Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  A question put into the respective connectivities of several different worlds might be days in the answering, even weeks if the respondents were on remote, far-flung worlds that were not frequently visited. But Shannery was a secondary world of Ikkibal, the foundational domain from which had come the pioneers who had settled the new planet, so there was but one whimsy separating the two, and ships large and small plied it frequently. So my assistant had been sending out queries and having them answered for the better part of a full day now.

  “Have you learned anything useful?” I said.

  “Nothing I would call definitive,” it said, “but enough to indicate that Shannery is the most likely world on which our client learned to speak, and that her speech patterns betray no overlays that would indicate she has spent much time elsewhere.”

  “Good,” I said. “Keep working on it.”

  “There,” I said to Hespira. “We are a long step closer. I would suggest that, while I am away, you look at images of representative landscapes and cityscapes on Shannery, and perhaps some well-known personages and historical events. They may stimulate associative memories. At the very least, they will serve to delineate the limits to which the amnesia extends.”

  The prospect of having something concrete to do cheered her, or at least suppressed her anxieties. I instructed my assistant to order some breakfast—and quietly reminded it to scan the food and its deliverer thoroughly—then departed. The aircar was waiting at the bottom of the hotel’s front ramp. I entered it, negotiated the terms of its engagement—always a wise thing to do before leaving the ground—then had it fly me directly to where the Gallivant stood.

  The vessel had nothing unusual to report, and I did not offend its sense of its own shipliness by instructing it to be watchful. The yacht would make itself aware of any person, device, or energy that impinged upon its privacy and would not take any such trespass lightly. I went aboard, received its report with thanks, then went to a locker in my quarters where I kept the tools of my trade.

  A short while later I was airborne again, with another shocker in my pocket and, in case of any serious situations, a self-activating energy pistol in a holster strapped to my leg. I also carried a compact device of my own design and manufacture, which I was confident would deal with whatever waited in the back yard of the empty manufactury, listening to my integrator’s artful fabrications.

  My hired aircar, however, was unclouded and I lacked both the time to equip it with the means to arrive undetected and the inclination to argue with the vehicle about making the modifications. So I instructed it to set me down a fair but walkable distance from the target and bade it wait for my return, or to come quickly if I signaled by activating its remote starter.

  The area was utilitarian, its bland-faced buildings designed more for functionality than for any uplift of the spirit, its wide and straight streets invariably meeting at right angles. I might have been in the industrial precinct of any city on a thousand worlds, except that even here the locals indulged their affection for steep flights of stairs. I had not seen the calf muscles of a Razhaman, but I was sure that those of men and women alike would resemble densely knotted tree roots.

  I consulted my locator as I walked and stopped when it told me that the coordinates of the target vehicle were at the rear of a building across an arterial street from where I stood. Traffic on the thoroughfare was increasing as the day’s work began in earnest, heavy vehicles and smaller carry-alls moving in both directions. I put the locator away and deployed my hand-held surveillance unit which had the outer appearance of a dog-eared, pocket-sized book whose cover bore the title: Guide to a Miscellany of Interesting Planets.

  The device surveyed the nearby surroundings and told me that no one’s gaze was turned my way, nor were any energies registering my presence. No one’s heart rate or breathing had changed as I had turned the last corner that led me here, nor had anyone spoken a word or phrase that could be connected with my movements. I put the book in a pocket of my vest, waited for a brief lacuna in the traffic, and crossed to the other side of the street, where I consulted the device again. My actions had drawn no reactions, save for an inventive curse voiced by the operator of a heavily laden truck who had had to swerve to avoid me.

  I put away the book again and looked up at the building behind which lay the vehicle that was receiving the focused beam of false information from the seeker in Hespira’s room. The structure was a gray cube, three stories high and featureless except for a double door, a few small windows, and some grills that I presumed had to do with ventilation. There was grime on the windows and before the doors lay enough accumulated grit and oddments of debris to suggest that the step had not been swept for weeks.

  To one side, an alley led to the rear, where I expected to find the loading docks for whatever had once been made in this abandoned place. I went silently along the building’s side, stopping short of where the alley met the vehicle yard. Again, I consulted my false book, this time adjusting its settings to give me a constructed view of the scene around the corner. The device told me that the vehicle stood where it had been when my assistant had first detected it. It was an unremarkable ground car, though the system that was clouding it was versatile and finely calibrated; even though it had been briefed by my assistant, the surveillance unit required several seconds to insinuate itself through the multilayered web of masking energies that surrounded the car. Then the reality was revealed.

  I went forward. The vehicle was not defended nor did any ha-ha wait to spring its fateful surprise. It was not even locked, my device had informed me, and directed me to where I could seize the handle of the hatch that led into the operator’s compartment. I threw it open, saw what I expected to see: a receive-and-record unit that had all night been accepting the information beamed from the floater above the Espantia that had, in turn, relayed it from the peeper I had found in Hespira’s room.

