Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 118
A terrible solution formed in his mind, a way they could still stay together. And it scared the hell out of him that he could even consider it. Then he looked at the Mariannes.
This, he realized, would make a real legend. It was a chance to do something that came rarely in even an indefinite lifetime. Legends weren’t made by cowards. Perhaps, he thought, if the Hazian consciousness and humans cooperated, maybe what was done could someday be undone.
“Tell me,” he asked Marianne, hardly believing his own words, “could I join you this way?”
She opened her mouth, shut it, and finally said. “Yes. Akil, are you sure?
He shuddered. “Don’t ask again, let’s just do it.”
“Akil, you’ll need a vagina, or the equivalent, somewhere. Where do you want it?”
Can you handle this, was what she meant. Could he overcome his prejudices and squeamishness. Did he have the guts to go through with it? He felt acute embarrassment, but he had to face this to be with her. . . . “Uh, the usual place is fine. I, look, uh, I’ve even had fantasies, about reversing roles and having you . . .”
She grinned. “Me too. Do you want breasts too?” She sounded hopeful.
He shuddered. “Uh . . . no, this is going to be strange enough. I want to look like myself. Maybe later.” Maybe body form would ultimately be no more important to him than clothes had become. “Here?”
“Yes.”
Not trusting himself to say anything more, he removed his pouch and floated down beside Marianne’s body, the microgravity settling him as gently as a feather against the smooth moist surface. They would become part of the vine, he thought, and their non-Hazian bodies would be found together like this in maybe a hundred million years by some other very confused explorers.
“I’d like to pass on the spear, too,” he said, half expecting her to say it was somehow necessary and getting ready to accept the wound.
“Hold my hand,” whispered Marianne on the tree.
Had he really heard her? He took the right hand, the one that he had cut free from the vine. Cold now, but there was still the hint of a grip. The Hazian Marianne took his other hand and stretched him between the two of her and held him down so that his back was pressed firmly against the vine. He began to feel wet and sticky. Then there was a stinging in the back of his head, his buttocks, his thighs and his calves. It stung. He gasped.
The Hazian Marianne let go of his hand and floated around to his front. He was firmly stuck, now.
“I will take away the pain,” she said, and enveloped him in her arms and legs, caressed him with her lips, and brought him up and into her. There was no pain; he felt only the pressure of her around him. But something warm flowed back through him, something settling and anesthetic.
Then it began.
2001
Relic of Chaos
Fraud and murder create hard enough mysteries when the people and objects involved are unique. When they aren’t. . . .
Consider the moons of Saturn.
Waiting in the airlock, I could see their entire range; from the crescent of giant Titan, bigger than the planet Mercury, and iceballs half the size of Luna, on down to flecks of dust so small that electric fields could lift them above the ring plane to form spokes, clouds, and other transient ring phenomena. They are uncountable and nature adds more moons with every meteor impact or collision between ring particles. Humans didn’t start adding to Saturn’s brood until the dawn of the 21st century, but we’ve been making up for lost time.
The biggest human satellite, of course, is Saturn High Station. It keeps time with the small moon, Mimas, circling Saturn some sixty degrees behind that battered icy ball in a few minutes less than a day. But its orbit lies in the plane of Saturn’s orbit around the Sun, inclined to the ring plane by some twenty-seven degrees. So Saturn High Station bobs up and down relative to the ring plane, and gives folks a good view from above and below the rings, with a total solar eclipse every day thrown in for good measure.
The other human satellites around Saturn range from major scientific research stations down to derelict spacecraft, dropped tools, and golden crystals of discarded urine. Some of these satellites were fully planned, designed, coordinated, approved, linked and cataloged. Others are the result of accidents, or worse.
I deal with the “worse.” I’m Hartigan O’Reilly, chief of security around Saturn. This satellite was a gray space suit with red detail; as our bright yellow and white striped motile handlers brought it closer I could see what type: a prospector version off a standard intersystem shuttle, with fuel cells, power assist joints, waste management system, and all the other amenities. You can live in it for a week with a full load of fuel, oxygen, and water.
Unfortunately for the sole occupant of this satellite, its limpness told me it held no significant air pressure but there was frost on the faceplate; that takes about ninety minutes after heaters fail out here. I took a sniff of the freshly cleaned room-temperature air of my own suit, just to reassure myself. In another hour, the frost would sublime, so the time of death would have been about two hours ago, plus or minus thirty. Of course, I already knew that; just confirming theory with fact. Saturn, Chronos, Time, the grim reaper. . . . But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It all started when a “Father Gannon” queried my autosecretary for an unusual in-person appointment for him and his staff. What was unusual was that he was at Saturn High Station, while my offices are on Hyperion, the small satellite with the random rotation just beyond Titan. I live there because my wife, Kate, works on patterns and chaos at the Hyperion institute. There’s not a lot of crime around Saturn, and most of that we import with other curiosities from the inner solar system. With a few part-time deputies and AIs to help me, Hyperion is as good a place as any for my office.
