Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 81
Kanti didn’t look hopeful. “Maybe,” she said. “Meanwhile, I think it’s going to be a disaster for human-Uther relations down there.” Then she translated for Bach.
The Uther hooted, then spoke in triads.
Kanti laughed herself. “I guess I don’t know everything. What Bach said was Fay D-flat Seege ship you humans scavenge. Much respect outside Fay D-flat Seege you humans win now. Now that it said that, I can see it. But that creates another whole set of relationship questions, doesn’t it?”
Greg nodded. Be careful of what you wish for; you may get it. “Yes, it will take some time for all the ramifications of our little adventure to work themselves out.”
Bach glided over to the viewport with a ripple of its forewings. Then it took, from its ventral pouch, a small transparent box with rounded corners. In that, on a bed of what looked to be packed dirt, were a few flecks of green, gold, and crimson, and with its roots wrapped around a small rock, a tiny pagoda plant.
Kanti looked at Greg. There was no spontaneous outburst, as there might have been from the child he knew only two days ago. Instead, he met the eyes of a woman who had learned to deal with consequences. Her voice was quiet. “Fair play, I suppose. It’s going to be hard on Mom. At least it looks like we’ll get to the starbase before her. We can try to explain.”
Greg nodded; it would be hard on Kanti, too. He wished he had a human comm set.
The blue white orb of Epona turned slowly below them as the human rescue spacecraft matched their course. As if by common consent, the three of them savored a few moments of silence before the universe of events devoured them again.
Bach spoke. The three tone groups it uttered were, as usual, devoid of emotion in human terms, but Kanti whispered the translation: “Too heavy a carcass this Uther may try to carry, but into that carcass my teeth are forever sunk. My wings, providence must lift.”
That, Greg Konstantis thought, made two of us.
1997
Messengers of Chaos
G. David Nordley lives in Sunnyvale, California, with his wife and son. A retired astronautical engineer, he is the author of some thirty published works of short fiction, a dozen or so nonfiction articles, a few technical papers, and a couple of as-yet-unsold novels. “Messengers of Chaos” takes place about a century earlier than “Alice’s Asteroid” (Asimov’s, October 1995) in the same more-or-less consistent future history as most of his other Analog and Asimov’s stories’. The observant reader may note gentle echoes of an even earlier fictional age.
“Hart,” Chief Tad Reynolds’s Harvard-educated voice said in my ear, “finish up what you’re doing. Sam Wu’s been killed.” It was Wednesday, September 30, 2068—a day that, up until then, had I been pretty routine as far as what passes for crime in the largest city on the Moon.
“What?” I said, so loud that the skinny kid in front of me nearly hit the ceiling. She fell back with an embarrassed giggle as I pointed to my ear—lunar gravity teaches self-discipline in several interesting ways.
“Sam Wu,” Tad answered. “At his desk, dart in the shoulder, about two hours ago—we just found out. The scene is stable, but finish up what you’re doing and call me as soon as you’re free.”
Sam Wu was the Cislunar Republic’s Minister of Allocations and Trade—cabinet rank. It was Sam’s unfortunate job to say “no,” here and there, and, apparently, he’d said “no” to the wrong person. This wasn’t just a murder—it was likely an assassination. “Got it, Tad. Give me five—I’ve got a kid with me.”
The girl, Tina, was nervous to start with; the pusher had threatened her if she told, but her mother sent her to me anyway. The pusher was from Earth—nearly a thousand Terrans came through the maglev port every week, some of them with crime on their minds.
“Sorry, Tina.” I pointed to my ear again. “Something’s come up. My boss wants to talk to me. Can you stay at the station for a couple of hours?”
“Mommy said I could stay all day, if I had to. But my moonball team has a game at sixteen.”
It was close to 1500. “We won’t hold you up that long. Now, I’m going to leave you with my computer friend for a while. His name is Dr. Watson. He’s going to show you pictures of every adult Asian male who’s come to the Moon in the last three weeks, and you need to tell him when you see anyone who looks like the man who tried to get you to try drugs. Then he’ll morph the face until you think it looks exactly like the man you saw. Okay?”