  But it was not the device that concerned me, nor was it the clouder that rested on the car’s instrument panel, its deluded sensors still telling it that it was functioning admirably. What drew a gasp from me was the object on which the receive-and-record sat. It was man-sized and man-shaped, folded to conform to the contours of the operator’s seat, and completely and tightly wrapped in a semi-transparent material that was obviously airtight.

  I knew it was airtight because the man-sized, man-shaped object it enfolded had been a man. Even through the thick membrane I could see that his lips bore the blue tint of oxygen deprivation, and the sightless eyes told me that there was no point in ripping the material in an attempt to let life-giving air reach the deflated lungs.

  Carthew Chumblot had long since taken his last breath.

  Chapter Five

  “The question is: was Chumblot’s murder a message?” I said to my assistant, when I had returned to my room at the hotel and told what I had found. I saw no point in keeping the news of our driver’s murder from Hespira. Whatever was going on, she was part of it, and though in some ways her condition made her as vulnerable as a child, she was in fact an adult and entitled to know the situation. Still, I did not dwell on the details, but assured her that Chumblot had not suffered.

  “The method of it, and the leaving of the body to be discovered where it was, argue for an intent to send a message,” my assistant said, “unless the killer has a fetish for suffocation. But the content of the message is ambiguous. Does it say, ‘We are ice-blooded killers, and you are next’? Or ‘Submit to being watched; we will brook no interference’? Is it threat or dominance?”

  “Or,” I said, “ ‘Don’t send an amateur into the arena of professionals’?”

  “I want to get out of here,” said Hespira. Her ungainly face twisted. “That poor man. He thought he was protecting us.”

  It was a reasonable supposition. But there was another: Chumblot, confined to a low-status occupation—though it was one that constantly took him out of the rank-obsessed milieu of Razham and into close contact with
visitors who were free of Ikkibali strictures—may have wanted to share in the reflected glamour of us strange and comparatively free offworlders. He had given in to a mischievous impulse, putting my client in the gray habit of a woman of mystery and delivering her to places where she would be noticed.

  Hespira, in her costume, was bound to have been noticed by gossip-addicted, scandal-loving Razhamans. A rumor had rapidly spread, even as were traveling to Candyk’s Spire, and that had led some overproud grandee to loose his watchdogs. The man in brown could have been sent to determine if the errant Sister of Repose was his master’s estranged spouse—perhaps the two women bore some resemblance. The tracker had twice come by the Greeneries, seeking a better view, and in between visits he had gone to our hotel and installed the peeper.

  Then Chumblot, seeing the plot happily thicken, had tracked the tracker, ultimately following him to the empty loading area where the receive-and-record unit was to be placed. There Chumblot’s quixotic blundering brought him within reach of a man who would not brook interference from an amateur. Again, the Ikkibali view of the perquisites of social rank may have come into play: the driver may not have worn the right colors that would have allowed him to play the sleuth and had got a blunt comeuppance for his presumption.

  There was a tidy circle to the reasoning: Chumblot’s caprice had set in motion a series of events that ended up burying him. I wondered if he had ever viewed a drama with that as its theme; if so, the import of the story had not registered deeply enough.

  “I want to get out of here now,” Hespira repeated.

  I spoke to my assistant. “Have we done enough research on Shannery?”

  “I am moderately confident that—” it began, then interrupted itself to say, “We are being scanned by two persons who are coming up the ascender. They are armed. Now they are getting off on this floor. They have turned into the hallway leading to this room.”

  I drew my energy pistol and motioned Hespira to stand behind me.

  “They have stopped outside the door,” my assistant said, so that only I could hear. “One of them is speaking into a communicator. The transmission is well shielded.”

  “And?” I said.

  “There, I have broken through,” the integrator said. “They are discriminators of the Razhaman Watch. Two of their colleagues are in an aircar that is positioning itself outside and just above the window. They are tense but not keyed up for immediate action. Their weapons are not drawn.”

  I put the pistol on a table and stepped well clear of it. “It is all right,” I said to Hespira. “It is the authorities.” She had been wringing her hands again. I said, “Put your hands where they will be able to see them.”

  The who’s-there beside the door said, “Members of the Watch require me to open. I cannot refuse.”

  The door slid aside. The man was tall and thin, the woman heavy and wide in hip and shoulder, but they both wore the universal expression of peace officers coming through a door for the first time. Their eyes took in Hespira and me, the pistol on the table, the shocker she had left beside the bed, my assistant draped across the back of a chair. The woman spoke: “Disable your integrator, if you don’t want us to do it.”

  “Integrator,” I said, “please stand by.” The “please” meant that I meant it.

  The Watchwoman consulted a device worn like a glove on her left hand then looked at me. “All right,” she said, and the two of them stepped into the room, filling it the way police always filled a room. Their eyes itemized everything, discarding the objects that did not count—the hotel furniture, the remains of breakfast—and registering those that did, especially the weapons, which the man efficiently sequestered, and Hespira’s gray habit, hung in an open closet.

  “All right,” the woman said again. I was unfamiliar with the rank symbols on the sleeve of her blue and tan uniform, but I could see that hers had two more diamonds than the man’s, and she had the unmistakable air of the one in charge. “I am Senior Examiner Joxon Bey,” she said, then indicated her colleague. “He is Leading Examiner Brevich. Please state your names, degrees, and place of origin.”

