Liquid Crystal Nightingale

by EeLeen Lee

  “I’ve been to the other Tiers before.”

  “Not the Aront Tier?”

  “Never been called there. I’m actually quite surprised.”

  “Sure?” Dumortier narrowed his eyes in disbelief.

  “They were very much after my time.”

  Dumortier adjusted his sleeves. “Not that I presume to advise you, but I’m reminding you: a direct question is an affront to their sensibilities. They prefer to dance around.”

  “I’ll be tactful.”

  “But bluntness has its uses with difficult witnesses and suspects. Provoking a reaction can give a more telling answer.” He blew out his cheeks. “Got anything for nerves?”

  He shouldn’t havenerves, Nadira thought as she drew her jacket around her, patting her pockets for magnesium citrate tablets. She found the last one, half melted in its tiny clamshell packet. Dumortier accepted and extracted the tablet.

  The Aront security detail did not disappoint. Like a torpedo, the lift did not so much as open as discharge five Dogtooths. The guards filed out and motioned Dumortier and Nadira to step into the lift to the main habitat. The lift ascended like an arrow, passed through the concourse roof and stopped after a few minutes.

  Nadira was expecting a more detailed glimpse into the workings of House Aront security: banks of surveillance equipment, barracks, chattering comms equipment, all infused with that trademark Aront grandiosity found in their public infrastructure projects. Size was money. But the martial feel of the ground level docking bay and upper concourse had already vanished, replaced by a checkpoint as mundane as the ones in a Khrysobe Spaceport.

  “Leave all weapons here. Collect them on your way out,” ordered a Dogtooth as soon as they stepped out of the lift.

  Dumortier reached under his overcoat, unclipped his ancillary mace from his belt and tossed it over to the nearest Dogtooth, who was holding a tray. The mace landed in it with a thud.

  “Final reminder to turn off all augmentations,” said the Dogtooth as he placed the tray into a wall slot.

  Nadira touched both of her temples in an exaggerated show of compliance, although her SeForTec clearance made her exempt from the visitor procedures of Tier Dwellers. Earning their trust was vital. She noticed that Dumortier did not remove or disable his ear stud: he pressed it twice and then three times in a coded sequence. The stud’s tiny light stopped pulsing green and turned white. He was gambling on the chance that analogue mode was obsolete enough not to be detected by security.

  “Security tightened up since my last visit,” murmured Dumortier.

  “It seems very crude to me; I see no counterintrusion measures except for these guards.”

  “If the guards are effective, security is not crude,” he drawled. “Keep in mind what we just discussed regarding tact and bluntness; there’s no telling which face the Aronts will wear for us today.”

  After the checkpoint the lift’s ascent sped up, and the g-forces made Nadira place both hands on the glass pane in front of her for support.

  The doors slid open onto an observation platform, a wide torus hugging the circumference of the Tier’s shaft. Nadira and Dumortier stepped out. She stepped up to the windows, entranced by the panoramic view of Chatoyance. Up here the city settlement was laid out splendid, like a mythic realm. The Temple to Gachala was a blue flame and the canals glimmered in the light, the bridges like essential stitches in an intricate pattern. Sweeping up from the ground in an immense organic wave, the roof of the ’Cinth enclosed the daily hubbub within it. The New Areas of Blue Taro and Boxthorn were no longer a haphazard afterthought, but dendritic in its arrangement.

  A recorded woman’s voice crackled to life over the speakers, her dulcet tones drawing attention to the horseshoe bend of Aront Major Canal. The outline of a drained canal, bone white in the window glass, highlighted the latest completed project.

  Dumortier tapped her on the shoulder and she suddenly felt conscious of him observing her enthrallment. But that wasn’t what he was drawing her attention to—a third person had stepped onto the platform.

  Patriarch Aront looked older and gaunter than the PR-approved images Nadira had seen all over the news. He exuded grace and practised authority, giving off the air that he was serving an administration—his own—which did the outlandish for the very sake of it. He crossed the platform to shake their hands.

  “Senior Investigator Dumortier, it’s been a while,” he said with convincing familiarity.