“Okay. What do I do then?”
I reached into my drawer and pulled out a little pin with the Cislunar Republic stars and globe logo on it and gave it to her. “Then you can say goodbye to Dr. Watson and go home. But I’d like you to wear this until we find the bad man. It will remember everywhere you go and everyone you see, just in case. And if you yell ‘help,’ Dr. Watson will send one of us to help you. Understand?”
She was nine years old with glistening black hair cut at her jaw line and what was now an almost comically serious face. She nodded gravely.
“Got that, Dr. Watson?”
A moustached north European in late nineteenth-century dress appeared inside the holographic window of my office and grinned at us. “Elementary, Officer O’Reilly. Tina and I will make short work of this matter, never you fear!”
Tina’s seriousness shattered into a giggle. I smiled, slipped out into the anteroom, and keyed my wristcomp. “Tad, Hart.”
Tad Reynolds’s thin, rugged face nodded to me from the tiny screen as he pushed an invisible hair from his forehead. “Lousy deal. You’re senior, and murder’s your hobby. I thought I’d put you on it.” Our chief public safety officer looked like a country club golf pro, stretched to two meters. He usually wore an infectious little-boy grin. Not now. At thirty-thousand or so people, Coriolis Municipality was still a small town and most people who were involved in government at any level knew each other. Disagreements or not, this was a death in the family.
I nodded back to him. “How’d it happen?”
“Dead in his office for about three hours, with a hell of a good simulation covering the fact. Kate Samios found him after she got tired of waiting outside and barged in to push for the comet expedition. Looks like a single trank dart loaded with an overdose, from the wound. The dart’s gone.”
“Damn!” The darts were traceable, but apparently the assassin knew that. “How’s Kate?” Kate and I went way back. The thought of her just walking in on a stiff who used to be someone she knew bothered me.
“Kate called me first thing—she’s okay; she went outside to deal with it.”
“Yeah, she would.” We’d grown up together in Coriolis and went to school here. Then Kate went up to L2 for a doctorate in astrophysics while I stayed here for a security degree, got a badge in ’53, met Linda and got involved. It was Officer O’Reilly and Dr. Samios by the time Kate came back to teach at the University, but Kate would always be the open-hearted girl next door to me. She was far-eyed—it’s probably in our Lunie genes, that outward impulse. Yeah, she’d go outside to deal with it.
But I was going to have to deal with it inside; this was going to be very public, very soon, and I had to get on it quickly. “Who’s at the scene?”
“No one’s been in there but me since Kate found the body. I offed the sim and we got out—haven’t even sent a motile in. Figured you’d want to handle it clean.”
“Thanks.” I meant it. It was my turf, kind of. We’d had five murders in the last four years here, and I’d handled four of them.
“Hart, this is a big one.” His implication was clear. Don’t blow it. Stay in control.
“Understand. I’ll be over there in about ten minutes.”
“Good. Call as soon as you’ve got a handle. Out.” His face disappeared.
I waved to the desk officer and made my way past the line of unhappy people waiting to see him and out to the balcony to grab the descent pole. I took a moment to gaze at the largest city on the Moon and felt that little tingle a native Lunie gets looking at what we’ve made here.
Coriolis Municipality is laid out like a big cross dug into the top of the crater rim where the maglev launch track starts. The Coriolis Municipality Security Bureau offices were in the south trench, Cislunar Republic offices in the north. I slid down the pole to the sidewalk and decided to take the park path instead of the tube—the two-kilometer walk would give me time to think. I settled into a nice long stride; between noon hour and school out, the path was pretty clear and I could put my body on auto while my mind spun.
Sam Wu wasn’t—make that hadn’t been—popular. But he was brilliant, and gave very good reasons for everything he did-which was why he was in the job. Still, he was remote, impassive, and unyielding. People who rely on personality instead of reason to get what they want found that he didn’t respond to their cues. Worse, they found him allocating resources to other unpopular, unsympathetic people who, in Sam’s view, had better reasons. But Sam kept everything running and everyone about equally short of resources—so he had a reputation for impartiality.
