“Why not? The Mutes are hostile.”
“They’re hostile because there was a series of incidents at the beginning, when we first discovered each other, that created conflict. It was mishandled on our end, and to a degree, on theirs. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s fault. People were surprised by an unprecedented situation and they reacted badly. Some of it’s in the genes. We can’t stand to be near them. Have you ever been close enough to a Mute to feel the effect?”
He wasn’t simply talking about their mind-reading abilities, but the fact that they touched something revolting deep in the bone. It was hard to say why; they were humanoid. But people reacted to them the way they did to large spiders, or snakes. Add to that the knowledge that, in their presence, your brain lay open to the sunlight. That you had to struggle not to think of anything that would embarrass you. That the creature knew more about you than you did because all the walls were down, all the rationalizations and pretensions set aside. They knew, for example, precisely how we reacted to them. It made diplomacy difficult.
“No, I’ve never seen one.” There weren’t many of them running around inside the Confederacy. They didn’t like us very much either. “Are you sure they weren’t involved?” I asked.
“We looked into it. You know, of course, they’d have to come through the Confederacy to get to Delta Karpis. Or go exceedingly far out of their way.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Not at all. Things had been quiet between them and us for a long time when the Polaris happened.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at the moon. It wasn’t Rimway’s moon. Too big, and hazy with atmosphere. In fact, it had oceans. “We couldn’t see any motive they’d have to kidnap the people on the Polaris. Certainly none worth risking war over. We talked to some of them. I personally talked with a representative.” He made a face at the memory and tried to shake it off. “He said they had nothing to do with it. I believed him. And I’ve seen no reason to change my mind.”
“Why would you take his word? There don’t seem to be any other likely suspects.”
“Because whatever else you want to say about them, Chase, they are notoriously poor liars.”
“Okay.”
“Furthermore, I couldn’t see how they could have accomplished it. They couldn’t have approached the Polaris without being seen. Had that happened, Maddy would surely have sounded the alarm. We’d have known.”
“Afterward,” I said, “you mobilized everything you had to look for them.”
“Yes. In fact, a sizable portion of the Confederate navy went out and conducted the search. And, although we didn’t encourage anybody, at least not officially, a lot of corporate and even some private vessels helped. The hunt went on for more than a year.”
“I assumed there’d been a campaign to get everyone involved.”
“We didn’t need a campaign. You don’t know what it was like at the time. People were scared. We thought something new had shown up. Something with hostile intentions and advanced technology. Something completely different. It was almost as if we’d discovered a supernatural entity. It was so bad there was even talk of an alliance with the Mutes. So a lot of corporate types sent their ships out. Became part of the effort.” He moved some sand around with his feet. He was wearing sandals. “It generated good publicity for them. For the corporations.”
“And never a sign of anything at all out of the ordinary?”
“That’s correct. We never found anything.”
One of the vents came on and delivered cool air into the room. We sat quietly, listening to it. It was reassuring, evidence that basic physical law still ruled. “Dr. Taliaferro,” I said, “do you have a theory? What do you think happened to them?”
He considered it. “I think they were taken,” he said finally. “By whom, or for what purpose, I don’t know.”
His bench was placed just beyond the reach of the incoming tide. We watched a wave play out and sink into the sand. “Why was there an empty compartment on the Polaris?”
“You mean, why were there only six passengers instead of seven?”
“That’s the same question. But, yes.”
“That’s easy to explain. The eighth compartment was reserved for me. I’d intended to go.”
“For you?” He nodded.”
“You were fortunate. Why did you change your mind?”
“Something happened at the office. I just don’t know what it was. I was never informed. I, the avatar. Whatever it was, it was serious enough that I felt constrained to cancel out of the flight.”
“It was at the last minute.”
“Yes. We were literally boarding the Polaris.”
I pressed for an explanation, but he insisted he had none. Whatever it had been, Taliaferro had kept it to himself. And I recalled seeing the director leaving early at the Skydeck launch. “Dr. Taliaferro, how about your disappearance? Why would you have walked off the way you did?” I should mention that it was a rhetorical question. No answer would be forthcoming. This Taliaferro was a construct of what was known of the man. It was, in effect, only his public persona. I wasn’t disappointed.
“It is strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes. What do you think?” Might as well push the point. I’d heard the question asked at the convention, and he’d offered no explanation. But the atmosphere was better on that beach, alone and in casual surroundings as opposed to the clamor in the meeting room.
“I have to think I met with foul play. There were people who would have liked to see me dead.”
“For example?”
“Barcroft. Tulami. Yin-Kao. Charlie Middleton, for God’s sake. They’re too numerous to name, Chase. But it’s all in the record. Easy enough for you to find, if you’re really interested. I stepped on a lot of toes in my time.”
“Any who might have been willing to take your life?”
He thought about it. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought so. But it appears someone did me in.”
