Haze

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Roget took the left branch, leading toward a circular grassy field where children, ten or eleven years old, he thought, were playing a game of some sort on what looked to be a circular grassy field. They carried short lengths of a metal shaft ending in an oval mesh frame. There was a single post in the middle of the field, and four narrow open cones branched from the post at a height of five meters.

  Half the players wore silver jerseys, and half wore a shimmering purple. Both teams contained girls and boys, it seemed, and the object of the game appeared to be to use the mesh-sticks to fling a yellow ball into one of the cones on the post.

  Roget followed the path up a slight slope to where several benches were located. Grass sloped down to the field some thirty meters away. A few handfuls of adults, both men and women, stood around the edge of the field, but the benches were empty. Roget seated himself and began to watch the players. After a time, some aspects of the game became clearer. Narrow strips of the grass had been colored to show four circles. The first circle was red and ran around the post some three meters out. No player crossed that line, nor the other red line, the farthest one, some thirty meters out. The other lines were a brilliant yellow, at ten meters, and a brilliant blue at twenty.

  A whistle shrilled as one player smacked another’s arm with his stick. Immediately, the smacker left the game and stood in a yellow box just outside the perimeter.

  “Are any of them yours?”

  Roget frowned momentarily—not at the friendly tone, but because he had understood the words and because they had definitely not been in Stenglish. He turned to the older man, wearing old-style black trousers and a black shirt with a shimmering gray vest, who stood at the end of the bench and smiled. “No. Just watching.”

  “They’re worth watching.”

  Roget nodded. He didn’t want to say much, aware as he was that, while his understanding was better, his speech certainly remained alien.

  “To be young again, and carefree.” The man shook his head, then walked eastward in the general direction of the central square.

  After the man left, Roget stood, then continued to follow the path as it wound toward a set of gardens bounded by a rough wall of black stone, behind which were more of the dark evergreens. As he followed the path through the opening in the wall, he could see that most of the plants were not the green of earth, but either a paler green or of a green so dark that it was almost black, like much of the lettuce in the salads he’d had on Dubiety. Less than a third of the plants were flowering. The blooms were, again, either on the pale side or very dark. One striking flower was a purple black trumpet with gold-fringed blossom ends. He’d never seen anything like it before.

  He bent forward and sniffed. The fragrance was lilylike, if not exactly, with a hint of gardenia. Then he straightened and continued through the garden. He walked another thirty meters along the garden path when he saw a pale-leafed plant that was wilted and desiccated, either dying or dead. For some reason, the dying plant struck him, but he kept walking. Another thought struck him. He hadn’t seen any butterflies. He turned back to the garden.

  Deliberately, he inspected the first flowering plant at the end of the garden. It had a variation on traditional earth flowering plants—stamen, pistil, and pollen. So did the second. The third had tiny blue flowers, but as he studied it, he heard the faintest whirring, and an insect—more like a tiny hummingbird—appeared, flitting from flower to flower.

  Roget resumed his walk.

  Beyond the garden on the southwest side of the path, he neared another game of the same sort, but the players were clearly older, and there were more adults ringing the field or pitch or whatever it was called.

  A path ran around the park, just inside the evergreen hedge. Roget hadn’t noticed it before, but what called it to his attention were two women running in long easy strides. Both wore but minimal clothing— skin-tight, low-cut briefs and minimal breast bands—and none of the men standing around the game even turned their heads.

  Roget was definitely distracted, enough so that he walked right into one of the benches, cracking his upper shin on the seat. He winced, then bent and rubbed the spot gently.

  After a moment, he straightened and continued walking.

  By the end of the day, as he walked back toward the guesthouse, he had covered close to twenty klicks of walkways through and around the center of Skeptos. He’d eaten a meal hardly passable at a tiny cafe without a name, and a slightly better one at a place called Calderones, where the servers all had their hair tinted purple. He hadn’t asked about it, not trusting his command of old American.

  He had seen a section of the city where there were individual dwellings, but, elegant as they appeared from without, they were comparatively modest in size, the largest being but two stories and encompassing perhaps six hundred square meters at most. He’d also seen small multiple dwellings that, while not decrepit, verged on shabbiness, or what passed for it on Dubiety, and where teenage males lounged on the corners.

  He’d walked through three other parks and entered a natatorium with a gallery, where some sort of competition was taking place involving boys and girls of all ages. What he had not seen was anything that looked like an industrial or production facility. He had passed buildings and grounds that looked to be schools, although he did not see anyone there, except a few children playing, with an adult or two nearby.

  When he trudged up the guesthouse ramp, well after dark, he was exhausted. Once he entered his quarters, he resolved that he would use the subtrans on Sunday to widen his explorations. Even so, as he sank into the sofa in the main chamber, he almost didn’t want to consider the implications of what he had seen. During the entire day, he had neither heard nor seen any form of aircraft. Nor had he encountered anyone or anything who looked like a police officer or a patroller, or an E&W monitor. He had seen people of all ages, and even those with significant variations in their physical features, although none were extremely dark skinned, possibly because lighter skin was a biological necessity under the orbital shields, and … most important, he had understood almost every word he had heard spoken.