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  Nadira pretended to admire the view again while studying the interaction between the men. Patriarch Aront’s familiarity with Dumortier was genuine, and it made Dumortier uncomfortable.

  “A slow and steady rise is the best,” said Patriarch Aront, slowly taking a seat in the middle of an open-back white sofa with sloping armrests. “It means you didn’t use or abuse any helpful connections.”

  Dumortier hesitated—a second too long—before pointedly replying, “The same could be said of how you achieved your empire.”

  Patriarch Aront laughed like a parent surprised at his child’s budding wit. Touché, but Nadira saw Dumortier hold his hands by his sides, one of them squeezing and releasing a fistful of overcoat. He should have taken two tablets.

  “It’s lunchtime, my sincere apologies.” Patriarch Aront resumed host duties as though the previous exchange had never happened. “How about refreshments?”

  He tapped one of the sofa’s armrests, and an aide carried in a tray and set it on a side table. The tray bore loaded black obsidian plates and a square cut bottle of garnet-hued wine. Nadira read the brand label engraved on it: Catru Estate: 3325. Sparkling. Finest quality guaranteed. Thick glass, and a large cork.

  Patriarch Aront went to pour himself a full glass and knocked it back. This was not the Patriarch’s first bottle of the day, Nadira figured. Nor the morning. If he was not talking, he was drinking.

  “Please.” Patriarch Aront gestured to the food. “Perhaps not the Catru wine. It occurs to me both of you are still on duty.”

  Nadira wanted to tell him she never ate much. She thought of the bitter yet restorative colour-coded drinks issued to SeForTecs, brimming with nutrient-laden jelly spheres in suspension. Dumortier inclined his head at the plates in a gesture that said: Some hospitality won’t kill you. Accept a little to expedite this meeting.

  She picked up a golden wafer of sorghum, topped with magenta caviar from strange crossbreeds of fish engineered to produce whatever colour was in vogue this year. It was rich, briny and creamy, with an incongruous hint of plum. Her dreams of owning an aquaculture farm resurfaced for a split second. Next to her, Dumortier took a quick bite of a plain wafer as a formality and touched the recording stud in his collarbone.

  Her aquaculture farm sank back under the tide of duty. Time to begin the session.

  Patriarch Aront held up the glass of wine as a toast to Dumortier and Nadira: “We, up here, live in equal parts dread and gratitude of our fine city’s Senior Investigators and SeForTecs. Propitious that both should have reason to step onto a Tier.”

  “I wish the circumstances were better,” replied Nadira.

  Patriarch Aront turned back to Dumortier and remarked sotto voce, “Your assistant has picked up your light touch.”

  Dumortier coughed twice. “Nadira Morad is Constabulary’s most senior SeForTec. Expect nothing less than exemplary from her and her team.”

  “Most of Chatoyance already knows about our tragedy.”

  Neither a question or a statement. Nadira decided to go for for honesty. “I’ll personally see that Constabulary renews the media embargo on your daughter’s death with immediate effect. The news outlets are very irresponsible.”

  “Very much appreciated, but not if it could hinder your investigation. In any case, please don’t tread around my wife and me. For the sake of Gia, you don’t have to protect our sensibilities.”

  Nadira kept an eye on the bottle of wine—it was still two-thirds full. If h
e finished this one and called the aide for more, the visit could stretch well past Shineshift.

  “Sometimes,” he continued, “Matriarch Aront and I have to accept that our image is more powerful than us. We’ve been philanthropists, industrialists, and tycoons. First and foremost we’re still spouses, parents. It’s so unbelievable all the roles we need to assume in public! I’ve stopped being shocked and disappointed when people call us corrupt and unfeeling. It may surprise you to learn that I wish that miner’s daughter is not involved. Her parents have to suffer with that.”

  “We’re here regarding Gia.” Dumortier sounded unimpressed with Aront’s grandstanding.

  “Gia, ahh, yes. And we ensured she had the same awareness of public opinion,” he added with the fatigue of somebody who has wasted too much time and breath justifying their behaviour to idiots. “Murder attempts and sabotage come with the success, unfortunately.”

