“Big Tooth tried them on,” my informant said.
“I do not know Big Tooth.”
“And now you never will,” my informant said. “The man in dark clothing played the fool but when it came to the business he dealt with Big Tooth expeditiously. The woman also weighed in. We decided that we were overmatched, and let them be.”
“Very wise,” I said. “Then, for the coins, where did they stay?”
“The Praedo.”
“That is a hotel near the spaceport, is it not?” I had seen the hostelry’s marquee as we rode the shuttle into Wathers.
“Yes.”
I tossed him both coins, then said, “One small addition. When people come from farms and small villages to try to make their fortunes in Wathers, where do they usually first arrive?”
He told me, then stooped to assist his brother, who was now stirring and making incoherent sounds. I took Hespira’s arm and left them. A short walk brought us to a place where jitneys waited to collect sailors who had celebrated shore leave so energetically as to be unable to return to their ships on foot. The second vehicle did not smell entirely unwholesome and we climbed aboard. I put a coin in the hopper and the car started up and moved toward the docks, saying, “What ship?”
“The Abbassad, near the spaceport.”
“That is not a ship.”
“Nor are we sailors.”
The vehicle grumbled and required another coin, but turned about and took us inland.
Chapter Six
“You enjoyed that,” Hespira said.
I turned to her and found her protruding green eyes regarding me with an air of an assessment fully completed. I raised my brows and cocked my head as if I did not know what she meant, though I did.
“The business in the Rolling Pig and then those two men in the alley,” she said. “You were having a fine old time.”
I looked out the side viewer at the passing sights of Wathers. “A craftsman enjoys plying his art,” I said.
“You even enjoyed speculating about poor Chumblot.”
The question merited some thought. “No,” I said, after reflection. “His death saddened me because it was unnecessary.”
“But it also angered you because he had tried to play at your game.”
I made no response.
“When you speculated that he was murdered by a professional who resented an amateur’s intrusion,” she said, “you could sympathize with that view.”
“I could understand it,” I said. “But I do not condone the action that it led to. If Chumblot was killed out of pique, the killer was no professional—just another thug with some skills.”
“Still, you are not pursuing my mystery out of any true regard for me. You are ‘plying your art,’ and I am merely your work.”
There were a number of ways I might have responded. Again, I chose the simple truth. “You are perceptive,” I said. “Perhaps you perceived something you were not supposed to and that is what led someone to steal your life away.”
“We are not talking about me, but about you.”
“Perceptive again.” In the face of her deepening frown, I held up my hands in capitulation. “I am who I am,” I said. “And who I am is what I do.” I took pause to order my next words before speaking them. “It might or might not be in my interest to become attached to a client. It is certainly not in the client’s interest for me to be anything other than a professional. Emotional judgments are clouded judgments.”
“And yet,” she said, “I sense some emotion in you. Not about me, I am sure, though at first I thought it might be. But it is there.”
“If so,” I said, “it is my own concern.”
“Not if it clouds your judgment.”
“It does not.”
“How would you know, if your judgment were clouded?”
I began to see another reason why someone might have put this woman far enough away that she would be unlikely to find her way back. “You ask difficult questions,” I said. “Fortunately, for you, you do not have to answer them, whereas picking the thorns out of prickly conundra is my stock in trade.” She was about to speak again, but I held up an admonitory finger. “Right now I suggest you let me get on with it. We can dissect my character later, when we are at leisure, but here we are at the Abbassad.”
I handed her some coins and asked her to remain with the vehicle, since we would not be here long. The place was a typical spaceport layover spot, catering to travelers waiting to make a connection or stopping briefly on Shannery to do some business. Its decor said it would offer moderate comfort, reliable functionality, and no surprises, good or ill.
I dawdled near the entrance, as if waiting for someone to join me. A man in a resplendent uniform commanded the portal, assisting patrons into and out of vehicles and summoning jitneys from where they waited in a rank for those who required transportation to the spaceport or into Wathers. I considered approaching him but he did not look to be the type who would serve my purpose. Nor, I was sure, would whoever stood behind the reception desk. I needed the kind of person with whom it was possible to strike up an instant rapport—provided, that is, that the relationship would be mutually beneficial and could be consummated without delay.
I had not been waiting long before I spied a likely prospect. He was a small man, scant of hair and slightly stooped, but sharp of eye. He wore a similar, though simpler, uniform than the door guardian’s, and was towing a come-along disk on which set the luggage of a portly man who was exiting the hotel in a bustle of self-importance. The porter eased the bags into the cargo compartment of a jitney and made the gratuity the plump man gave him disappear into a pocket with smooth speed. As the jitney pulled away, taking the rotund patron out of his life, the small man glanced in my direction, and I recognized the look as one part simple curiosity and nine parts assessment as to whether I could do him any good. I made a small gesture and the nine parts instantly became a whole. The porter sidled over to me.