  He couldn’t help but wonder if the Thomists were doing something to his perceptions … or if his entire thought processes were being manipulated by some alien intelligence.

  Yet his feet ached, and the place where he’d cracked his shin was definitely sore and probably bruised. His internals matched what he had sensed and felt, and even his physical condition. He had tasted food, some of it barely palatable. He had smelled the flowers, heard children playing, and seen all manner of buildings and dwellings.

  Either way, he reflected … he was in trouble.

  18

  25 LIANYU 6744 f. e.

  Once he’d returned to the FSS on Friday afternoon, Roget had explained his early return because of a bout of dehydration. Sung had given him a lecture and let it go at that. Roget had thought about sending another encrypted linkburst report to his controller, then decided against it. He didn’t want either dehydration or delusions on his record. He had kept monitoring his internals, but once he’d increased his fluid levels, they continued to indicate he was normal.

  Even so, on Saturday morning, Roget slept until close to ten. When he finally woke, he realized just how exhausted he’d been the night before. When he was alert enough to check, he found that his internal monitors indicated that he was in good shape. But then, they hadn’t given him any warning on the dehydration/delusion induced by whatever charming Marni and her compatriot had done. His shoulder wasn’t sore, but he thought he could see the faintest hint of a circular patch of redness in his upper arm. That would fit with some sort of nanojector, but why were there no other signs? And what had Marni had in mind? She wasn’t the type to do something without a purpose.

  After eating a leisurely, if not particularly appetizing, replicated breakfast, cleaning up, and dressing, Roget carried a case from the bedroom out to the main area. There he laid out the gear he had available o
n the table that doubled as desk and eating space. When he finished, he glanced toward the projection to his right. He couldn’t help smiling at the little black dachshund with the tannish brown patches over her eyes. “You are something, Hildegarde.”

  He knew that the dachshund was only an image, but who else could he talk to in St. George? Besides, she did remind him of Muffin.

  “You made a lot of people happy, I’d bet, little dog.”

  Hildegarde didn’t answer, but Roget imagined that she bounced a little and wagged her tail as he turned from the image to the gear on the table. He finally decided on the wrist dart gun, a waist-pak that contained various tools designed for circumventing security systems and locks, and, just for emergencies, a small explosive and incendiary device. He had been in St. George for two weeks. That meant he no longer was restricted to mere observation, and he was getting tired of being a target.

  Once he arranged the gear, he went back to the bedroom closet and ran a check on the nightsuit, a dark gray, long-sleeved singlesuit. When activated, the special threads and sensors created the image of whatever was behind the suit—from all angles. If Roget slipped the hood over his head and face, even in bright light, he merged with the background, and in darkness, he was close to invisible.

  The next step was to use his personal monitor to access certain information and dig out what he could about his putative targets for the evenings ahead. That would take more than a little time.

  By the time twilight had begun to creep eastward from the western bluffs across the town, Roget had discovered quite a bit more to put with what he’d already discovered. The women’s clothing shop Santiorna’s was owned by Julienna Young, the sister of one Brendan B. Smith. While interlocking family ownerships were not uncommon in smaller towns, when energy anomalies occurred involving two properties side by side and when one of those properties was owned by someone already flagged by a Federation agent—a dead agent—Roget thought that was carrying coincidence a bit too far.

  In addition, William Dane, Bensen Sorensen, and Brendan Smith had all been classmates at Deseret University, and Smith’s father had been a director of Deseret First Bank at the time Dane had been transferred from the Elko branch of the bank to St. George … and the elder Smith still was a director, from what Roget could determine. The only one who seemed to have no direct links to the other three on the initial listing Roget had received was Mitchell Leavitt—except that financial dealings usually touched everyone in a town as small as St. George. Leavitt, the collateralizer, had held a second deed of trust on the property owned by one Delbert Parsens, and Parsens had done the sculpture outside The Right Place, Bensen Sorensen’s guesthouse. The deed of trust had been released three years earlier for one thousand yuan and “other considerations of value.”

  Was that too tenuous a connection? Was it just another example of small-town financial incest, so to speak? Or a lead to something larger? One way or another, Roget needed to find out, and that would take some on-site investigating, beginning with DeseretData.

  He donned the nightsuit, along with matching dark gray boots, but left the fine mesh hood tucked inside the collar. Then he looked toward Hildegarde. “I’ll see you later, little dog.”

  Wearing the unactivated nightsuit that looked like a casual gray single-suit, remarkable only for its plainness, Roget left his apartment and walked up 800 East to the tram station. He and two youths, who barely looked in his direction, were the only ones to board the westbound tram. At the main station, Roget transferred to a southbound car, which he took to the 300 South platform. That left him a three-block walk to Bluff Street.

