Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  I was growing more and more uncomfortable. For three years, back on Middlesaint in the Menkent system, my contacts with other human beings had been rare and meager in content. So cloistered had been our skategrace training, in fact, that Chaish and I had often gone three or four months without seeing anyone but our dyad mentor and a few other uncommunicative chode-and-human pairs in collateral skategrace programs. Now, it seemed, Sinclair Toombs was mercilessly reacquainting me with the unique and persistent follies of my kind.

  “How does your station’s crew abide it here?” I asked.

  “Most of us are on one-year contracts. That gives us the sensation that our sufferings are finite. Besides, once you get on the payroll, the money isn’t bad. Since there’s nothing much to spend it for out here, it steadily accumulates for us on our home worlds.”

  “Do people ever choose to renew their contracts?”

  “I’m on my second year. Not many of the station personnel work beyond their initial contracts, though. Miners are more likely to opt for contract extensions, primarily because they don’t have to put up with the abusive, demoralizing guff that Lupozny plied.”

  “How long have the Blocks been working here?”

  “Seven months.”

  I tacked about: “Does Lupozny’s death elevate you to his position in the company?”

  “It elevates me to acting stationmaster,” Toombs replied angrily, his right hand again tightening into a fist. “I’m an employee, Mr. Detchemendy, not a business partner or a shareholder. An employee!”

  A veil of phosphene characters fell between Toombs and me, and I realized that Chaish had returned from the control center with Synnöva Helmuth.

  **The knife haft reveals a number of Lupozny’s own smeared fingerprints.**

  As my dyadmate and the station’s assay officer entered the tiny room, I stood up. Toombs also stood, gamely struggling to demonstrate that Chaish’s presence did not disturb him. He was folded as many ways as a paper finger puppet.

  “Nothing else?” I asked, after nodding curtly at Helmuth.

  **Perhaps the wear pattern of a glove. The assay officer probably has very little experience making such determinations.**

  I turned and told Toombs what Chaish had just said. He looked to Helmuth for confirmation, and she, somewhat bewilderedly, supplied it. They may have believed that Chaish had spoken with me telepathically, mind to mind, when the truth was in many ways stranger and more complex. Recovering, Toombs commenced a round of introductions, for Helmuth still did not know Chaish’s name and recognized me only as the chode’s anonymous human associate from the Baidarka. She was a trim, silver-blonde woman with a generous nose and chaffinch-quick eyes.

  “Glove markings on the knife haft?” Toombs asked her, motioning her to one of the bolted-down chairs. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve got to get back,” she said, declining the invitation to sit. “No, I’m not sure—but the oily micropattern on the haft suggests that some kind of flexible material effaced some of Mr. Lupozny’s old fingerprints and badly smeared several others. It might be the synthetic fabric of a spacesuit’s glove that did that, but it’s hard to be positive.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Toombs said, looking at me, “that’s corroborating evidence. It points directly to Misha Block.” Synnöva Helmuth nodded deferentially at Chaish and me and disappeared with a sprightly step into the corridor. My dyadmate, meanwhile, stationed herself to the right of Toombs’s desk like a piece of painted statuary. Her mail shone almost blindingly in the cold, flat light.

  “If Block’s your murderer,” I asked, “how did he get into and out of Lupozny’s room undetected?”

  “He had help,” Toombs replied, glancing warily at Chaish. “Misha claims he was in the observatory developing some photographs, the sort we use to find and spectrographically evaluate asteroids. Really, though, he was putting on a vacuum suit and preparing to murder Frederick Lupozny. He let himself into the auxiliary airlock near the observatory, went out through it onto the station’s hull, and walked forward to the auxiliary airlock just beyond Lupozny’s room. From there it was a quick dash across a small section of corridor into the stationmaster’s cabin. Block took his revenge on Lupozny and returned to the observatory the same way he had come.” Toombs vibrated his right fist for emphasis. “Helmuth’s electron-microscope scan of the knife haft supports this chain of reasoning. The murderer was wearing gloves, you see—the gloves from a spacesuit.”