I made a mental list of people likely to be unhappy with Sam. At the top were the South Americans. The Republic had cut immigration from that part of Earth to a relative trickle in response to their failure to make much headway in population control. About half the new housing there was made from moonglass panels, and Sam had cut materials allocations in favor of east Asia and Africa south of the Sahara. Policy aside, there were complaints that he favored the Chinese for racial reasons.
Coriolis University also had a number of hotheads who insisted that Earth had to curb its population growth eventually and that we should stop facilitating its bad behavior—conveniently forgetting that’s what our ancestors were sent here to do.
We still sent over half of everything we made down the gravity well, but Earth wanted more; more outreach, accelerated Mercury development, quicker Martian settlement—looking ahead ten years as opposed to fifty.
Speaking of the university, there was a moonball game going—Coriolis blue against Clavius red—in a court just south of the Central Park, where the four arms of our cruciform city meet. One of our “Blueskins” caught a lob in mid-leap and pegged the large softball at the target hole from what must have been ten meters up before she got tackled. It must have been my day—her shot went in; in two hours plus overtimes, the usual college moonball game score is something like 2 to 1. Celebrations of the rare goal erupted, filling the air with demonstrative young bodies.
I recognized one of Linda’s brothers coaching on the sideline and waved. During the troubles with the U.N. over the LI Station, there was an immigration hiatus and a big patriotic baby boom. Sometimes it seemed like half of us were related.
Relatives. Wu had an estranged son, Chun-Hee, who’d bounced from the university to his mother’s escort service to semipro moonball. Sam resented Chun-Hee’s uselessness. Chun-Hee resented Sam’s preoccupation with Earth. Chun-Hee had been a software major at Coriolis U and might have, or might know someone who had, the expertise to do the sim that had served as the murderer’s smokescreen.
Then there was a spacecraft contractor who’d almost come to blows with Sam—it had been on the news a week ago. He’d lost an order to an Earth company for one of the new Saturn liners because Sam wouldn’t take our replicators off making parts for China’s Mars fleet. He’d have access to that kind of technical expertise as well. I asked Dr. Watson to get the contractor’s name as I headed up the North Park path.
“Ahmed Fhasi,” came the answer. I glanced at my wristcomp screen—it showed a picture of a Mediterranean type of the clean shaven, bald, and well-fed variety. I didn’t know him.
“Don’t see him around much.”
“He spends most of his time at his plant, out under C-23 North Rim.”
“Thanks.”
I reached the crime scene. North trench was fourteen stories deep. Buildings with balconies and neoclassical facades rose up on either side of the government area. Overhead was the dark arch of our thick moonglass roof. Floodlit day in here, night outside.
Sam Wu’s office was on the third floor, two units left of the entrance. Inspired by the moonball game, I ignored the outside lift pole and jumped right up to the third floor balcony, grabbed the handrail and pulled myself on. The office was typical of the older parts of the city; the north-south trench was almost fifty years old now, and the balconies still had sliding emergency pressure doors. Those massive things hadn’t been closed since the automatic roof-seal backup systems were installed on the trench roof a quarter of a century ago, so the room had a permanent two-meter opening to the balcony with no physical barrier at all—except a yellow tape that was less than half an hour old.
That kind of openness, I supposed, might have to change now.
Sam Wu’s body was sitting behind his desk, slightly slumped, with his back to me, like he was bending over some hard copy and might turn and say hello in a moment. Like most reasonably fit lunar citizens not going to or coming from outside, he was wearing walking shorts and sandals, nothing more. His shirt was hanging on an antique polished wood coat rack in the corner. Whoever had come in during the sim had been a casual appointment—someone he knew too well to have to put a shirt on—probably a local or a visitor he’d had frequent contact with.
“Dr. Watson, I suppose Sam might have been shot from the balcony, then turned back toward the door before he lost consciousness, but it doesn’t look like that to me. Nor is it likely that he was shot from the interior door to the office—that’s off to his right. My guess was that he was shot by someone standing right in front of him.”