“When you were at the convention, you mentioned that you’d cleared off your desk that last day. You said that was uncharacteristic.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I may have exaggerated. For effect. I mean, you appear at a convention, there’s always a little show business involved, right?”
“And you removed everything that was in your accounts.”
“Yes. Well, that does sound as if I was thinking about leaving.”
“Any chance you might have committed suicide?”
“I had everything to live for. A good career. I was still relatively young. Only in my sixties. In good health. I was in a position to help a number of causes that needed assistance.”
“Which causes?”
“At the time, I was active in efforts to improve public education. And I was helping the Kern Group raise money.” The Kern Group was a nonprofit organization that sent volunteers and supplies to places like Talios, where famine was common. (Talios, of course, was not on Rimway. Not many people ever miss a meal on Rimway.) “And I’d recently met a woman.”
Ivy Cumming. After Taliaferro’s disappearance Ivy waited a few years before giving up and marrying an academic. She eventually gave birth to two children, and was herself still alive.
“No,” he said. “I was ambushed. I understand how it looks, about the bank accounts. But I still don’t think I’d have gone voluntarily.”
I’d dropped by Windy’s apartment shortly after the bombing to see how she was doing. By then she was on her way to recovery. The day after I talked with Taliaferro’s avatar, Alex announced he thought it incumbent on him to pay a visit.
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I want to reassure myself she’s okay.”
“She’s fine.”
“I should let her see I’m concerned.”
“We sent her flowers. I stopped by. I can’t see there’s much point. But if you really want to—”
“Civic obligation,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”
So we went. She was back at work by then, and the only trace of the injury was a blue cane left in a corner of the office. From her window, had she been so minded, she could have watched construction bots clearing off the last of the debris of what had been Proctor Union.
We’d brought candy, which Alex presented with a flourish. He could be a charmer when he wanted. She was receptive, and you would have thought they were the best of friends. There was no sign of the annoyance I’d seen over our refusal to return the artifacts.
We talked trivia for a few minutes. Windy had gone back to playing squabble, which required good legs. And gradually we worked around to our real reason for coming. Alex segued into it by mentioning that he’d just finished Edward Hunt’s Riptides, a history of the various social movements of the last century. An entire chapter was dedicated to Taliaferro. “Did you know,” he asked innocently, “that he was supposed to be on the Polaris?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “That’s right. If you look at the pre-op passenger manifest, you’ll see his name.”
“What happened?”
“Some last-minute thing. I don’t know.”
“The last minute—”
“They were loading up and getting ready to leave.”
“And you have no idea at all why he backed out?”
“No. The story was that he got a call, some sort of problem at the office. But I don’t know the source. And you won’t find it recorded anywhere.”
“Were there any problems at Survey at the time? Something so serious that he’d have canceled out?”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing on the logs for that date. There were calls to Skydeck during the departure, but nothing official. It was all just to wish everyone good luck.”
“Maybe it was personal,” I said.
“He told Mendoza it was a call from the office.” She was bored with the subject. “Of course, it could have been personal. Could have been something they were just relaying. Does it matter?”
“Do we know,” Alex persisted, “whether he returned to the Survey offices that day?”
“The day the Polaris left? I really have no idea, Alex.” She tried to look as if her head was beginning to hurt. “Look,” she said, “we have no record of the call. And it was all a long time ago.”
I asked Jacob what we had on Chek Boland.
Boland’s specialty was the mind-body problem, and his tack had been that we’d always been deceived by the notion of duality, of body and soul, of the mind as an incorporeal entity distinct from the brain. Despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, people still clung to the old notion.
Boland had done the breakthrough work, mapping the brain, showing why its more abstract functions were holographic rather than embedded in a specific location. Why they were part and parcel of the way a brain was supposed to function.
Boland had been the youngest of Maddy’s passengers. He had dark eyes and looked like one of those guys who spent two or three hours at the gym every day. I watched him in the visual record, watched interviews, presentations at luncheons, watched him accept awards. The Penbrook. The Bennington. The Kamal. He was self-deprecating, easygoing, inclined to give credit to his colleagues. It appeared that everybody liked him.
Despite his accomplishments, he seems to be best known as the onetime mind-wipe expert, who worked with law enforcement agencies for thirteen years to correct, as they put it, persons inclined to habitual or violent criminal behavior.
Eventually, he resigned, and later he became an opponent of the technique. I found a record of his addressing a judicial association about a year after he’d terminated his own law enforcement career. “It’s akin to murder,” he said. “We destroy the extant personality and replace it with another, created by the practitioner. We implant false memories. And no part of the original person survives. None. He is as dead as if we’d dropped him out of an aircraft.”
But he’d spent thirteen years performing the procedure. If that was the way he felt, why did he not resign sooner?