But why in person? Gannon said he’d rather not deal with ten-light-second gaps in his conversation and there was much to discuss. He uploaded his brief to Watson, and after a glance at the lurid material, I agreed we had a problem. The case involved a murder on Earth, flight, and theft of a priceless relic that Rome now believed to be on Saturn High Station.
Further research revealed even more of interest. I returned his call and invited him up to Hyperion. We had something to talk about, indeed.
Three days later they were in my office reviewing the crime with me. Gannon, a tall, somber technical expert named Herman Edelsohn, and Oporto Dimundi, the Roman Catholic chaplain at Saturn High Station. Everything about Gannon seemed soft; the rumpled black coverall, the loose flesh on his face, his easy gestures and his fuzzy voice with its light Irish tone. He’d made no effort at hair restoral, and so nature had given him a more or less monkish look. Dimundi was a small sharp man with a thin, almost beaklike nose and dark eyes which darted here and there, taking in everything. Edelsohn was tall and reserved, almost courtly in his manner, and seemed vaguely uninterested in what was going on.
They all sat in web chairs beneath an image of St. Peter’s that I had Dr. Watson put on the wall screen behind them; my way of keeping their allegiance in focus. They sat uncomfortably, shifting and fidgeting. It might have been the low spin gravity, I thought, but, more likely, it was the subject matter. The morgue view of the various limbs, fingers, and other parts of Jose Zapata would unsettle anyone, me included. Even when I’d been working homicide back in the Cislunar Republic, I’d never seen anything that bad.
“I think we’ve seen enough, Dr. Watson,” I said, and my cyberservant mercifully replaced the corpse with an exterior view of Saturn. “According to the report, the victim was still alive when that started, so the perp has motives beyond theft, it appears.”
Gannon looked distressed, but merely said, “So it appears. This is a replica of what we’re looking for.” He held out a small, intricately carved wooden box.
I took it and turned it over and over in my hand. There were Hindu images carved all over it, including Shiva, the destroyer.
“Death, dismemberment, ransom, betrayal, and now anonymous threats. You spin quite a tale, Gannon.” I handed the box back. “People think the original of this has magic powers?”
“The power of faith is not in the relic,” the priest said in his soft high voice. If his English had any trace of an Irish accent, I couldn’t hear it; he spoke North American standard. “The power is Christ. The saintly relic is a . . . a focus or a conduit, if you like, for those who believe. When you pray . . .”
I held up a hand. “Despite my name, Gannon, there hasn’t been a Catholic in my family in five generations, and I don’t pray. I try to use my head. But what I believe or don’t doesn’t matter. What matters is what the thief might have believed. Did he take the relic for its magic? Or just to sell?”
The priest frowned momentarily, then resumed his friendly demeanor. “They want a ransom for it, now. But why they took it in the first place, I would not be so sure; there is always a kernel of belief in the soul that responds to the power of such an object.”
Dimundi nodded. “I was born on Earth where tradition is strong and people often did things the old way to keep their culture alive. I fished on die sea in an open boat in the Sun with nets for years. Not to survive, but because my father did and his father before him and so on as far as we have records.” He smiled. “We threw the wild fish back, except for what we ate ourselves. Sometimes you can lose track of when you are, and your heart believes things your head does not.”
I sighed. “Sometimes people’s hearts make them do things they know are wrong. Very well. Gannon, as you reconstruct things, Zapata stole the box from its display in the New Vatican Office Building and was later murdered for it by unknown persons.”
He nodded. “María Sánchez found a copy of the relic in her bags after she and her husband arrived at Saturn High Station. Thinking it real, she put it on her altar and was a wee bit reticent about notifying us, though as you will note, she finally did. In the meantime, we received a ransom note from Saturn, with evidence . . . “he held up a hand and shook his head “. . . admittedly fakable evidence, that the real relic is indeed out here.”
Well, maybe, I thought. “So you suspect the real relic did come out with María and that the objects were switched before you tested it and that María Sánchez and her husband are either dupes or want you to think so. You’re certain on the provenance of these objects?”
“There is a bloodstain on the real box which was of the blood of holy Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The box was a gift from one of the street people she cared for. The story is that she once cut her finger on a piece of paper and then touched the box, hence the stain in the upper left hand corner.” Gannon nodded to his technical expert. “Mr. Edelsohn?”
Edelsohn ran a hand through his mop of sandy hair before he spoke. His hand appeared rough, and well used, but it’s owner had a manner of classic Austrian refinement. He picked up the box and pointed to the bloodstain.
“The shape of the stain on this box does not exactly match the shape of the stain on the original, and the DNA of the blood does not match that of Saint Teresa of Calcutta. It does match the blood of Zapata. There can be no question about the results. I authenticated the original relic myself twenty years ago. This is a fake by someone with some knowledge, but not with high standards.”
I looked Gannon in the eye.
He waved a hand. “Zapata worked for the curator. Father Dimundi would know it well enough, too. Hector Sánchez deals in such objects.”
“And María with him,” I added.
Gannon coughed. “No, María seems far too innocent to have had much of a role in this.”
There is innocence and then there is innocence, I thought. “She kept the object at first. And according to the brief, she knew the original thief, Zapata.”