  “It won’t help to start cooking up theories,” Durmortier soothed in a priestly tone Nadira suspected he exclusively reserved for the recently bereaved.

  “It won’t be necessary anyway. That miner’s daughter did it. Are Saurebaras and the tyro girl still at large?” Aront took several shallow breaths, as if trying to control himself. “You should have both of them in Constabulary cells as we speak.”

  “Patriarch, an investigation takes time,” said Dumortier.

  “Proper channels are too slow.”

  “Do you see progress when you look down there?” asked Dumortier. “I see more ruin than anything else. Call me a realist. Unless I’m actually looking at a ruin in slow-motion.”

  The Patriarch stared at him for a moment. “If not for the likes of us, all of you”—he jutted his chin at the window, dismissing all Chatoyants living below the Tier—“would suffer in an industrial purgatory.”

  Nadira noticed the Gachalan disk set high into the wall, its teal and gold pattern an exact match for the temple roof.

  “My wife acquired religion this year, I think. Just a little too late to save Gia.”

  “Do you really believe so, my husband?” Matriarch Aront called out from a lift door as it opened onto the observation deck. Her perfume entered the room before her.

  “No, no, sorry. My grief getting the better of me. It’s not too late at all,” soothed Patriarch Aront.

  “Have you caught the tyro yet?”

  Nadira looked at Dumortier and he shook his head. Don’t answer.

  “Soon,” replied Dumortier.

  “‘Soon’? There’s nothing worse than ‘soon.’” She went to pour herself some wine. “But when you do, you will deliver her here? I want her head. If you can get me that dance instructor’s head too, so much the better. I want to turn them into carbon and encase what’s left. I blame both of them for what happened to Gia.” She said it with a flick of a hand, as if she was beyond the concerns of others.

  Dumortier did not reply.

  “Satisfaction,” said Nadira as though she was simplifying a philosophical concept for the Matriarch’s benefit. “You demand it for Gia, but it’s not anyone’s to give. What you’re asking is illegal, but in light of your loss, Dumortier and I are willing to overlook it.”

  “Do you know what it’s like to lose children?” The glass of wine was drained with haste. “I don’t suppose you do, because you spent half your life in a vat! Gia is dead. Satisfaction is my due.”

  “Swibi,” Patriarch Aront put an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t get yourself upset. These two are on our side.”

  He now addressed Dumortier with a cut glass, all-business tone of voice. “Should my Dogtooths have to supplement you in order to find one girl?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then leave us. And return with better news.”

  Dumortier performed a slight bow, and Nadira followed him into the lift in silence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A DOT OF fern green light pulsated at the corner of the Shirpen’s windscreen where Dumortier sat in the passenger seat. Seconds later he still had not responded: he always found these notification lights soothing in their tweaked colour palettes, modified for ocular comfort. But the windscreen always noticed his delay, which danced on the edge of flouting at least three on-air protocols. He could no longer ignore it when it began emitting shriller, more insistent beeps than the ones used in his ear stud. Beeps that could be telling him anything: signs of life or signs of life ending.

  “This is Dumortier,” he finally responded.

  “Trooper Devinez transferred to Canal Police last year. No subsequent sightings or body reported or found since then.”

  Or signs of life that ultimately signified a dead end.

  “Who made the Missing Officer report?”

  “Name declined. Report submitted to Sergeant Morin of Canal Police, sir.”

  “Over and out.”

  Another dot of light, burgundy replacing the fern green. Katyal’s voice, just as strident over the comms channel as it was in person. “I understand and commend your commitment to all aspects of your investigations, but Constabulary is overwhelmed.”

  “I’m just concerned that one of us has gone missing and—”

  Katyal interrupted. “At this time it could be anything.”

  Dumortier muttered, “Sure, she may have been crushed by a malfunctioning Canal Newt.” Then, louder, he said, “Understood.”

