Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Sheer serendipity came to the rescue. Aboard the freighter E.C.S. Osprey, nearly ninety years ago, were a human astrogator and a chode auxiliary pilot who had grown up together on Voshlai. They had been raised in the consciousness-sharing tenets of a sect called, by Ecumos demographers, Essencialism, a sect lightly regarded even by many of the chode, if regarded at all. No matter. On their fourth or fifth cruise, in a linkage as much philosophical as physiological, the human astrogator and the chode pilot survived the Osprey’s accidental side-slip into the wastes of Black Ice. Wholly awake, they exercised their complimentary talents not only to lift their ship free of danger but to skate across the gelid subtemporal blackness to their home world, Voshlai. In only two hours of feverish activity, they had guided the Osprey a distance of three light-years.

  This unlikely pair, then, was the first dyad, and Ecumos took their serendipitous triumph to heart. Within a year training programs had been instituted on five different Confederacy worlds, including Voshlai itself, Earth, and Greater Bethlehem; within a decade the sublight mercantile and military vessels of the Confederacy had all become, with very little design or technological alteration, “light-skaters.”

  Chaish and I were one astrogational dyad out of five thousand, give or take a hundred or so. Nevertheless, considering a total E.C. population of better than one trillion, we were sufficiently uncommon that I viewed my partner and me as a splendid rara avis. I tremendously resented the fact that Frederick Lupozny had got himself murdered just in time to ruin our maiden run across The Ice. I was forty-four at the time, old for the human half of a skategrace; and because Chaish was approaching the chode equivalency of middle years, I was hungry for all the glory that our past lives had deferred.

  Our spaceboat entered the hangar in the bay perpendicular to the cylinder of Lupozny Station, and we waited for the air pressure to equalize with that of the station itself. Although both Chaish and I were wearing suits, neither of us cared to exit into near vacuum. Fortunately, we didn’t have to.

  “Have you touched the body since you found it?” I asked Sinclair Toombs, a lean, gray-eyed man of about my own age.

  “Of course—to examine the wound. The knife is from Lupozny’s desk. So is the telescope. Our stationmaster enjoyed surrounding himself with mementos from his career.”

  “The telescope?” I asked, nodding at it. “Does it function?”

  “It’s strictly for amateur stargazers,” Toombs said, trying, without success, to look neither at Lupozny’s corpse nor at Chaish Qu’chosh—who roamed the perimeters of the room like a prepossessing wraith of silver and gun-metal blue. “The captain whose skater first surveyed this system gave every crew member and passenger one of those ’scopes to remember their adventure by. Lupozny was aboard, and he brought that gadget with him when he and his partners began their operation here.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “About eleven years, standard reckoning.”

  I walked to Lupozny’s feet and stared across his body and beyond. The discomfort of his living second-in-command was increasing, visibly. It seemed that the mining operation around Anless 32 was an exclusively human operation; contact with the chode was rare, and Toombs was reacting to my dyadmate’s presence as if I had invited an impossible variety of dinosaur into his hermetic castle. Maybe, in a sense, I had. Sometimes I felt that, despite the occupational intimacy of our dyadship, I knew absolutely nothing about Chaish.

  Toombs, however, was in sullen terror of her. His gray eyes shifted after her as she moved from Lupozny’s bunk to the door of his tiny water closet to a rack of prefabricated shelving.

  “What’s over there?” I asked, pointing in the direction that Lupozny had fallen. All I could see beyond his outstretched right hand was a small, relatively dark corridor mouth.

  “The lifeboat bays for this part of the station,” Toombs answered, glad to have his attention directed away from the corpse and Chaish.

  I looked back at the door by which we had entered Lupozny’s quarters; there were no other entrances or exits. The station’s control center, its hub, lay farther along the passage by which Toombs had directed us to the victim’s room. After meeting us outside the spaceboat hangar (the station’s principal airlock and primary means of access for off-board visitors), he had led us down here without even offering to introduce us to the people in the control center. At first I suspected that he feared the reaction of his associates to Chaish. Although that worry may have contributed to Toombs’s brusqueness, I now began to realize that he desperately wanted his own deductions confirmed and the case taken out of his hands.