“Quite likely, I should say.”
“Right. Tell Tad I’m on scene now. On the balcony.”
I waited a minute, then two. Finally Tad’s face appeared in my wristcomp screen.
“Hart, I’m busy with Ahmed Fhasi. He says Wu made a verbal commitment to let him make an experimental ship for the comet mission, and he’s worried that there’s no record of it now. And he’s right. If there was anything on Wu’s computer, the simulation wrote over it.”
“Thanks. I’ll check myself as soon as you release the site.”
“It’s released as of now—his cyberservant program is called Fu-Tse. And there are a dozen forensic robots waiting outside the door.”
“Roger, thanks again, Hart out. Fu-Tse, open the door.”
The inner door slid open and the forensic robots floated in with a barely audible whirring sound—only ten of them; Tad exaggerates. The miniature blimps coasted around, imaging everything in the room down to a tenth of a millimeter for later analysis. They were followed by some mechanical spiders, about half a meter tall, that picked, sniffed, vacuumed, microsampled, and cataloged everything loose on Sam’s carpet, desk, and body. Then I ducked under the tape to take a look myself.
“Dr. Watson, O’Reilly. I want you to take over for Fu-Tse.”
“As you wish. Accomplished.” Watson’s smiling face appeared in Sam’s screen.
“Good. Now, what have we got on footprints?”
“He had three visitors, going back to about four hours. Nobody after the sim starts.”
“Who were the three?”
“In order, they were Ahmed Fhasi, Wu Chun-Hee, and Mathilda Soames.”
“Who?”
“His new deputy, a New Zealand immigrant. She . . .”
“Hold it. I remember her now.” A big, tall, olive-skinned woman with a attitude so positive it was almost oppressive—she’d have her fifteen minutes of power until Prime Minister Nakasone decided which of his political cronies would get the portfolio.
A thought occurred to me. “Does she know?”
“Not by public communications, and the sim would have been telling her he was busy until Tad offed it. No calls since then.”
I had a chance to make a test, but I needed someone who wasn’t a cop. “Ask Tad to hold off telling her, and get Kate for me.”
While I waited for Dr. Watson to find Dr. Kathryn Samios, I surveyed the room with my own eyes, looking for anything I’d think was unusual or out of place. First, the corpse.
“There’s a bruise and a red puncture wound in Sam’s right shoulder. The dart’s been removed. Not by Sam—I’d say.” Yanking darts out automatically to avoid an effective dose is a painful part of lunar cop training, but . . . “I don’t think Sam had been trained to pull darts and, obviously, he didn’t avoid a lethal dose—so someone else, presumably his killer, pulled the dart out.”
“There is no record of Sam having public safety officer training,” Dr. Watson confirmed.
“Right. I’d say odds favor a Lunie or a spacer—Earth perps tend to use bullets. But a clever one might get a dart gun just to throw us off the track. Best check Sam’s Earth connections—see if any of them or their agents are up here.” While Earth money wasn’t that important on the Moon, back on the home world, Sam Wu’s decisions on where to send what would mean lots of money—enough to attract criminal undergrounds like honey attracts flies. After the troubles, we’d kept the right to decide where our stuff went—and the U.N. was just as happy not to have to deal with fights over it. They say a Muslim holds the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, for similar reasons.
“Sam reported more than one bribe attempt,” Dr. Watson said. “We locked one miscreant in the ice mines of Peary Crater for the rest of his life for attempted extortion. And yes, the blackguard is still there.”
There was, I remembered, at least one new Earth criminal on the Moon.
“Dr. Watson, has Tina found her pusher yet? Do you have a make on him?”
“Yes. But it’s a she. Her name is Ayun Nu—she was masquerading as a man. The child isn’t sure, unless I show her as a man, but the bone structure recognition software was not deceived.” I smiled. Part of Dr. Watson’s job is to gently remind me of the capabilities of our cybernetic servants—easy enough to forget when we start thinking of them as fellow personalities.
