Jay Caselberg, page 3
“Forget it. I’ll be down in a while.”
He spent a short time poking around the room, checking out the rest of the facilities, working out how limited the place really was. There was a handset to control the screen, piping vids directly from the hotel network. There was an information channel, and he flicked through looking for other services.
Okay, most of the stuff was pretty standard, but still, it wasn’t anything like the level of technology he might have expected. That could present its own problems. He rubbed the back of his neck and
grimaced. He should have guessed when he had to use an actual swipe card to get into the room.
Back down to the lobby and he was immediately bombarded with noise as the elevator doors slid open.
Someone in a far corner was bashing a tambourine, and the surrounding group was clapping along with the beat and laughing. Jack shook his head, stepped out of the elevator, and headed for the desk.
“Ah, hello, Mr. Stein. Here is your map.”
He leaned in closer to look.
“Here is the city, you see. If you follow this route here, it takes you out to Summergarden. That is where you find the university. There is a technology park out there too.” She turned the map over to show a broader map of the surrounding area, pointing to a region well outside of the city. “This is Summergarden. There is a public shuttle out there. Number D-twenty-four. It runs right outside here.”
She looked up at him and smiled. “But it will not run today.”
“Well, how do I get out there?”
She nodded. “You could hire a private transport, but that is quite expensive.”
“Hmmmmm.”
“But there really is no point today.”
“What do you mean?” Jack frowned.
She waved her hand in the direction of the people crowding the lobby. “It is Festival.”
“And… ?”
“There will be nobody there. Nobody works on Festival.”
Jack sighed. “You’re working.”
She looked disappointed. “Yes, I know. It is a pity, but I have to work. Later, when I have finished, I will go out.” Her face brightened. “But you will be able to have a good time tonight.”
“Yeah, thanks.” He took the map, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket. Somehow, he didn’t think so.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Stein?”
“No, that’s fine. Thanks.” He left the desk and headed straight for the elevator, his lips pressed into a thin line.
Back in his room, he tried to put a call in to Dr. Heering at the university, but there was no answer. It looked like the receptionist had been right.
He ordered a plain room-service meal and spent the rest of the evening half watching piped
entertainment channels on the small screen in the corner of the room, flipping from channel to channel, but his mind wasn’t on it. Later in the evening the outside noise grew, and he went to the window. From buildings the length of the main street, people had spilled out onto the roadway. Drums had joined the tambourines, and the revelers were dancing in the streets. A few blocks up, Jack could see a band playing, people clustered around a stage. The noise thumped through the area, almost below the threshold of hearing, stirring vibrations deep in his guts. He growled under his breath and closed the curtain, hoping to cut some of the noise, but it was there and it persisted. Jack sighed again. He really should have done some research on the place before coming in totally unprepared, but that was it: When someone you cared about was in trouble, you didn’t think; you went and you did.
He took a few moments analyzing that thought. He did care about Billie. He cared about her a lot. And she was in trouble. He could feel it deep inside along with the vibration stirring the depths of his stomach. He thought about doing some of his exercises, inducing alpha, that half-awake, half-asleep state between unconsciousness and wakefulness, to try to grasp the clues from semi-dreamstate, but dismissed the idea. He had none of his equipment here, and the circumstances weren’t exactly ideal for that state of mental relaxation he needed. Better to try to get some rest and get into time zone so he’d be sharp.
It took a long time for Jack to fall asleep. It wasn’t the unfamiliar room, the unfamiliar setting, or even the noise intruding into his awareness. He could deal with all of that. It was the simple sense of disquiet working in the back of his head.
Later in the night, he dreamed anyway.
Chapter Three
Jack knew immediately he was dreaming. The familiar sense of place, of personal identity that went with a true waking state, floated in and out. He was standing in an open field, the landscape gently undulating around him and the tang of something sharp undercutting the breeze. Sour, like sweat. He knew this place. He’d been here before. There was no sense to it at all. The artifact case was long gone, so what the hell was he doing here?
” ‘Alio, Yack.” The voice came from behind. There was no one talking. He turned, heading toward the
place where he thought the voice had come from.
The smell grew sharper, and was suddenly touched with the taste of something burning. He didn’t want to think what it might be.
“Yack Stein.”
Yeah, he knew that voice. It had appeared in his dreams before. And as a final confirmation, a ruined figure lurched over the hillside, half its face burned away, the disfigurement unavoidable. Jack grimaced.