  “Is Lupozny’s room serviced by maintenance crawlways?” I asked.

  “I know who killed him,” Toombs replied testily. “You’re needlessly complicating things if you think—”

  I cut him off by repeating my question.

  “No, it’s not, Mr. Detchemendy. There aren’t any maintenance crawlways on Lupozny Station. It was constructed so that we could make most of our minor, day-to-day repairs from our living and working areas. We suit up and go outside to take care of many of our problems.”

  “Which brings me to the lifeboats. Have you checked them since Lupozny was killed?”

  “As soon after we found him as we had the chance,” Toombs said wearily. “Our lifeboats—our remora craft—are all fully pressurized. No one could have entered or exited the station through a lifeboat without leaving it evacuated. If someone had managed to open the exterior hatch of a remora, all of its air would have blown out into the void. That just didn’t happen.”

  Suddenly I was seeing Toombs through an ice storm of phosphenes: Chaish had encoded a question for me to put to him.

  “Would your on-duty crew in the control center have seen anyone using the corridor connecting this room and the hub?”

  “No question about it, Mr. Detchemendy.”

  “And undetected access through the only airlock at this end of the station—which would have permitted the murderer to sneak across the main passage into Lupozny’s cabin—is an impossibility because the depressurization alarm would have alerted the crew. Is that another reasonable assumption, Mr. Toombs?”

  “Ordinarily.”

  I didn’t register the grudging note in this response because Chaish had seeded my field of vision with another secret blizzard: **There seems no way at all that anyone could have killed Lupozny and escaped detection,** she was declaring. In the way her message oscillated in and out of focus, I read both her bewilderment and her distaste for our enterprise.

  I spoke aloud for Toombs’s as well as her benefit: “We’ve got something of a locked-room murder on our hands. Except that our ‘room’ is a station in space.”

  “Damn it, Detchemendy, I’ve already told you that I know who killed Lupozny. The murderer’s in custody, in fact. Don’t complicate this for the sake of an imaginary challenge of your own asinine invention!” The outburst seemed to restore a measure of Toombs’s confidence. “Let’s talk in a vacant office, near here. I’m tired of wading back and forth through Lupozny’s blood.”

  Although nettled by his tone, I agreed. At the door, however, I realized that Chaish had made no move to follow us. Looking back, I saw that she was squatting beside the corpse, her intricately scaled torso bent at an angle that must have struck Toombs as either hysterical or predatory.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  Chaish looked up at him, and he fell back—involuntarily—from her stare. Fascinated by the man’s ill-concealed horror, I tried to see my dyadmate as he saw her, as if for the first time.

  Her eyes, which resembled large ball bearings, floated in a containing matter the color and consistency of mercury; they were slitted vertically by milky, diamond-shaped pupils like a poisonous snake’s. On her head and upper body she appeared to be wearing iridescent mail, whose platelets flashed blue and silver. Closer scrutiny revealed that this mail was her skin: She was as naked as a newt. Her abdomen, buttocks, and upper thighs, meanwh
ile, were not scaled at all, but girded in a blue-gray integument like the scar tissue that forms on the backs of dark-coated animals whose fur has been stripped away by fire or boiling water. Her lower limbs were again clad in natural mail, terminating in a pair of calloused, blue-gray feet.

  I let my eyes sweep back to Chaish’s head. It was shaped more like an extinct hominid’s than a reptile’s … but for the bulge at the base of her brain stem. This hard but movable lump housed an evolutionary-directed extrusion of gray matter from the cerebral lobes above it. In front this bulge was mimicked by a loose, shimmering throat sac whose principal function among the chode seems to be as a sexual signal. And on both sides of Chaish’s head, where a human being would have ears, were those horizontal strips of bright violet flesh that anatomists call “respiration ribbons.”

