarbon in gold and silver, reflecting the sun like some inland, mirror-image of the bay.
Vaughan lay on the back seat, asleep. As Chandra drove through the city, following directions to the hospital he’d received from the officer in charge of the Essex case, he considered Vaughan and what had occurred yesterday. The telepath’s outburst in Jenson’s house, provoked though he might have been, had struck Chandra at the time as unwarranted and unprofessional behaviour. It suggested a mental instability that had been simmering away under the surface, but never boiling over, for a long time. Chandra had often thought that the root of Vaughan’s depressive attitude had been the insights granted him by his ability to look into the minds of others—Vaughan had almost said as much often enough in the past. Since what Chandra had found on the files in the basement of police headquarters the other day—and in light of something else he’d discovered just that morning—Chandra wondered if his telepathic ability was the sole cause of his depression.
Back on Earth, Chandra had run a visual identity check on Vaughan, and the com-program had come up with a match—fifteen years out of date but still recognisably the man who called himself Vaughan. The original ‘Vaughan’ had lived in Canada back then, an officer in the Toronto police force. That tied in with what Vaughan had let slip once: that he was a Canadian whose parents had died when he was young.
For whatever reasons, Vaughan had fled his past, established himself with a new name and a new identity on Bengal Station.
Chandra had always thought he’d known—as well as he was able—the man who was Jeff Vaughan. He’d realised, now, that he knew very little.
And Vaughan’s obsessive interest in the Elly Jenson case? After their meal last night, Chandra had heard the French windows open. He’d moved into the lounge and looked through the window. Vaughan had been standing in the middle of the lawn, in the snow, staring up at the stars and weeping.
That morning, Chandra had inadvertently stumbled upon what might have been another piece of the puzzle to Vaughan’s past. At dawn, ready to set off, Chandra had knocked on Vaughan’s bedroom door. Five minutes later he’d knocked again and shouted and, getting no response, had opened the door and looked in. Vaughan was sprawled on the bed, fully clothed and asleep. Beside him, spread across the rumpled sheets, were about two-dozen pix of Elly Jenson—miniatures of the graphic that Vaughan had taken from Genevieve Weiss’s studio. Then Chandra noticed something else: not all the pix were of the Jenson kid. Some were of a girl who bore a striking resemblance to Elly.
Vega hung high above the sea to the east, four hours from setting. Already, a cool breeze had sprung up to temper the fierce heat. Chandra found the short day, the accelerated timescale, hard to accommodate. They had been on Verkerk’s World for almost twenty hours, yet had experienced a night and almost two days. He longed for the familiarities of Bengal Station, where you could get a full day’s work done without the premature arrival of night.
“Jeff,” Chandra called. “We’re here.”
Vaughan hung his head through the gap between the front seats, looking dog-tired. “I’ll never get used to these short nights, Jimmy.”
Chandra smiled. “Tell me about it.”
The city hospital was in the oldest quarter of Vanderlaan, the area constructed thirty years ago by the first wave of colonists. Despite the relative modernity of the old town, the area had the look, with its warmwood buildings bedecked with creepers and blooms, of having been settled for centuries.
They parked outside the hospital and made their way to reception. An officer, Sergeant Hengst, greeted Chandra and Vaughan and ushered them along a corridor. “Lieutenant Laerhaven instructed me to help you however I can, gentlemen,” he said in stilted English.
“We can interview Essex?” Chandra asked.
The sergeant nodded. “He’s showing signs of recovery,” he said. “His doctor says you can have thirty minutes.” He paused. “As a matter of security, and in order to aid our own investigations, I must tell you that your interview will be recorded.”
Chandra looked at Vaughan, who shrugged. “No problem,” Chandra said.
Hengst smiled. “Excellent.”
Vaughan asked, “Have you any idea who might have wanted Essex dead, Sergeant?”
Hengst shook his head. “Our investigations so far have come to nothing. Please, this way.”
He led them into a small room overlooking a garden. The shrunken figure of an old man, not at all the image of the ex-spacer Chandra had expected, lay
in a recovery pod. Essex was thin-faced, bald. His thin chest was encased in a glossy layer of synthi-flesh, and from the pale flesh of his arms snaked the leads of a dozen monitors and intravenous tubes.
He stared at Chandra, wide-eyed, as the three men approached the pod. He tried to sit up, but failed and slumped back into the cushioned interior. He said feebly, “If you’ve come to kill me, then kill me!”
Hengst said, “Mr. Essex, officers Chandra and Vaughan are here to interview you. If you could assist them by answering their questions, we would be grateful. If at any time you wish to terminate the interview, just say so. Do you understand?”