Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  Yes.

  The chapter summaries became the only story, all incoherent rambling and self-obsession. Kevin fanned to the end and read the final section slowly.

  In the not-too-distant future, I will blackmail Ewan into telling me what he learned in the sessions with Mother DeLint. That will make for interesting beach reading for those sitting in a quiet dune somewhere reading such a book as the present one. Nowadays everyone who is anyone here at Omphalos is blackmailing everyone else. Has not my time come too? Have I not earned the right to be as miserably rewarded as the next? I know some things too, you know — i.e., about the so-called Widower. You are forewarned, Eugene! Don’t be telling me what to write! I can blackmail too, you know, if I had a mind to. And I just might, nyaa-nyaa… In the not-to-distant future all Beldons will cease to be: So it is written, so it shall come to pass. Thus sprach etc. etc. Already belladonna Mom is no longer numbered amongst the quick. The little Beldon trick has been coming back to the trough once too often, now always with the cur brother in tow. In private Eugene says there is no longer a place for Ewan in the future of Omphalos. Ewan! The only person who does me any good around here!… I saw little Jake Shercock the other day for the first time in donkey’s years. He was standing in the middle of Eugene’s office, looking at the ceiling like a lost soul seeing his only way to heaven as up through Satan’s scaly hole…

  Kevin hurt. In his head and heart he was hurting badly. It was one thing watching a man’s, McNicol’s, mind ride madly off in all directions, each one signed I me me mine. But Kevin was worried for his own mind too, because these ramblings of a madman had started making sense to him, mad sense.

  How could his whole family suddenly have been coming and going from Eugene DeLint’s office just when he was being blocked from Omphalos? What had Bill done to cause Cynthia to ask Kelly for an audience with Eugene DeLint? DeLint — his prime candidate for the Widower! Kelly knew that!

  But something was missing still: that which would lead to the one elegant solution. He must maintain a multi-focus till he found the lens that would bring all together. He still needed material evidence identifying DeLint as the Widower. He must find Dr. Randome, who it would appear from McNicol’s account had been blackmailed by DeLint into doing things he was ashamed of. That was why Ewan couldn’t talk — his shame, the much vilified guilt — and had resigned from his life’s vocation at Omphalos. Ewan would have to talk now, and Frank had promised a subpoena.

  Call Kelly from the safer Rideau Centre public communicator. Kelly would have to answer some direct questions about her mother and Bill. No more ironic banter or witty parrying. Kelly had been lying all along about her relations with DeLint. DeLint the Widower. She’d been lying about Bill too.

  Bill. Bill had only ever been good at one thing: chemical engineering.

  Chapter 13

  Kevin turned into the Rideau Centre, where every second store was abandoned. Blankets and coats and rags and cardboard — Was that a curled pile of human shit? — showed that street people had jimmied locks and been camping in the stores. There were more security guards than shoppers, but the guards appeared to be in it more for the sun-free walk than the work. He spotted some rodent’s nest in the distant corner of his once-favourite bookstore, Food for Thought.

  The smoked-plastic public communicator tubes always made him think of Venus flytraps awaiting their human meals. He took a breath and stepped inside one. To distract himself from creeping claustrophobia (his nightmare), he strained to remember: What was it he missed about real books?… Yes, tautologically: their palpable reality. And the personal space — the privacy — books afforded, like a sign: PLEASE LEAVE ME BE, COMMUNICATION IN PROGRESS. It was inexplicably comforting just to have them lying around. They were memorials, again tangibly.

  Stop avoiding: Kelly.

  He’s the only caller in the multi-tubed affair. Again he had to bend, his sorry ass sticking out like a nightmare of nakedness, and peer into the eyeball scanner, and wait forever before Macro Security would allow him access. It had been so much easier to swipe a card, and later impressing a finger; he could even remember rocking a coin right into the slot. A cashless world had not lessened muggings, only spawned the mall-rat sport of taking seniors by their abundant scruff and jamming their macular-degenerated catareyes against bank scanners for credits transfer. And no cash had made it impossible for parents to hand their child an allowance and accompanying advice (such as, watch your debt, respect your elders, be grateful).