  The evening was slightly cooler, and he could hear the occasional buzz of insects. He only saw one older couple on the other side of the street, and they had waved and then continued onward.

  A block short of Bluff, when he could see no one nearby and in the shadow of an ancient mulberry tree, he activated the nightsuit and eased the hood over his head. Then he walked the last block to the corner where Santiorna’s was located. The shop was dark, and Roget’s detector showed no energy emissions at all. Next door, to the north of the clothing boutique, DeseretData had closed, but the lights were still on inside.

  Roget walked back along the side of the boutique, but his equipment and monitors detected nothing. Then he slipped up the alley to the rear of DeseretData. Even there, his detector showed no energy emissions whatsoever. Roget moved to the building’s energy monitoring box and focused the detector there. Only a slight energy flow was apparent, and there should have been more. Roget glanced down at the alley surface, lightly covered with the red sand that was everywhere. Something caught his eye. He turned, but it was only a cat skulking way. He looked back at the alley surface again. There was something…

  He bent down and brushed the sand away. Under the thin layer of sandy grit in the alley were old bricks. Roget looked closer. The bricks were indeed old, but their spacing was perfect, and old bricks in alleys didn’t stay perfect for very long. In fact, the bricks along the entire rear of DeseretData had been replaced recently, probably within the last year or so, out to a good two meters from the rear wall.

  Roget brought the energy detector to bear on the bricks. Beneath them was the faintest hint of energy flows. As he sensed, rather than heard, voices, he straightened and stepped farther into the shadows.

  The rear door opened, and the young man who had answered Roget’s questions when he had bought the infosloads stepped out, then looked back into the shop. “You sure you don’t need any help, sir?”

  “No. I won’t be long,” came a voice from inside.

  “Nine on Monday, sir?”

  “A few minutes before. Don’t be late.”

  “No, sir.”

  Once the young man closed the door and hurried down the alley toward the cross street, Roget stepped back and studied the thick roofing tiles, noting the lines of mortar at each corner of the rear roof. Even for St. George, the tiles were thick, thicker than necessary even for solar tiles… He nodded. They were industrial solar tiles, soltaic cells designed to produce and store electric power. While there was no direct prohibition of their use, tiles like those were extremely expensive, far too costly for a small EES in St. George. Yet, from what he’d discovered earlier, DeseretData was drawing a full quota of power from the grid, and it shouldn’t have needed that much with the soltaic array set up on the shop roof.

  He walked back along the alley. From what he could determine, Santiorna’s also had soltaic tiles across its entire roof. By clambering up on top of a sealed recycling bin, Roget managed to trace the almost hidden connectors that linked the roof grid of the boutique to that of DeseretData. Again, that wasn’t proof of anything—except that someone was using a great deal more power than was being registered or monitored. In itself, that certainly wasn’t illegal.

  He eased himself back down to the alley.

  A faint click and then a flash of light that vanished alerted Roget, who flattened himself against the rear wall of Santiorna’s. A tall blond man—presumably Brendan B. Smith himself—stepped out of the rear door, locking it, and then sending an energy pulse upward toward the eaves. Immediately, a low-level ambient motion and mass detector field cloaked the two buildings. Roget backed away quickly, slipping to the far side of the alley.

  Smith frowned and looked down at a device in his hand. He glanced around, then stepped back several paces from the rear door. Then he nodded, slipped the system controller into a belt holder, and began to walk down the alley.

  Roget remained motionless until Smith was well out of sight. He hadn’t expected that DeseretData would have such a sophisticated system. Why would a mere EES local outlet need it… unless it was more than just an EES? Then he moved silently toward the rear door, stopping well short of the detection field. He took out his monitor and called up the field diagnostic functions.

  Even with his equipment, it took Roget almost half an hour before he managed to create a diverter field, an
d another fifteen minutes to bypass the rear lock circuits. Then he had to pick the mechanical lock as well. The more he had to do, the more convinced he was that whatever Brendan Smith was doing was something Smith didn’t want anyone to know about, particularly the Federation.

  Once Roget was inside, he slipped on a pair of flat night goggles, and the narrow backroom of the shop turned shades of pale green. He began to search for a doorway or some access to a lower level, although neither was apparent. Eventually, he found a sliding panel at the side of what looked to be a closet. Behind it was a wooden circular staircase down to a basement. Roget took it, if carefully.

  The lower level contained three microfabrication units—ancient but effective molecular fabricators. Their presence definitely explained the power requirements of the building. Roget moved to the first, but the fabrication bay was empty, as were those of the second and third machines. A short workbench was set against the south wall, and several objects had been laid out there.

  Roget bent down to see them more clearly, then swallowed. While not fully assembled, the pieces definitely looked like an old-style pistol, except for the barrel, which was a dark solid material flanked by two thin metal rods, each of which terminated a fraction of a centimeter short of the end of the solid barrel. The grip had not been fitted, but inside the frame were the mounting and leads for a quick discharge capacitor. Roget was standing over a device that looked suspiciously like an antique narrow-beam nerve shredder.