“Talbot. What are you doing here? This is my dream, dammit. You shouldn’t be here.”
Carl Talbot had been present in Jack’s earlier dreams about the stolen artifact when he’d been working on the Landerman case, but there had been a reason for that. Tal-bot had been one of the victims of Landerman’s gang. Jack had solved that case long ago. Talbot’s presence now made no sense. Could you have a ghost from a dream in a dream? This guy was haunting him, like the ghosts of his past.
“You not finish yet, Yack,” said Talbot.
Jack tried to will him away, but the maimed figure stayed where it was. When that didn’t work, he tried to will himself away, away to somewhere different.
“Not finish.”
He tried to drag his attention away from the ruined face, but it was as if he were compelled to keep looking.
Then, in the next instant, Talbot was gone.
“What the… ?”
He was awake. He sat up in bed, a runnel of sweat crawling from his forehead to his cheek. He rubbed his face vigorously with both hands and then sat there in bed for a few moments, collecting his thoughts and working his eyes properly open.
Throwing back the covers, he swung his legs out of the wide bed and padded into the bathroom to pour a glass of water. He drank it in large swallows, then stood staring into the mirror, propping himself up with his hands against the sink. A bleary, shadowed face stared back at him, hair sleep-tousled, eyes slightly bloodshot. Damn, what he’d give for a stimpatch right now. He pressed his eyes firmly closed, then opened them wide. Jack, you’re getting past it, he thought to himself. You’re losing your edge. No stimpatches, though. Not since Billie. Anyway, what the hell had that been about? Stupid dream.
He’d spent plenty of time dealing with that particular dreamscape while dealing with Landerman’s lot.
He often used his dreams for psychic prompts, clues to lead him down the right path in a case; that was normal. But this? Okay, so Billie was working with Antille, and Hervé Antille had been linked to the case too, and to the City of Trees back on Mandala, as the archeological site had been called, but that didn’t explain Talbot’s presence. He scratched the back of his head. Bits of it made sense, but the rest didn’t. Forget it for now. Sometimes he just had to wait for the dreams to fall into place, and sometimes dreams were just dreams. For the moment, there was nothing concrete to tell him otherwise.
He glanced at the wall, forgetting for a moment. No time display there, and his handipad was in his coat. No, wait. There was a small clock by the other side of the bed, its numbers glowing red.
Six thirty. He groaned. Damn, just what he needed. Mornings were bad enough without being awake this early. If he was lucky, most of the parties from last night would be over by now. Still, being awake at this hour should give him a chance to get started, and the sooner he tracked down Heering, the sooner he’d have some answers about what was going on, about what had happened to Billie. A
steaming hot shower and some coffee and he’d be ready to face the rest of the day. He hadn’t even bothered to check if he had coffee. Pulling open the cupboards, he found a small bar full of local wine and beer, and not much else, prompting a low sound in his throat. He’d have to go downstairs for coffee. Great. He really was beginning to hate this place already, not that there were many places Jack Stein didn’t hate.
After coffee and, unusually, something to eat—the coffee was normally enough—Jack felt he was
ready at least to give the semblance of functioning. There had been only a few people at breakfast, and a number of them looked positively the worse for wear. Balance City had certainly turned it on last night. Somehow he suspected they didn’t do that sort of thing often. It was almost as if they had been orchestrated to have fun, and they weren’t really used to how they should do it.
As he finished the last of his coffee—surprisingly quite decent—he pulled out the map and studied it.
The university was a full ten miles outside the edges of Balance City. He had no choice but to take the local transport. He grabbed his coat from the nearby rack, patted his pocket to make sure his handipad was there and he’d forgotten nothing, and returned to the table for a last swallow of the coffee before heading to the front desk to inquire about the shuttle schedule.
It appeared he was in luck. They ran about every hour, and the next one was in about ten minutes’ time.
He thanked the girl and headed out into Utrecht’s day, feeling as if he were walking into a landscape even more alien than the one he had visited in his dreams last night. But then every cluster of humanity gathered together was like an alien landscape, glossed with the sweat and dirt and odor. Balance City was no different.
Outside there were traffic, people, noise, in complete contrast to how it had been when he’d arrived.
