Complete Short Fiction, page 141
Jaenl shook her head at me. “Why does he always gotta know why, instead of just doing it? It’s a sickness.” She raised her voice. “ ’Cause there’s crap on these. There’re some white slip-ons in the front hallway. Those’ll do.”
I left Jaenl frowning at her toenails and waiting for her shoes.
“Doable” was just accurate.
I did managed to squeeze between the two grease-covered structures without touching, though it was close. And the path climbed, and then climbed some more. It got steeper, turned into rough stairs, then into something like a climbing wall, only someone had chiseled away the easiest footholds. This neighborhood liked its privacy. I had kept my nice evening shoes on, and ended up shredding the toes on the rough rock. There was no way I was putting that goo-covered ribbon back on, so my loose hair kept getting in my face.
The double sunlight of Actin and Umber should have driven all the nocturnal Mesklitch indoors, but I still felt assessing eyes, probably adolescents resentfully on day watch. The kids hid out in the crumbling spheres they stuck on the outsides of their houses as their neck glands developed. Though they hadn’t secreted brood shelters that way for thousands of years, they retained the ancestral ability. I caught sight of yellow eyes within the round entrances, waiting impatiently for Umberlight, so they could come out and jump from building to building. Given how they got around, I was lucky they’d left any street at all.
Near the top, I found her. A plump Om woman with short red hair and hoop earrings sat at a table shaded by the raised side of a cubical shelter. There wasn’t much inside: a small kitchen, a hammock, a toilet screen.
She wore an expensive but unflattering suit with wide-legged trousers and an embroidered jacket, a season or two out. The embroidery was hard to clean, and I could see some dangling threads. Money once, it looked like, and used to it, but not so much now. I hoped we weren’t here to found some kind of losers’ club.
I waited for her to say something. Finally, she did.
“Did you come up all this way just to block the view?”
“I’m Sere. You must be Mirquell.”
“And you must be late.”
I had to recover from that, and fast. I sat down in the other chair without asking. Sweat trickled down between my breasts and down my back. I wasn’t going to readjust or dab at anything.
“You need someone to poke around,” I said. “Various places, various nations. Lost, hidden, forgotten. Something I do. A friend told me.”
Mirquell looked unhappy. Her wide face with its downturned mouth seemed optimized for that particular facial expression. “This friend tell you what my problem was?”
“No.”
“Good. At least I don’t have to correct any wrong ideas you’d already have.” She looked at me: big girl, dark skin, crazy black hair, party dress, shoes that were okay this morning but now had to be trashed. All of that made her even less happy. She drummed her fingers on the table. Thick fingers, cracked nails. There are a lot of ways to go wrong in Tempest, City of Storms, particularly for us Oms. I’d found one. Looked like she’d found another.
One thing was clear pretty quickly: she liked looking, didn’t like being looked at. So I turned to check out the view. She’d probably picked this inconvenient spot so no one could drop in on her unexpectedly, but maybe so she could keep an eye on something too. Figuring out what would help me figure her out.
We were near the top of a hill, pretty high. The flat roofs of Mesklitchtown dropped down below us, hiding Kiff and Jaenl’s twisty street. The orange and yellow wedding cake of Drur Reef loomed up nearly a thousand feet, and spread out over half a mile. The different layers had left open areas where roads and other transportation ran, all clear from this height. I could see the helmet-like structure Jaenl had pointed out. No real sign of anything that poor exterminator might have got up to, though.
A few layers above that someone had once strapped elevator tubes to make it easier to get to the top. I could see traces of at least two that had vanished. Only one was left, starting in a vivid green and purple spot of dense plant growth and shooting up to the top of the wedding cake, where the structure separated into a few buttes, vague with distance.