  Cease and desist, old man, and right now — Kelly.

  He coded. Waited through more Beatles music, a surprisingly sweet harmonica rendition of “Something.” They’d become our Celtic gods, the ould Beatles.

  He waited, accompanying the tinny instrumental with singing in his head, which made him think of Cynthia, of course, and afraid he would cry publicly at long last. Old man. Change then. So he distracted himself wondering if Cohen would ever become on-hold music? Impossible!… Well, maybe “The Future.” Ha!

  And waited.

  Now there would be another Macro record of a call of his from outside Omphalos. Surveillance. Between the Marco and MYCROFT, an ice storm in Ottawa could be traced back to a soft fart in Antarctica. You have no cause for concern if you’ve nothing to hide, even conservative politicians now claimed. But who among us has nothing to hide? Privacy had long since been painted as archaic, as selfish, as throwback, relict, freak, as having outlived its evolutionary usefulness, as threatening to the public good. But Kevin, a cop, had seen no public benefit from the surveillance obsession. More than the loss of simple privacy, it was the beginning of the end of the inner life (thus accompanied by the figurative book burning). Privacy, subjectivity, the soul — all sacrificed to the impossible god of perfect security against the multitudinous terrorisms of being alive.

  Perfect security. Whether the idol of global insurance conglomerates or a symptom of mass paranoia, who knew. Probably both, and more, as with all such turns for the worse. But so far there had emerged only the one indisputable effect of the end of privacy, the latest anxiety pandemic: cryptovidaphobia. Everyone thought that everybody else wanted to know everything about them.

  No answer at any of Kelly’s numbers.

  On the next call it took forever for the security check, and twice he had to restart the coding sequence.

  “May I speak with Dr. Nora Goldstein, please.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but Dr. Goldstein is no longer with the University of Ottawa.”

  “Would you tell me where she can be reached?”

  “Dr. Goldstein is now at the Museum of Science and Technology. We’re affiliated, and I can transfer you from here. It will take a minute to clear.”

  “That would be very helpful, uh, merci.”

  She’d not even asked his name. Some security rigmarole. He gazed through the smoky glass.

  Dr. Nora Goldstein: photo-electronics engineer, one-time dean of the University of Ottawa’s engineering faculty. She’d been supervisor of Bill’s unfinished thesis on the asymmetrical properties of some molecule or other. Kevin had first met her two years earlier, after Bill had decided to drop out of graduate school only a chapter shy of filing his thesis — really just the conclusion.

  The stout grey-haired professor had greeted him in an office-lab so cluttered with electromagnetic crap that for weeks afterwards he’d imagined tumours sprouting like potato eyes up and down his colon. Dr. Goldstein herself appeared anything but electric. She had the face of a puggish man who could well have gone to a stylist with a picture of Albert Einstein, pointed and said, “Like that.” Regardless, in flowered beige blouse and brown vest, burnt-orange skirt and sensible black shoes, she smartly dressed a body that would have been more at home in babushka and wellingtons in a turnip field (it was just such a description, delivered at supper with affection, that had inspired Kelly to dub her “the Mighty Turnip”). The top of he
r head came to Kevin’s elbow.

  He’d known to waste no time. “Surely you can do something, Professor Goldstein, to convince my son to stick with it for once.”

  Her welcoming smile had melted and her hazel eyes concentrated as she looked him over again. Resolved, she fired back: “My son! For once! Why don’t you leave Bill alone for once in his life. Either that or pay real attention!”

  “What!”