  When Katyal signed off, Dumortier sighed and tapped the Shirpen’s windscreen to darken it, scanning the stretch of Guanna Avenue ahead as it was overlaid with grid lines, then touched his side of the Shirpen’s windscreen to restore it to full driving view. It lightened to normal transparency, allowing him to scan Gachala Avenue. It was the longest of the seven avenues radiating from the blockaded site that was to be The Monument To The Falcons, a new set of cenotaphs, yet to be unveiled but officially announced a week ago.

  “So… I couldn’t help but overhearing…” Nadira said after a minute.

  Dumortier shook his head. “It’s a loose end. Quite a major one from the case I had to drop before Gia Aront.”

  “Katyal and Sakamoto are like every superior I’ve seen over the years; they concern themselves with the bones and muscles. They forget that investigators and SeForTecs still have to pick at the connective tissue.”

  “Hmm,” replied Dumortier. “‘Connective tissue.’ I like that.”

  “But I could help you, once Gia Aront’s case is over.”

  “Thanks, I’ll let you know,” he replied, grateful but a little distrustful of Nadira’s sudden generosity. But that was a concern for another time.

  As straight as a spear, a newly built—still waterless—canal ran alongside the Shirpen. Dumortier checked the name on the canal network map, which proved oddly nondescript: North-South Canal.

  Dumortier motioned for Nadira to slow the Shirpen down, and she pulled over at the barrier. They both got out of the Shirpen, and Dumortier stared down at the empty channel for a minute, then he tossed his cylinder of lolo paste over the barrier. It bounced once off the geomembrane canal lining, rolled away from Dumortier and Nadira, and continued in a straight line along the canal bed.

  “The bed is tilted,” said Nadira as soon as the cylinder was out of sight. “Incline not steep, yet considerable. I’d say five to ten degrees.”

  “It ensures the water flows in one direction.” Dumortier pointed straight ahead down the canal.

  “Where to?”

  “A topographical or waterways map will have the answer. We need to check them.”

  They climbed back into the Shirpen.

  Nadira insisted on carrying out the check. Her eyes performed a string of rapid saccades as she parsed the topographical data flowing over the console, her field of vision flooded with informatics. Dumortier had seen similar reflexes when she was testing the fans and shrapnel heart back at the shooting range, and wondered if all SeForTecs were as fast at processing.

  “There it is.” She reached out and placed a fingertip on t
he display, freezing a section of waterway map.

  The new North-South Canal originated from the Harp Reservoirs in the northernmost sector of Chatoyance, flowed directly to the south sector and terminated in the Jare Artificial Lake. In doing so, it bisected the centre of Chatoyance—known as the Pupil—and formed a cross with the Aront Canal running east to west from the Temple of Gachala.

  Dumortier tsked. “One thing’s for sure: it will be scenic, when it’s filled. Perfect for cruises and floating palaces.”

  Nadira circled the Temple site with her fingertip. “All those tourists and devotees swarming here and outwards. More uta for Arontcorp.”

  “The revenue from them won’t be as much as the mooring fees collected from 7.6 miles of canal.” Dumortier dragged the map to show this distance from Harp Reservoirs to Aront Canal. “And the North-South flows in one direction to encourage the traffic towards Aront Canal, which is three miles long but near the Pupil. Imagine the total fees to be collected.”

  “Chatoyance Government approved this? How do they justify it?”

  “On paper,” replied Dumortier. “For all the uta passed under the table and a cut of the mooring fees, the city gets a new canal. No one will question the necessity, because the Aronts play the part most beloved by old money: altrustic developers.”

  “A new canal that stinks before it opens,” said Nadira.

  She restarted the Shirpen and drove it back onto Gachala Avenue. Her insistence on manual driving reassured him, as if she too inherently mistrusted automation despite, or because of, her long years of service. She had not spoken much since they had left the Aront Tier. Dumortier assumed she was deep in analysis, turning the encounter over in her mind.

  After fifteen minutes of driving, she said, “I, too, need a diversion.”

  “All right.” Dumortier checked the time; seven hours to the next Shineshift. Both of them could use an hour or two of decompression after meeting the Aronts.

  “I want you to see something. For and with me.”

  “Regarding the case?”

  “Indirectly, yes. But it’s strictly off-record.”