I opened my palm to display a high-value coin, then added two more to it. The tiny clinks the currency made sharpened the man’s attention. He looked up at me with an intensity of expression that would not have been out of place on a bird that was sizing up a well-fleshed and peckable grub.
“Two travelers, in the recent past,” I said. “A man fond of dark clothing and a woman with an affection for large hats. They might have asked directions to a picturesque dockside tavern, also the omnibus station.”
I saw from a slight concentration of his features that my description was riffling the chimes of his memory. I put the coins into his hand and showed him an expectant attentiveness.
“Within the past month,” he said. “They both called themselves by the name Ololo, though they were neither spouse nor brother and sister.”
“How did they come and go?”
“I heard mention of a private spaceship.”
“Did you see them depart?”
A recollection of something out of the ordinary. “No, they left very late one night, almost morning. Only the night porter was on duty.”
“Were they accompanied by anyone?”
“I cannot say. They used a car that they had hired in town.”
“Any noticeable accent or unusual turns of phrase?”
A negative motion of his head. “They spoke mostly to each other, and in soft tones.”
“And did they ask directions?”
“They asked where travelers from the north might pitch up if they arrived not knowing the town. I told them of Ollanmore Square, where the day laborers congregate, and the omnibus station.” He consulted his memory, chinking the three coins in his hand. “Yes, and they wanted to know which places on the docks were good to avoid.”
“And you told them…?”
“Flink’s, of course, and The Deadlights. And the Rolling Pig.”
I held out another coin. “Consider now, what question should I have asked that I did not think of?”
He caught the inn
er corner of one lip between a canine and his lower teeth, then after holding it a moment, said, “ ‘Are they dangerous?’ And the answer is, ‘The man is, the woman more so.’ ”
I put the fourth coin into his hand. “You never saw me,” I said.
“I never did,” he agreed.
I returned to the car and Hespira, on the way giving instructions to my assistant. By the time I was seated and the vehicle was headed back to town, my integrator had completed its tasks. So that the vehicle would not overhear, it spoke privately to me, saying, “This is interesting: the spaceport reports the arrivals and departures of three private yachts during the times the targets came and went to and from Shannery. Two of the craft are innocent; I can trace their movements and neither carried a pair such as we are interested in.”
“And the third?”
“That is the interesting part. It arrived and departed under a false name and details.”
“And the spaceport did not detect the subterfuge?”
“It did not. The camouflage was of a high order.”
“Like unto the quality of the equipment on Ikkibal?”
“Very like. Had I not been looking for deception, and looking very hard, I might not have noticed.”
“Hmm,” I said aloud, causing my client to want to know what I was about. “Premature,” I said, gesturing at the car’s auditory percepts.
I did not bother with Ollanmore Square but had us taken directly to the omnibus station. This was an octopoidal structure, a low-built hub covered in fanciful arrangements of colored glass and spins of artfully corroded metal. From its eight covered walkways lined by bays, multipassenger vehicles loaded and offloaded persons traveling in and around Wathers or to and from distant towns and villages. It was a busy place; privately operated vehicles seemed to be the exception rather than the rule in Wathers. I thought also that Shanners—or at least those on the continent of Ballaraigh—must be of a relatively footloose breed, for I saw plenty of them coming and going, towing their bags on come-alongs or wearing them strapped to their backs—the light gravity made large loads easy to bear. The ambient mood was also light of heart, befitting a people happy to pick up and move on to somewhere else.
Hespira and I left the car and followed a trickle of just-arrived passengers heading into the central hub. Many passed straight through the terminus, others diverted to the sanitary suites or to the refectory, but a few looked about, found what they were looking for, and went to give it a closer inspection. The object of their attention was a notice board headed with the words “Situations Available,” beneath which were affixed palm-sized cards of different colored stock, on which were spelled out the terms and conditions of posts offering wages and other considerations.
I turned to my client to ask if any of what she was seeing seemed familiar, but I saw from her look of studied concentration that the scene was roiling the subsurface layers of her mind. I said, “Do not try to force it. Let it work its way free.”
My distracting her had the desired effect. The bubble rose into her awareness and burst. “I have been here,” she said.
“And you went straight to that notice board.”
She looked at me. “Did I? Yes, I did!” She let it come. “A blue card.” She strained then, but came up without a pearl. “I can’t remember what was on it.”
“No need,” I said, “it offered a position that seemed eminently attractive to a young woman just arrived from the north coast: to be a clerk in an emporium that dealt in the kinds of gear that seafarers need. It required prospective candidates to present themselves at the premises at a certain time.”
Her eyes were searching my face, and I could see that my words were striking a true note even if she could not remember the exact details. “How do you know this?” she said.
I gestured to say that I was not yet finished. “Probably, a woman was standing nearby as you read the card. She may have leaned over your shoulder and spoken, saying that she knew the business, that it was soundly managed and of good repute.”
Now, it was almost memory; she knew it was so, even if she could not recall it. “How do you know it happened that way?” she said.