  They’d argued energetically that first time, and it hardly mattered. In the end she made him a cup of freshly ground coffee like he’d not had since Cynthia switched them to decaf, and a lightly toasted Montreal-style bagel spread with a criminal thickness of real cream cheese, and fresh chives. She told him wondrous things about the asymmetrical quantum world, chemical determinism, and his son. He’d left with an impression of Nora Goldstein as the second-most exciting woman he’d ever met. Once outside, he’d stood and looked about at the people coming and going, and said to himself again what he thought he’d learned for good a long time ago:

  Never, but never, judge by appearances. What kind of detective are you anyway, Beldon!

  They’d become friends, Kevin and Nora Goldstein. After Cynthia’s death, he’d allowed Nora to drag him out of his apartment once, almost literally with her ferocious strength, and take him to a performance of the Namibian Children’s Choir at Notre Dame Basilica. That was not long after his second recovery from alcohol poisoning. She’d said nothing important that time, merely dropped him at his door. A few weeks later she’d made him take her to lunch in a private room at the posh Le Circle, where she’d wept for Cynthia — whom she had never met — like a well-paid keener (Kevin had thought). Weeping was not what Kevin had wanted. He’d wanted nothing. He’d walked out on her.

  Coming on the communicator now, she said, “Is it really you, the great detective?”

  “You’ve left the university, Nora. What have you been up to?”

  “University? It’s more the training ground for Macro and Omphalos Enterprises than the institute of higher learning I joined oh so long ago, when it merely serviced the high-tech industry as a sideline. Here at the museum I’m up to fun, Kevin, nothing too serious for my middle age. I was just showing a group of wide-eyed kindergarten kids what an electromagnetic field can do to their hair. They squealed and pointed at my head, and I’d not even turned on the power yet!”

  “Ba-boom,” he laughed. “Don’t let them fool you, Nora, you’re a beauty.”

  “I am? Since when?… But this is a business call, am I right?”

  “It is, though no less a pleasure for that. When this is over I’ll take you to supper, promise.”

  “And this time you’ll stick around for dessert, if you get my drift?”

  “Jesus, Nora.”

  “A brother of mine, your Jesus.”

  “I didn’t know you were Mexican.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “What can I help you with, Kevin? I should warn you, though: if this is real business, I’m out of the loop here. It’s all fun and games at the museum, not real science.”

  “I’ve no time for your modesty, Dr. Goldstein. What would it take to sedate a big man without rendering him unconscious while simultaneously frying his insides with some acid compound?”

  “So that’s how Eugene DeLint was killed.”

  He hesitated only a moment, checked the encryptor. “No, that was the setup. He was beheaded. Though I wouldn’t have pictured you in a hackers’ chat room, Nora.”

  “Don’t picture me in a thong.”

  “Lieber Gott!… Well?”

  “I heard some of the kids’ teachers talking about it. It sounds tricky, even for brilliant me…negotiating the volatility, the contradictions at the molecular level. You’d need staggered activation, and a non-permeable yet binding buffer, probably have to invent your own. And if the subject’s to be kept conscious — oi! — the very highest refinement! All in all, a most delicately balanced concoction. On the upside, since the subject’s going to die anyway, you’d not have to worry about some other contradictory elements, such as duration and persistence, which, by the way, are different aspects. And of course you’d need access to a top-flight lab stocked with some very hard-to-come-by tertiary ingredients and instruments.”

  He smiled. “But it could be done?”

  “It was done, Kevin, wasn’t it?… But why on earth would anyone go to the trouble of devising such an extravagant means of murder?”

  “From what you say it sounds like he or she or they would need some top-flight help.”

  “You could get the materials illegally, if you’ve got the barter, big-time barter, lots of liquid fuel, or an off-the-grid water source, or secure servers outside the Macro, or distant-travel vouchers, what have you. Most of the supply of contraband chemicals is controlled by biker gangs, so no big deal finding a supplier. But the barter, and knowing what to do are, as I said, other matters. And a safe lab where you can do it.”

  “You could have done it, though.”

  “I confess, I hated the pig, he ditched me at lunch once too.”

  “Nora, I’ve got only minutes here, I’m a bit desperate, and my encryptor is not the most reliable.”