  I identified myself and made sure to say that on Old Earth I was accounted a personage of note, the foremost freelance discriminator of my time, which made me a confidant of lords and magnates and even the Archon himself. This assertion won me a look of attentive neutrality from Bey and a frown from her subordinate, which deepened when I said that my client’s name, rank, and origin remained a mystery.

  The Watchwoman’s expression did not alter. She said, “We had better hear your story.”

  I had already decided on a strategy. I would simply tell the truth—though not the whole truth; magic would not be mentioned, nor the roles of Shar and Chonder—then I would see how the situation developed. The likelihood was that whatever the imbroglio in which we were enmeshed, we were only tangential to its core dynamic. If we could establish that fact to the authorities’ satisfaction, we could move on.

  And so I began at the beginning, on Old Earth, with Hespira’s bumping into me, then went on to my desire to take a vacation after a particularly taxing bout of work, and my impulse to assist a person in need when I was peculiarly equipped to do so. I related the matter of Chumblot and the clothier, my discovery of the import of the gray habit, then the finding of the peeper, at which the junior Watchman went into the other room and returned with the device, pronouncing it dead. I continued my story, moving on to the discovery of our driver’s corpse. While I spoke, the woman watched me closely, though she occasionally glanced at the back of her glove.

  “I then returned here, to be sure that my client was safe, and was just about to contact the Watch when you appeared.”

  “Did you send Carthew Chumblot to where you found him?” Brevich said.

  “No. When last I spoke to him I had not yet discovered the peeper. I attempted to contact him, but could only reach his integrator.”

  “We heard your messages.”

  There seemed nothing to be said to that statement, and in the subsequent silence I deduced that the two were saying nothing in order to leave an opportunity for me to volunteer something. It is a basic interrogation technique.

  When the silence had not brought them anything new, Joxon Bey said, “That taxing bout of work, what did it entail?”

  “I recovered some stolen property for a client.”

  “That does not sound terribly taxing.”

  “There were… complications.”

  “Did these ‘complications,’ ” Brevich said, “have any relation to your possession of a large quantity of untraceable jewels when you arrived on Ikkibal?”

  “No. I did not know if Old Earth financial instruments would be functional this far up The Spray. The jewels were convenient.”

  Again a silence opened. After it had yawned to its limit, Bey said, “Back to the ‘complications’?”

  I gave the Watchwoman a look that said we were all professionals together before I said, “Client confidentiality prevents my saying more.”

  The Senior Examiner studied her glove for an extended moment. Meanwhile, Brevich gave me one of those soul-piercing stares that were supposed to unsettle the guilty conscience. I had long ago decided that, all too often, the guilty were unequipped with the troublesome hindrance of a conscience, and therefore the accusatory glare usually found nowhere to strike home.

  “It is possible,” I said, “barely possible, that some repercussions of my work on Old Earth could follow me here. And if that were shown to be the case, then my former client would have breached his obligations to me, and I would have no hesitation about giving you the details.”

  “How very gracious of you,” said Brevich.

  I ignored the tone and continued, “But I believe there is a simpler, and therefore more likely, explanation.” I then offered them the theory of the estranged spouse, ending with, “It fits the facts.”

  The woman looked from her glove to me and back to the glove. “And,”
she said, “the facts it fits are conveniently difficult to confirm, since your hypothetical outraged superlant knows, via the device recovered from the other room, that this woman”—she indicated Hespira—“has nothing to do with his marital difficulties. If he exists, he certainly has no reason to come forward and point the finger of culpability at his own operative.”

  “I cannot help the facts,” I said. “I did not create them.”

  “Chumblot was not acting as your agent when he went to the manufactury?” After asking the question she gave her attention to the glove while I answered.

  “No,” I said. “I believe he followed the man in brown out of a desire for adventure.”

  “A desire that was fulfilled beyond his expectations,” said Brevich.

  The comment brought a sob from Hespira. Both officers turned and studied her. “He only wanted to help,” my client said. “He was trying to be nice.”

  Bey’s eyes came back to me. “The element that escapes me,” she said, “is why Chumblot was killed. He could have been deterred by some rough treatment or the flourishing of a weapon. There was no need of it.”

  “It puzzles me, too,” I said. I offered the rationale of the professional offended by the intrusive amateur, but now, as I spoke the words, they sounded less convincing than they had when I had advanced the same argument to my assistant.

  The Watch entertained the concept, however, causing me to think that in a society so careful of rank and status, the motive might carry more weight. They had not thought it likely that the murderer intended to send me a message, I noted, but immediately I had to revise that assumption when Joxon Bey said, “How long are you planning to remain on Ikkibal?”

  I had told her in my earlier summation that we were focused on Shannery as Hespira’s probable home world. “I have not heard my assistant’s full report on its researches,” I said, “but I believe we are ready to press on.”

  The Watchwoman gave me a look that was less neutral. “Then I think you should.” She signaled to Brevich that they were leaving.