“I know it, because that is how it must have happened. You were seen debarking from an omnibus inbound from the northern coast, though you probably began your journey in Orban. A man spotted you, decided you were what they were looking for, and signaled the woman to put up the blue card just as you entered the terminus and looked for the notice board. You read the advertisement, took the card, and set off to seek employment.”
“But why?” she said.
Again I felt that urge to protect her. I was convinced that there was an answer to her question, though at this point I could only guess at it. At the same time, I knew that she could have been a random choice, that she had simply offered the right age, sex, and general background. Perhaps she had been used for some purpose that required a cut-out, then scrubbed of all memory and dropped far from the scene of the action.
The problem was this: the kind of people who were so callous as to inflict such damage on an innocent pawn—and I was sure she was innocent—ought to have been hard enough that when they dropped her it would have been well-weighted and into the sea. Or out of an airlock into the great emptiness. The two elements did not add up.
“Why?” she said again.
I did not tell her it was premature to say. I said, “I do not know. But to that I will add the word: ‘yet.’ Because it will not be enough to restore you to where you came from, or even to recoup your lost memories. I mean to know why this was done to you. And who did it.”
#
The advantages of owning a spaceship—being able to pick up and put down wherever one desired, and to arrive with roof and sustenance in hand—were not available to me on Ballaraigh. The inhabitants preferred to keep their roads clear of private cars and their skies uncluttered by volantes and yachts. Hespira and I therefore had to make our way to Greighen Island by omnibus and ferry. The road portion of the journey took two full days, with an overnight stop at an inn just below the Oyoy Pass, where the road wound through the range of hills whose streams fed the River Leff, vigorous and narrow here though it would be wide and sedate where it reached the coast at Wathers.
I was not averse to the slower mode of travel. It offered Hespira an opportunity to let the sights and sounds I believed were familiar to her wear away at the barrier that separated her from her past. It also made it easier to determine if anyone was taking an undue interest in us. I hoped that would be the case, so that I could identify the shadow and take him or her aside for some pointed questions. But no one stood out, which meant that we could relax on the way, but also that we would arrive at the town of Orban not knowing if a reception had been organized.
I was also regularly checking the disk Osk Rievor had hung about my neck. It remained cold and dark blue. Perhaps Shannery was a world without sympathetic-association dimples, a characteristic that could only endear it to me.
The slowed pace of our trip also gave me time to worry at the aspect of the case that bothered me. While my client watched the hulaboa trees go by the omnibus window, their feathery fronds rippling in the breeze of our passage, I came back to the question of why she had been disposed of in a manner that allowed for the strong possibility that she would eventually regain her memories. The perpetrators of the crimes against her had not scrupled to murder poor Chumblot nor the Wathers skullthump Big Tooth; why had they drawn the line at Hespira? Were they hirelings who had been given orders about her that drove them to act in a manner at variance with their instincts?
The thought of what might have happened to her caused a visceral reaction in me. Rather than suppress an emotion that I knew to be unprofessional—and at variance with my own instincts—I let the feeling well up in me so that I could examine it as it was occurring. But the exercise brought me no enlightenment. I could only fall back on my earlier rationale: that the microcosm of Hespira’s plight ha
d become conflated, at some level of my psyche, with the fate of the macrocosm I loved. I could do nothing to prevent the coming cataclysm, but I could at least put my client’s upturned life back to rights.
It was not a satisfactory explanation. It seemed to me that I ought to be more complex than that. But perhaps having lost a substantial portion of my larger self, when Osk Rievor first became a separate persona then removed himself from my mind, my deeper workings were now out of balance. Without my intuition—my insight, as I had always called it before it reared up in the forefront of my mind and half-challenged me for dominance—I could not expect to be as nuanced as I had been.
The thought made me sigh. The sigh brought a questioning glance from Hespira and a quiet-mode query from my assistant. I gestured to the former that the matter was of no consequence and silently told the latter to attend to its own business. The integrator took that as an invitation to file a report.
“We are unremarked by person or device,” it told me, “except for the small boy in the seat across the aisle who has been amusing himself by contorting his face into caricatures of other passengers. His rendition of you shows a genuine talent for mimicry.”
I turned my head sharply in the direction of the gifted child and caught a flash of lowering brows and pursed lips before the boy quickly cleared his features and looked away. “He looked as if his bowels had downed tools last week and had since refused to function,” I said silently to my assistant. “That is not how I look when I am wrestling a heavy thought.”
It had something more to say but I saw nothing to be gained from a debate on subjective impressions. “Continue your surveillance,” I said, “and confine your reports to matters of substance.”
I almost heard something more and said, “Are you muttering something just below the threshold of my hearing?”
Now there was only silence.
“You would not have done that before you spent time as a grinnet,” I said. I was more and more convinced that the will my assistant had acquired during its incarnation as a wizard’s familiar had not died with the simian-feline body that was buried near Osk Rievor’s cottage.
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