  **What about the airlock alarms?** Chaish asked. **Would not they have sounded?**

  I put these questions to Toombs.

  “Ordinarily, yes. But Misha and Loraine Block were acting in concert. When Misha first climbed onto the hull, Loraine intercepted the alarm trigger at her console in the hub, through which almost every function of the station can be monitored—even locking and unlocking the doors of our people’s private cabins. That’s a capability upon which Lupozny had insisted when this station was built, not even exempting his own quarters. In any event, because Misha left both the observatory airlock and the airlock near Lupozny’s room depressurized after exiting them, Loraine—again from the master console—activated the appropriate pumps to restore airlock pressurization. Those actions effectively covered her husband’s tracks.”

  “Not if you managed to see through them,” I countered, annoyed by Toombs’s smug omniscience. “Where are Misha and Loraine Block now?”

  “Under house arrest in their quarters, Misha for premeditated murder and Loraine for aiding and abetting him. If you come to agree with me, I hope you’ll take the Blocks aboard the Baidarka for conveyance to the proper Ecumos authorities. I just want to be rid of the matter, Mr. Detchemendy.”

  **Would a murderer take himself into the territory of an intended victim without carrying a weapon?** Chaish asked.

  Rephrasing the query, I conveyed it to Toombs.

  For a brief moment he looked taken aback. Then he said, “Everyone knew that Lupozny kept that knife on his desk. Misha has no discretion, no real self-control—but he’s very smart. Killing a man with his own weapon obviates the necessity of securing one of your own and then trying to dispose of it.”

  “You have it all figured out, don’t you?”

  Toombs turned away, showing me his haggard profile. “I’m sick of this business. I want it to be over.”

  “Let me talk to Loraine Block,” I said.

  The interview with Misha Block’s “partner in crime” (if you accepted the new stationmaster’s interpretation of events) took place in a room well away from the murder site; it gave off the main corridor beyond the hub of the station, not too far from the observatory.

  In fact, it was Toombs’s own office, a cubicle appointed with lime-green vinyl flooring, models of interstellar ships, baroque specimens of ore on wooden stands, and a gallery of hologramic portraits, apparently of members of Toombs’s family. The cargo-release forms on which he had been working several hours ago were still on his desk.

  As for Lupozny, the dead man, a crew consisting of Chaish, Hans Verschuur, and me had helped Toombs remove the corpse to a cold coffin, in which we would transfer him to the Baidarka. Although death had pretty obviously resulted from the stabbing, our shipboard physicians would perform an autopsy to see if there were any incongruous foreign substances in his blood. We also intended to send over the contents of Lupozny’s medicine cabinet for analysis. Considering the locked-room peculiarities attending his death, it wasn’t altogether impossible that Lupozny had committed suicide and for eccentrically spiteful reasons of his own disguised it as a murder. Toombs dismissed this over-clever hypothesis out of hand, nor did I really seriously credit it—but Captain Sang had wanted her investigating dyad to put a skeptical T-square to every angle, and so the body, along with a box of harmless-looking medications and toilet articles, awaited shipment to the Baidarka in the bleak little room adjacent to the murder site.

  Where the body had lain, bright green-yellow chalk marks outli
ned the man’s attitude in death. Another vivid chalk loop showed where the telescope had fallen.

  Now Chaish and I were awaiting Loraine Block in a cluttered room almost at the other end of the station.

  Soon Synnöva Helmuth escorted Loraine Block in to us, dropping her off in the same affectionate, distracted way a parent deposits a child at school. Helmuth, at least, did not regard Chaish and me as threats. That was comforting, for Toombs had been peevishly reluctant to let us interview Loraine Block in his absence. Finally I had asked him point-blank if he feared the outcome of such an interview, and he had angrily acceded to our demand, knowing that he had no other choice.

  Loraine Block seemed, at first glance, a beautiful child-woman. Small in stature, she wore her dark hair long, clasped at the nape in a butterfly barrette. Both Chaish and I towered over her, a fact to which she was wholly indifferent. More remarkable, she was unperturbed by the presence of a chode.