  No wonder Chaish had disrupted the already well-battered control of poor Sinclair Toombs.

  “Get away from the body,” he said, his voice quavering.

  Chaish ignored him. She gripped Lupozny firmly by the shoulders and pulled him over to his back, revealing the bent haft of the knife. With her left hand (only four digits, but immense ones) she pulled the knife out. Then, letting the blade dangle between her two middle fingers, she rose and approached the door. Toombs pushed past me into the station’s central corridor.

  **If they have a scanning electron microscope in their assay room,** Chaish told me, **they could check the haft for fingerprints.**

  I relayed this suggestion to Toombs, who urged Chaish to go to the control center and to give the weapon to Synnöva Helmuth, the station’s assayer and metallurgist. Toombs shouted a series of instructions at the control center, telling Helmuth precisely what she must do with the knife. Helmuth came forward a few steps from the consoles up that way, and Chaish strolled nonchalantly toward her, bearing the bloody, outsized bodkin.

  “Neat,” I told Toombs. “You get Chaish briefly out of the way and likewise ensure a thorough examination of the knife.”

  “He makes me nervous,” Toombs confessed.

  “She,” I corrected him.

  “Chode make me nervous. Irrational, maybe—but there it is. I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, but that one—just the way she moved around Lupozny’s room was an accusation.”

  I finally said what I had been thinking ever since Chaish had first looked down on the stationmaster’s corpse: “They don’t kill their own kind, Mr. Toombs. That ancient rumor is true: The chode don’t take one another’s lives.”

  Toombs gave me an incredulous moue. “Never?”

  “Never,” I echoed him. “Not for vengeance, or profit, or meanness, or mercy. Self-defense is never even an issue among them.”

  “Let’s go in here,” Toombs said, gesturing me into a nearby room and bemusedly shaking his head.

  The room into which Sinclair Toombs directed me was small, clean, and bleak. It contained a metal desk and three metal chairs, all bolted down against the unlikely prospect of a failure of the station’s artificial-gravity generators.

  “One of Lupozny’s partners maintained an office here,” Toombs said, sitting down behind the desk. “Back in the days when Lupozny had partners, that is. No one’s used it in years.”

  I eased myself into one of the metal chairs. “How many unused rooms are there in this part of the station?”

  “This is the only one. If you’re trying to imply that someone might have hidden in here after killing Lupozny and then slipped out again, you’re prospecting barren rock.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve accounted for the whereabouts of everyone aboard the station during the time that the murder had to occur. Besides, the people at the control center never saw anyone in this corridor.”

  “Who’s your murderer, then?”

  Toombs cocked his head to one side. “You may not believe this, but Lupozny himself told me.”

  “Lupozny?”

  Toombs’s lean face revolved toward me; his eyes, glittering, intercepted mine. “Let’s just say that even toppling face-forward to his death, he was mean enough—just sufficiently cagey-mean, Mr. Detchemendy—to want to pin his murder on the appropriate party. That’s how and why he managed to leave us a clue.”

  “The telescope?”

  The new stationmaster nodded.

  “Just who does that point to, Mr. Toombs?”

  “Listen: Here was the situation just before the Baidarka emerged from Black Ice. All but four of us were in the control center. We’re working with minimal staffing because Lupozny could never stomach the expense of an adequate payroll. As for our mining crews, they’re either out among The Rocks or manning the far-side fetch station.”

  “Which four weren’t in the control center?”

  “Not counting Lupozny, who’d given us instructions not to disturb him until the Baidarka arrived, only Misha Block, Corcoran Skolits, and me.”

  “Alibis?”

  Toombs raised his right eyebrow. “I was in my office on the other side of the control center, sweating over the cargo-release forms you’ll be taking with you when you leave.”

  “What about Misha Block and—?” The other name had escaped me.

  “Skolits. He’s a journeyman asteroid miner, long in the company’s employ. He came into the spaceboat hangar several hours ago with a partial load. His was the other craft you saw in there when you and your dyadmate arrived aboard the station.”