“They were acquainted.” Father Gannon fidgeted even more.
I almost didn’t need his answers; I could just watch his body. “How well?”
“I am not really at liberty to say,” Gannon’s voice said, but his body told me “intimately.”
I thought then might be the time to dole out a little of my research, just to inhibit further evasion concerning the things I needed to know to do my job. I spread my arms. “Zapata was also married to someone else, so I know that can be delicate. And you were María’s confessor for a time, and I know that can be delicate. But Zapata is dead and cut to pieces; an object of great historical value, at least, is being held for ransom; and it’s all on my desk now. So help me, Gannon.”
He looked up for a moment, then back to me. “You will have to draw your own conclusions. Of course, you could ask her yourself.”
His look told me that was all I was going to get from him on that. I thought furiously. If María had been Zapata’s lover, then she was unlikely to be his killer, but her husband might be. Knowing the explicit details of the affair wouldn’t change “might” into “definitely.”
“There are at least two records of domestic violence because she was allegedly seeing other men.”
The priest looked away again, then back. “They say one should be careful of what one asks for.” He sighed. “I had to ask for a good detective.” He paused and shut his eyes briefly. “Very well, I was sent because I am an experienced investigator but also because, while I cannot divulge all I know of María Sánchez, I can still act on it in a matter of such overriding importance to the church.” He sighed. “But I have not been a very good detective in this place, as my last month out here shows.” He paused to rub his nose. “It is a matter of public record that María’s marriage has not been happy. She has sought occasional release with others and berates herself for it unmercifully. I give what comfort I can. None of her friends, to my knowledge, could be involved in cutting up Zapata.”
I’d need to check that more thoroughly later, but I sensed I was getting an honest assessment from Gannon. “We can leave it at that for now.” I held up the box and turned to the expert. “Aside from the bloodstain, how good a copy is this?”
Edelsohn shrugged. “The wood is North American white pine of the right age. As with the original, the carving was done by machine in a factory in Korea, perhaps by the same tool. These boxes were stained to resemble a more expensive tropical hardwood, warehoused in Bangalore and sold to street venders at a 300% mark-up. The vendors then squeezed maybe another ten percent out of it. There were literally millions of them made in the twentieth century; the only clearly unique things on the relic are the pattern of the grain, its wear, and the bloodstain. But those would be impossible to match exactly.”
“Some would include as unique,” Gannon added, “the spiritual essence of the relic, which is subject to higher powers of identification.”
“On demand?” I asked and immediately regretted the sarcasm.
Gannon frowned deeply, tightened his lips and said nothing.
Careful, I told myself; If I was to get anywhere on this case, I’d need Gannon’s willing cooperation.
Edelsohn touched the priest on the arm, which seemed to calm him. “The data—the quantifiable data—on the relic has been uploaded to the Saturn High Station system—a highly protected file, to be sure, but available without a three-hour lightspeed delay. You have access to it.”
I nodded briskly. The tall Austrian seemed quick on the uptake—a likely useful ally in this.
“What do they want for the real relic?” I asked.
Gannon looked very uncomfortable now. “I’ve gotten a demand every day since I’ve arrived—I’ll be looking at a vista, or just completing a call and suddenly there it is, on screen, making its demands.”
“What?”
Gannon smiled weakly. “Now before you start thinking I’ve lost my sanity, I’ll assure you that I know it’s just a construct, a hologram, but what shows up is a devil’s head. And it speaks. It tells me they want unfettered access to all the Vatican archives.”
It figured. In past ages, money would have been demanded; but nowadays that could be traced too easily. “I suppose there’s information in there that could be used for blackmail.”
“And worse,” Gannon added. “It is a very delicate time to be talking about such access. Pope Julius IV has just celebrated his 115th birthday.”
“Yes,” I said, unsure of what he meant. “It was on the news. He waved from a window.”
“Some thought they saw him raise his arm in blessing when the nurses wheeled him in his bed to the window, and, yes, that made news throughout the solar system. But people have been talking about candidates since the holy father took to his bed. The curia is near evenly divided over ordination of women, names on both sides have been floated, and the whispers have risen to a babble. I am ashamed for the church.”
“To some, great spiritual necessity can justify acts otherwise unthinkable,” Dimundi said.
“People who could sacrifice themselves might also sacrifice others,” Edelsohn added.
“I’ve got the picture. Reports of a girlfriend from fifty years ago or some such nonsense could probably undo a candidate.”
Gannon winced, but didn’t dispute it.
I smiled. “What else would the access be good for?”
“Investment information; real estate on Earth is one of the few things that robots cannot make more of for nothing; the Church has a great deal and gets more through inheritance. We sell less than we get, but even that has created a liquid endowment, the motions of which affect markets worldwide. Locations, descriptions, and security precautions of authentic church artifacts and treasure would be highly desirable to thieves, of the sort, perhaps, that stole this one. There are detailed plans of numerous buildings of interest to saboteurs, assassins, and potential purchasers. One might find embarrassing admissions for theological enemies.” Gannon spread his hands. “It would be what any invasion of organizational privacy would be, except on a grand scale.”