  “I could do it, yes. Jean-Louis Carrier, who replaced me at the university, he could do it. He wouldn’t though. I’d say only a handful of others, most of whom studied with me, or J-L. Remember, though, it would have to be someone with not only the smarts but lab access and the barter. A tall order, scientists are not rich.”

  “Would you give me names, Nora?”

  “On your word of honour that they are known only to you and that you destroy the file and send a LuvU worm after any and all remnants. In fact, I’ll imbed a worm in the file, so you’ll have about an hour. I’ll have to do some checking. Give me your highest security code and I’ll send their names and last-known contacts to your MYCROFT account.”

  Kevin spells out his code: “B-e-l-c-y-n-1-7-1.”

  “You’ll have the list within the hour. And Kevin, you are using MYCROFT encryption right now?”

  “No, a plug-in. I’m on a public communicator in the Rideau Centre.”

  “Jesus Christ, Kevin!”

  “A one-time saviour of mine, that brother of yours. But I have to go, Nora. Don’t worry, if there’s any trouble, I won’t let it touch you.”

  “Kevin, wait a second, for God’s sake.” He heard her exhale, draw in. “I was only being human when I cried and tried to hold you. You were as out of it as an autistic kid. You were never even there with me. I wasn’t hitting on the recent widower. Oh, forget it.”

  “I know, Nora, I know that now. I wasn’t thinking straight then. You’ve been a great friend. I will be in touch, promise.”

  “How is Bill? How’s Kelly?”

  “She’s the apple of my eye. We’re almost sure she’s up for the next appointment to the Supreme Court. I have to go.”

  “But Kelly’s barely thirty!” She sounded more alarmed than impressed. “And Bill?”

  “Bill’s been away for a while, though I hear he’s back in town. Just out of curiosity, could Bill have pulled it off?”

  The silence was more accusing than any curse.

  “Bill is a rarely gifted biochemical engineer and a pure scientist. But I never did learn the extent of what that troubled young man could do. Besides which, how could Bill get such barter?”

  “Don’t worry, Nora. I’m not completely nuts yet. I’m not thinking Bill actually did it, only wondering if he could have. Such a waste…”

  “I know what you mean, Kevin. Fatherly pride is a good thing, within limits. I still get sad myself when I think of Bill, and I do often. I had hoped that, left alone for a time, he’d come back to me. I never told you, because Bill made me promise, but he wouldn’t let me credit him for the discovery of the greening water on the fourth satellite of Aldeb
aran. It was Bill’s work prompted me to reflect the tripartite laser off the old Titan probe to boost the spectrum resolution.”

  “You’ve lost me, Nora. But really, Bill wouldn’t take any credit? He’s always been a generous boy, too generous, like…his mother.”

  “Like his father too!” She waxed wistfully: “Yes, a brilliant boy, and such a gentle soul. Forget the barter, Bill is as incapable of doing what you subconsciously fear — or you wouldn’t have brought it up — as we are. Such a gifted young man.” She sniffled.

  “But no discipline.”

  “But no discipline, or none I recognized anyway. I always suspected Bill was an intuitive scientist, that rarity, and there are cases reported in the history literature.”

  “Really?”

  “So again more like his factioning father than Dad recognizes, or will admit.”

  “Factioning,” he all but spat. “Nora, listen, I’m really out of time here. One last question. Off the top of your head, do you know if any of your former students capable of such work are, or ever were, affiliated with Omphalos?”

  “You sound like a goddamned cop, Kevin, or a lawyer.”

  “You’ve made me self-conscious with your scolding about Bill. But do you?”

  “My former Ph.D. students are all scattered and mostly out of touch. But it’s likely, given Omphalos’s reach, that some would have had a professional association. I’ll check that too; their current C-Vs should be on file at UO, and I can still access them.”

  “Thanks, Nora, you’ve been a big help. If we need further consult on the chemistry, I’ll be counting on you. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  “How about arranging a twenty-gallon shower. And you don’t even have to join me.”