  I pointed this petite computer officer to the swivel chair behind Toombs’s desk, and when she sat, she ceased to convey the vulnerable daintiness of a child. I made brief introductions.

  “I can answer your first question without your even having to ask it,” she said. “Shall I do that?”

  “Go ahead,” I urged her.

  “No, I definitely didn’t intercept the airlock pressurization alarms at my computer console.” She paused. “What’s my prescience quota?”

  “Did your husband kill Lupozny?”

  Mildly piqued that I hadn’t accepted her gambit, she again turned her attention to Chaish, who, partially concealed by a microfiche cabinet, radiated satiny glints of silver and blue, her eyes like melting mirrors.

  “You’re a lovely representative of your people,” Loraine Block told her. “Misha and I once had a brief stopover on your world—Voshlai, that is; not a colony—when we were employed by the Ecumos freighter Newfoundland eight years ago.” She looked back at me. “No, Misha didn’t kill our stationmaster. My husband was in the observatory when the murder apparently occurred. He might have killed Lupozny, given half a chance—but that chance never presented itself, and after he got into a stupid scuffle with Lupozny a few days ago, I warned him that he was jeopardizing everything we’ve worked for out here.”

  “Which is what?”

  “The chance to visit as many different inhabited solar systems as we can. That’s always been our life’s goal together.”

  I stared intently at the demoralizing lime-green floor. “Lupozny raped you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hate him?”

  “Despised him. But I had despised him before he raped me, Mr. Detchemendy. After it happened, I …” Her voice trailed off.

  “You told Misha.”

  She ignored this. “He used his size to overpower me. It was as if he were manipulating a doll. I think he would have derived as much joy from his own clenched fist. It certainly wasn’t an erotic impulse that prompted his assault.”

  “What, then? A desire to humiliate?” I looked up.

  “Partially,” she replied. “A more compelling motive, though, was his need to reaffirm his authority over everyone aboard this station. I think his real target was Sinclair Toombs.”

  “Raping you was a slap at Sinclair Toombs?” Behind Loraine Block, the new stationmaster’s family smiled down on Chaish and me from the hologramic gallery on the wall: a woman, two children, and a set of gracefully aging parents or in-laws.

  “I think it was. Mr. Toombs—with admirable discretion—has invited me to bed with him on three or four different occasions. Unlike Lupozny, he was—maybe he still is—truly taken with me. Or maybe he just envied my relationship with Misha and hoped to share in it in some silly, even harmless way—by making love to me. In any case, Lupozny picked up on his longing. And Toombs irritated Lupozny with his efficiency, his ability to stay on top of matters that had slipped Lupozny’s own notice. Because Lupozny’s sexual wiring was basically isoclinic—same-to-same, you understand—I think he raped me as a complicated sort of rebuke to Toombs. Any humiliation to me was incidental.”

  “If Lupozny picked up on Toombs’s longing, what about Misha? Did he?”

  “Never.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s absorbed in either me or his astronomy, not much else. And Toombs, as I said, was always discreet.”

  “How did Toombs behave when you refused him?”

  “How is anybody supposed to behave when unequivocally rejected? I don’t think he liked it. He usually just smiled. He certainly didn’t shout or throw things.”

  “Do you think he’s trying to frame you and Misha?”

  “It’s a definite possibility, isn’t it?” Loraine Block smiled.

  **Why?** Chaish suddenly asked.

  I turned to her. “Toombs may be attempting to punish Loraine for refusing him.”

  **Why does he also seek to punish Misha?**

  “Out of envy,” I hazarded. “None of this is certain, Chaish. We’re exploring the possibilities.”

  Even though I anticipated another brief flurry of phosphenes, Chaish simply stared at me.

  “I know how you two communicate,” Loraine Block suddenly said. “Crystals of inner light. Your companion generates them out of your own brain and optical equipment. Misha and I tried to acquaint ourselves with the phenomenon when we were on Voshlai. We attended a mechanical simulation—projections on a wall—in a visitor’s temple outside a northern lake city. But I’ve never seen the real thing.”