“I thought it was useful work,” he said in an interview. “It was satisfying, because I felt I was removing someone’s felonious characteristics and replacing them with inclinations that would make him, and everyone who had to deal with him, happier. I was taking a criminal off the streets and returning a decent, law-abiding citizen. It was painless. We reassured the victim that everything would be fine, and he would be back out in the world again by dinnertime. That was what I told them. Out by dinnertime. And then, God help me, I took their lives.
“I can’t answer the question why I was so slow to accept the reality of what I was doing. If there is a judgment, I hope I’ll be dealt with in a more lenient manner than I have dealt with others. I can only say now that I urge you to consider legislation banning this barbaric practice.”
TeN
She crash-landed among the classics, and never fully recovered.
—Bake Agundo,
Surfing with Homer
A day or two after I’d looked through Boland’s background, we took several clients to dinner. When it was over, and they’d left, Alex and I stayed for a nightcap at the Top of the World. We were just finishing when I got a call from Marcia Cable. “Chase, you told me to get in touch if anything unusual happened about Maddy’s blouse?”
We were sitting looking out over the vast tableau that Andiquar presents at night, the sky teeming with traffic, the two rivers filled with lights, the city aglow. “Yes,” I said, not quite focused yet. “What’s going on?”
“There was a guy just left here who came to look at it. It was the damnedest thing.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. Alex signaled for me to turn up the volume so he could hear.
“He told me he wanted to buy it. Offered a barrel of money. Damned near three times what I paid for it.”
“And—?”
“I’m not sure whether I’d have sold it or not. I’ll be honest, Chase. I was tempted. But after he looked at it he changed his mind.”
Marcia came from money. She’d gone to the best schools, married more money, was a skilled equestrienne, and specialized in taking over failing companies and turning them around. She had red hair, dark eyes, and a low tolerance for opposing opinions.
“He withdrew the offer?” I said.
“Yes. He said it wasn’t quite what he expected and that he’d decided it wouldn’t go well with his collection after all. Or words to that effect. Thanked me for my time, turned around, and left.”
Alex said hello and apologized for breaking in. “Marcia,” he said, “you say he looked at it. Did he handle it?”
“Yes, Alex. He did.”
“Any chance he could have done a switch?”
“No. After what Chase told me, I never took my eyes off him. My husband was there, too.”
“Okay. Good. What was his name?”
She paused, and I heard the bleep of a secretary. “Bake Toomy.”
Alex shook his head. The name was not familiar. “Did you ask how he came to know you had the blouse?”
“I think everybody knew. I told most of my friends, and I was on the Terry MacIlhenny Show with it.”
“That’s the one you sent us?” I said. I’d noticed it in the queue, but hadn’t really gotten around to watching it.
“Yes.” She was trying to decide whether she should be worried. “I was wondering if he was trying to pin down where we keep it. Maybe he’s going to try to steal it.” I told Alex, out of range of the link, that I hoped we weren’t getting people upset for no reason. “I asked him,” Marcia continued, “if he knew you, Alex. He said he did.”
“What did he look like?” Alex asked.
“He’s a young guy. Not very big. Midtwenties. Auburn hair cut short. Sort of old-fashioned style.”
“Did he leave contact information?”
“No.”
“Okay. Marcia
, I have a favor to ask.”
“Sure. Alex, what’s this about anyhow?”
“Probably nothing. Just that somebody’s showing unusual interest in the Polaris artifacts. We don’t know what’s going on. But if you hear from him again, try to find out where he can be reached and get in touch with us. Right away.”
Young. Not very big. Midtwenties. Auburn hair cut short. Old-fashioned style.
“Maybe he’s legitimate,” I said. “Just wanted to look and changed his mind. No big deal about that.”
A call to Paul Calder confirmed that Davis, the purchaser of Maddy’s vest, fit the description of Bake Toomy. It seemed to be the same person.
Marcia lived in Solitaire, on the northern plains. Paul was a local. “Whoever this guy is,” Alex said, “he gets around.” He instructed the AI to check the listings in Solitaire for anyone named Toomy. “Can’t be many,” he said. “The population’s only a few thousand.”
“Negative result,” said the AI.
“Try the general area. Anywhere within a six-hundred-klick radius.”
“I have eighteen listings.”
“Anybody named Bake, or any variation like that?”
“Barker.”
“Any others?”
“Barbara. But that’s it.”
“What do we have on Barker Toomy?”
“He’s a physician. Eighty-eight years old. Attended medical school—”
“That’s enough.”
“Not our guy, Alex.”
“No.”
“Bake Toomy might be unlisted.”
“He might. But that would be unusual for a collector. Or a dealer. Check our clients. You won’t find any of them who aren’t listed.”
“Alex,” I said, “you think this is the same guy who did the break-in?”
“I don’t think it’s much of a leap.”
“I wonder if he’s connected with the woman who gave the bogus award to Diane?”
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