Above it all the Architon pier thrust up a couple of thousand feet, then curved out, to end abruptly in a smooth, slanted surface that gleamed in the mixed light of Actin and Umber. If the Architon had some plan for a larger structure, of which this pier would be just a supporting element, they hadn’t gotten to it yet, though the thing had been standing for endless centuries, so long that dirt had piled up and formed a steep slope, which had then been covered with a gigantic colonial structure slowly grown by creatures themselves now vanished, and their constructions reconfigured and reused by other nations entirely. The Architon were never seen, didn’t talk to anyone, and, in fact, didn’t seem to have really noticed that dozens of other species had been infesting their city for some thousands of years now. Presumably, they took the long view of their own pests.
Mirquell sighed and accepted that life was far from perfect. “I’m trying to create a business relationship with the Case.” She paused.
“Are you waiting for me to argue with you?” I said. “Tell you that’s impossible, ridiculous, whatever? The Case must hire someone, if only for waste disposal, even if no one seems to know who, or how. There’s a Case in Shrivis. That’s not far from here. But, still, you aren’t in Shrivis. Do you think you have a way to contact them here?”
She looked sour, as if having her researcher already know things was a downside. “I don’t. But I have a way to do the Case a favor. A month or so ago, the Shrivis Case got contacted by someone. And they hired him.” She did not hide her outrage. “I’d been working it for months at that point.”
No one seemed to have ever seen a representative of the Case. They lived inside what looked like swollen black seed pods, each a few hundred feet long, and never emerged. Or maybe each Case was itself a single individual. No one really knew. I suppose we could have called them the Pod, or the Egg, or something, but everyone had settled on the Case. The Case did communicate and negotiate, but rarely, and only on their own terms, through various intermediaries. They had landed in the City of Storms during a particularly turbulent time a few centuries ago, and no one could even say when, exactly, they had set up their dwellings. Suddenly, it seemed, they were just there, part of the landscape, five Cases in all.
“Who did they hire?” I said.
“A guy named Zinter,” Mirquell said. “Jaenl’s probably already told you about him.”
“She mentioned him. What did they hire him to do?”
“All I know is that Zinter, an exterminator, mind you, a guy who handles sand squirrel infestations and getting hibernating grackuses out of people’s basements, used some lensed explosives to bring the roof of a tunnel in Drur Reef down on his own head. Did they hire him to commit suicide? Somehow I don’t think so.”
I looked down. I could almost see where it happened. He’d ostensibly been trying to get rid of those odd bugs coming out of Jaenl’s toilet. And working for the Case on something else? Or taking care of both things at once?
“Is that tunnel used for anything?” I asked.
“Nothing that I know of. But someone has recently leased it. In fact, there has been a lot of leasing activity up and down the Reef. Even the top of that highest butte over there. And all of it for stuff unused for a long time. Impossible to say who it is, they use a lot of fronts and cutouts. But Zinter blew up one of the newly leased tunnels, or at least tried to.”
“And you want me to find out what he was up to,” I said.
“No. Nothing so complicated. I want you to find out who has the use of that butte up at the top there, and who has leased all the parcels on the way up that look like they give access to it. I understand you know someone in Plats, Surveys, and Parcels.”
So that woman at the party who’d given me the lead hadn’t just been chatting. Mirquell must have a thick network, even if she currently hid out in a bolted-together shack on an exposed hillside surrounded by irritable Mesklitch. She’d been searching for someone who could get access to a key piece of information.
But this was deflating. I did, in fact, know someone in Plats, Surveys, and Parcels. Siboo was a buddy of my old boyfriend’s. Was that really why Mirquell wanted to hire me?
“I’ll throw in an extra opportunity,” she said, just at the right moment. “Information I’d pay more for, if you need an escalator to keep your interest.”
“How about we talk about the actual job first.” I wouldn’t let her distract me. I needed work. “Escalator later. What, exactly, do you want?”
“I want the identity of whoever uses and controls those parcels, and fast. Tomorrow would be best.”
“And you want to know what they’re using it for.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “But I’m not paying for that. At least, I’m not paying you for that, even if you tell me. That’s not the escalator.”
I gritted my teeth. I hoped it looked like a smile. “Okay. What’s the escalator?”