  “He didn’t report immediately to the control center?”

  “No. Just off the hangar, through a small accessway, is a recuperation facility for incoming miners. It’s not unusual for them to shed their suits, shower, and settle in for a well-deserved rest. Skolits had been out prowling about nineteen hours. In any case, once aboard, we always knew where he was; he couldn’t have been anywhere else.”

  “All right. That leaves this person Block.”

  “Misha’s the station’s astronomer and remora-craft controller.” Toombs lofted this statement into the air like a target balloon.

  “You think the telescope was Lupozny’s way of fingering the station’s astronomer—is that it?”

  “That’s the obvious interpretation, but there’s more. You see—”

  “Wait a minute. Before you slip the noose around Misha Block’s neck, how did you discover that Lupozny was dead? You seem to enjoy springing the gallows trap even before you’ve produced a body.”

  Toombs stood up. “Listen, Detchemendy, you’ve seen the goddamn body!”

  “Tell me how you found it.”

  Up and down at the pit of his stomach Toombs shook one of his gourdlike fists. “When the Baidarka broke through The Ice,” he began angrily, “Hans Verschuur, our communications officer, tried to notify Lupozny of your arrival. Lupozny didn’t answer. So Verschuur got in touch with me; and I tried to summon the stationmaster. Still no response.” Toombs’s oscillating fist continued to accent his story. “I went to the control center and found Skolits talking with Synnöva Helmuth about an ore sample he’d brought in.”

  “Skolits? I thought he was in the recuperation facility by the lifeboat hangar.”

  “He had been.” Willfully asserting control, Toombs halted his shaking fist. “He had been. But he’d come in from the lounge to check in formally and present a sample of his partial load. I asked him and Helmuth to go with me down the central corridor to Lupozny’s quarters. The stationmaster’s door was locked … from the inside. I had to ask Loraine Block, our computer officer, to countermand the lock from her console in the hub. When Skolits, Helmuth, and I finally entered the room, we found Lupozny just as you’ve seen him.”

  “Loraine Block? This is your astronomer’s wife, I take it. Misha and she have an old-fashioned marriage contract?” I was surprised. You found very few couples, either het or isoclinic, who did. Toombs sat down again. He turned toward the wall, giving me his hard, lupine face in profile. “Yes, an old-fashioned marriage contract,” he said tonelessly. “That’s important. Misha and Loraine aren
’t giddy adolescents; in fact, they’re both in their thirties. But …”

  “But what?”

  “But they’re genuinely, passionately in love with each other. In my experience that’s a rare thing. And that’s why Misha killed Frederick Lupozny.”

  “Because Misha loved his wife?”

  “Because, Mr. Detchemendy, about a month ago—” Toombs turned toward me again, almost accusatively “—Lupozny escorted Loraine Block to his cabin, supposedly so that she could make a series of minor repairs to an auxiliary personnel computer. Once there, however, he took her.”

  “Took her?”

  “Carnally. Against her will. But it happened behind closed doors, Loraine’s word against Lupozny’s, and the tension aboard this station has been close to unbearable ever since. Because Misha believed his wife—I do, too, for that matter—he made sure that the story of her violation reached everyone from his own point of view. Of late we’ve been especially jittery because three or four days ago Misha and Lupozny almost came to blows in the observatory.”

  I said nothing.

  “Even in the best of times,” Toombs went on, unbidden, “Lupozny had a way of keeping everybody pushed right to the edge. He was demanding, arbitrary, egotistical, insecure, physically intimidating. On the other hand, he could go weeks—or several days, anyway—exuding a low-key sweetness that scared the living shit out of us. The hell of it is, Mr. Detchemendy, any one of us aboard this station could have killed that man. Misha Block just happened to be the one to do it. The rape of Loraine, and Misha’s preoccupation with it even after Lupozny had apparently bought them both off with apologies and bonuses, finally pushed him over the edge.”