  “You’d like to?”

  “Very much—if it’s possible.”

  Chaish, understanding, glided forward and squatted purposefully before Loraine Block. The transmission of phosphene images requires that the chode have a mental fix on the retinas of any potential communicant, as well as some small handle on her frame of mind. Chaish was attempting to secure these things, probing to locate Loraine’s foveae in order to transmit an electromagnetic signal into their sensitive depressions and so from there to the young woman’s brain. The rebounding of this signal along the foveal tracks would, in turn, create the “crystals of inner light” which Loraine wanted to see. Later, more familiar with her subject, Chaish would be able to beam this encoded signal straight to the visual cortex.

  A moment later Loraine Block had seen her gentle explosion of phosphenes. She blinked and put the heels of her hands to her eyes. Chaish returned to her corner.

  “Lovely.” The computer officer lowered her hands. “Just lovely.”

  I watched the beatific expression on Loraine Block’s face dissolve into one of bewilderment. She turned to me.

  “But it’s all abstract patterns and floating lacework. Are you really able to interpret it?”

  “Sure—but there’s three years of sweat, hypnopedia, and mental anguish in that accomplishment.”

  Lifting her chin, she looked to Chaish. “Please tell Mr. Detchemendy what you’ve just told me. Please. So that he can translate it for me.”

  After Chaish had regaled me with the same message, I relayed it—in English—to Loraine: “‘I wish for you and Misha all anticipated fulfillment of your life’s plan, that and a great deal more.’” Then I said, “Tell me who was in the control room with you when you were supposedly intercepting airlock alarms for your husband.”

  “Hans Verschuur,” she responded readily enough. “And Daphne Kaunas, the life-systems officer. Synnöva was there, too, of course. And Corcoran Skolits, the pilot of a mining boat, was talking with Synnöva about something he’d found during his work shift among The Rocks. They’re pretty good friends, those two.”

  “Was Skolits there the entire time?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘entire time’—he came into the control center about twenty minutes before the Baidarka arrived. All hell broke loose when Hans was unable to rouse Lupozny.”

  “From which direction did Skolits enter the control center?”

  “The only way he could—from the access corridor to th
e spaceboat hangar, the same way you and Chaish did.”

  “There was no way he could slip down to Lupozny’s quarters without being seen by the personnel in the hub?”

  “Everyone saw you, didn’t they?”

  “Just long enough to nod or wave. Toombs hustled us down there before we could even say hello.”

  “But you were seen?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Everyone gawked.”

  Loraine Block absentmindedly examined one of Sinclair Toombs’s light-skater models, then blinked and said, “I don’t know who killed Frederick Lupozny. It’s hard for me to see how any of us could have done it. What I do know is this: I intercepted no airlock alarms, and Misha didn’t kill the bastard. That’s my story.”

  “Tell me about Corcoran Skolits.”

  “I don’t know anything about Corcoran Skolits.” Loraine Block shrugged dismissively. “Only that he’s in and out of the station at odd intervals and that he’s an old hand out here.”

  “Anything else?” I waited, expecting nothing.

  “Oh, yes,” Loraine Block said with a small surge of enthusiasm. “Oddly enough, Skolits is something of a pocket expert on the chode. It’s his pet avocation. I once overheard him tell Synnöva that as a boy he had hoped to be the human half of a skategrace.”

  Chaish, noncommittal, sent me no excited or disbelieving snowfalls. Her calm was almost admonitory.

  When Toombs returned to his office, I told him that I wanted to talk with Corcoran Skolits. This request plainly annoyed him. He heaved himself into his swivel chair and banged his right hand down on its padded arm.

  “Talk to Misha Block instead.”

  “I’ve just talked to his wife. She said she intercepted no alarms and that your frustrated longings have disposed you to be vindictive.”

  Toombs continued to exercise a precarious control over his emotions. “The longings I freely acknowledge. The vindictiveness I don’t. Everything points to the Blocks. Even if Loraine is ordinarily the most forthright of women, she would lie for Misha. She’d do virtually anything for him.”