“Why did Zinter do it? What was he after when he dropped that chunk of rock on his own head? So those are the two units of work. Uses and controls, fifty. Zinter’s goal, two hundred. I know you were making a lot of money before. So was I. I’m not interested in negotiating the rates.”
Did she even care why Zinter went hunting bugs underground with explosive charges? It didn’t matter. The best price/performance ratio on this deal was to drag myself over to Siboo’s office, sit down for five minutes with the idiot, get the name of the parcel owner, give it to Mirquell, and call it a job. Less than I had hoped, but it was a start.
For meeting Siboo I found some stiff, creased trousers I couldn’t even remember buying, and a taupe jacket that looked like something you’d wear to maintain messy machinery, a gift from an older relative who had wanted me to get some decent work. I was a few years bigger than the ill-behaved Sere who had resentfully received it, but an emergency loosening at the shoulders and I could at least get the damn thing on. As long as I didn’t emphasize my words by waving my arms too much, I thought the sleeves would stay on.
After five minutes in Siboo’s office, though, I was wishing I’d dressed inappropriately again. The tangle of offices and cells that made up Plats, Surveys, and Parcels had been shoved in underneath some kind of power plant, and the low ceiling radiated heat. It also vibrated in a way that made my teeth feel loose.
Siboo had met with Lemuel, my old boyfriend, in bars, always a bit conspiratorial, like he was dealing with top-secret information, rather than the location of some particular nation two centuries ago, which might have left behind some interesting detritus Lemuel could clean up and resell.
Maybe he was worried that I wouldn’t spring for the drinks. I think he wanted to impress me, though. When I came in, he had all sorts of important-looking displays open, showing property lines, ownership chains, subrights negotiations, but as we talked I began to suspect that none of that had anything to do with his day-to-day, which seemed to consist of stamping an ideogram on a corner of a particular property diagram.
This was how a lot of us Oms made our living in Tempest: we’re known for our ability to sit still for long periods and do work that makes other nations want to rip off parts of their own bodies. It was a known fact in the city that, no matter how simple the initial setup, once humans got hold of it, it became a complex, mind-numbing nightmare.
“So, what is he up to now?” Siboo said, as he juggled screens, trying to answer my ownership question.
“Lemuel? I don’t know, Siboo. We broke up. I don’t see him.”
“You must run into him, though. I mean, you get around.”
That was kind of my reputation. “I think he’s fine. Making a go of it.” With my business, the one he’d managed to get licensed to himself.
“I know he’s been kind of busy lately,” Siboo said. “Still, it would be great to see him.”
“If I run into him, I’ll let him know.”
Lemuel didn’t treat his friends any better than he treated his girlfriends. He relied on his charm and entertainment value to keep people coming back. So far, I had to say, he’d been right. Siboo was all needy, maybe the reason he’d agreed to see me. Because Lemuel’s angry ex-girlfriend was his best conduit to the friend who wasn’t talking to him? I didn’t have the energy to care about how sad that was.
“Interesting,” Siboo said.
“What?” Sweat was beading on my forehead. I had to get out of there.
“All those parcels got leased recently. Several different owners, but none of them is big enough to really do anything with. Plus, that’s not a great area. Why are you interested in it?”
“I’m not interested in it. A client is.”
Siboo pouted. He was both bulky and insubstantial, like a cloud in a shirt a size too small. He had good lips for pouting, though. “Well, you can tell said confidential client they have someone a bit rough to deal with. Ferrulin.”
“That’s who has leased all the parcels?” I said.
“Yep. And all at the same time. Oh, they did it through a couple of shell companies, so that no one would see they wanted something and hold out for a higher price. But that’s pretty easy for me to figure out.”
Ferrulin. That was a bit of a surprise. Second only to bureaucracy in the Om skill set is organized crime. Ferrulin wasn’t a criminal enterprise, exactly, but it certainly had more than a couple of toes over the line. With a lot of Oms in management, Ferrulin was a cleaning organization, contracting for all sorts of things: clothes, houses, factories, public areas—and with a good reputation among a variety of nations. But they also managed the cleanup of more private messes, cleanups that sometimes involved them with various order-enforcing agencies in the city, angry that key pieces of criminal evidence had mysteriously vanished.
I looked at the complex patterns of ownership and control up the many layers of Drur Reef. The leased parcels interconnected, creating a complicated path up from the bottom, all the way to the top butte, which stood separated from the nearest level ground by a chasm about ten feet across. There was a solid way to it, but that was from the other side, via a narrow walkway. I saw no sign that Ferrulin was at all interested in anything over there.
“What are they doing with all that?” I asked.
“Really, Sere. That’s something I can’t see here. I know that they got control, for the length of the lease—which is just for the next month, by the way—but there’s no way for me to even know who might be actually using it. You maybe know people from your neighborhood who do business with Ferrulin who could tell you a little more. Sar . . . you know Sar, right?”
He’d grown up just a few streets up and run with an older, more dangerous crowd than me. I nodded.
“He does some hauling work for them, still in Panetto. And there’s a guy named Gimnus, Lemuel knew him. Gimnis, maybe? Building maintenance, works with Ferrulin subcontractors. And you had a friend you mentioned once, Zazstra Hass . . .”
“Zaza?” I said. “Zaza works for Ferrulin?” We’d once been close, but I hadn’t seen her in years.
“Not her, I don’t think.” He looked uncertain. “No, her little sister. That’s right. Some pretty close stuff, crime scene cleanup. You used to hear about her, then you didn’t. I forgot her name.”
Zaza’s little sister had been named Anikee. I was pleased to be able to remember the name of that little pest. Showed my brain was still working, even without much to work on. But none of these people mattered, since all I needed for Mirquell to pay me was . . . damn. Damn it!
Mirquell had been careful in her phrasing when we made our agreement. I would recheck the actual contract, but I knew what was in it. She was paying me, not for the legal lessee, but for the actual on-the-ground user of the parcels. Her phrasing had implied that they were one and the same thing, but they weren’t, not necessarily. Ferrulin was mostly a clearinghouse, getting subcontractors work, guaranteeing performance, and putting in a little muscle if they decided their subcontractors were getting pushed around. People liked working with Ferrulin and built long-term relationships through them.
So I didn’t yet have what I had agreed to give her.
I had thought it would be easy: Siboo, info, done. So, maybe not so easy.
“Something wrong?” Siboo asked.
“Nothing to do with you.” He deserved something. I wasn’t paying him. He was doing this as a favor, and probably not the last one I would ask for. “Lemuel is digging around out in Ffolio.”
“I know. I gave him the information for that.”
“He’s doing an event out there. For investors, I think. People who want a piece of his business. I know some people who are going . . . if you want, one of them can probably take you. As a date.”
His wide face lit up. “Sure. Sure, I’d like that, Sere.”
If that makes it sound like maybe I still paid an unhealthy amount of attention to what Lemuel was up to. well, it was kind of an unoleasant surnrise to me. too.
I swept across Ferrulin’s wide lobby toward the reception desk like I meant business. I’d dressed for it, trying to get the look of the prosperous householder I was pretending to be. The main thing I had to do was show outrage without giving away that I had no real idea of what I was supposed to be outraged about.
Vitrines gleamed here and there in the darkened lobby, displaying various hard-to-clean clothing items, including a human ball gown, quilted Samrong armor, and a Kriv godsuit, built to soak up water and sink instantly to the bottom of a sacrificial pool, along with its wearer. It had dozens of lace cuffs, hard to keep up to the standards of demanding deities.
But none of the displays was as decorative as the golden Aara who manned the reception desk. He pulled a comb through his fur as he watched me approach. I heard the crackle of static electricity.
“Excuse me.” I tried for an entitled voice, the kind that got people to jump. “You guys have caused me a real problem.”