The empty streets from yesterday were now fully without a trace of the celebrations of the previous evening. Whoever ran this city did so efficiently, by the looks of things. Maybe too efficiently for Jack’s taste. He spent a moment getting his bearings; then, following the directions he’d been given, he headed for the shuttle stop, weaving in and out of smartly dressed commuters. There was something not quite right about the way they looked to Jack, and it took him a while to puzzle it out. Finally, it clicked. The colors were all wrong. The clothes were conservative in cut and style, but the color combinations were deep greens, yellows, blues, even reds. Primary colors, most of them. He was adrift on a sea of rainbow humanity, his own drab hues—the plain brown coat, the dark top and trousers—setting him clearly apart from the rest of the crowd. He hadn’t really noticed because he was the different one.
Damn. The last thing he wanted to do was draw attention to himself, but there was no way he was going to be following their particular fashion sense anytime soon. The residents of Balance City could have it. A bit of research, that was all it took. A simple bit of research. Stupid, Jack. If Billie had been with him, she’d have done the research, even down to the local fashion and style. It was really starting to hit home how much he had grown to rely on her. But she wasn’t with him, and that was why he was here. The simplest bit of preparation… He was suddenly more aware of the curious glances that kept shooting his way as people passed, and then he caught himself. Dammit, Stein. You have better things to worry about.
He found the shuttle stop, making a show of peering at the neat little notice showing the times, ignoring those who walked around him, but keeping one eye on the passing traffic and the street. He felt edgy this morning, as if something were plucking at his sensory nerves, thrumming subconsciously within him. He kept his eye out, checking the people, but there was nothing there to set off any alarms. Just the locals, heading off to their pristine jobs. The problem was, how could he tell if he was being watched when everybody seemed to be watching him? He glanced up and down the street feeling the familiar stirring deep in his guts.
The shuttle was there before long, and he climbed aboard, thankful that there were only two other passengers. One was a kid, about the same age as Billie, and the other was an older man. Both ignored him. Jack took a seat, glancing at the kid, thinking about Billie. Kids. Kids were trouble. His gaze lingered on the youth as he thought. The doors were just sliding shut when a man forced his way through them, brushed down a long yellow coat, and also took a seat. Jack glanced at him with a frown, but the man avoided his look, just like everybody else in this place.
Jack nodded to himself, and turned his attention to the window as the vehicle whirred into motion. The shuttle was larger than the one he’d taken in from the airport, but was propelled by the same sort of almost-noiseless drive.
As Jack looked out through the window as the urban landscape passed, it was clear that the day in Balance City started early. People were already disappearing into buildings, and the crowds and traffic were dwindling rapidly. Jack had never really thought about consigning himself to such a life, the daily routine, uniformity, and conformity that went with a steady job. Maybe he should have, but really, he thought he would have gotten bored in no time flat. His drifting from the military, to intelligence, to freelancing had taken away the boundaries and the uniformity rather than adding to them. Sure, there was uncertainty about what he did, but that was half of the attraction. He had no one to answer to but himself and, in a roundabout sort of way, the occasional client. Well, apart from Billie, that was. No, the life of a psychic investigator suited Jack Stein just fine.
Balance City’s layout puzzled him. It was even, ordered, all hard angles, but he hadn’t seen a single shop, not a department store or convenience outlet or anything. Block after block of glass cubes stretched to the sky. Where the hell did these people do their shopping? He was still puzzling as they crossed the great span over the canyon leading to the city’s edge. There had to be somewhere, right? He was almost tempted to ask one of his fellow passengers, but thought better of it. Billie would have done so in an instant, he was sure. Still, it was supposed to be a guy thing, right? You didn’t ask other people.
As they reached the edge of Balance City, Jack grunted to himself. There was no transition, no gradual thinning of buildings. One moment there were walls of steel and glass, and the next, nothing. Open fields stretched before them, broken only by the clear line of the roadway. One or two vehicles moved along its length in the distance, but it could have been a flat, unpopulated plain, except for the marks of agricultural activity. Clearly it was before planting season. He guessed they were farms, and the even tracks crisscrossing the dusty brown ground attested to that fact. He glanced behind to see a wall of reflective glass staring back at him. When the sun was at the right angle, Balance City must simply glow with golden light across the flat plains in front of it.
He turned back to face the front, and narrowed his eyes at a white band that was starting to come into view above the skyline. There was no way it could be another city. Whatever it was, it stretched from end to end of the horizon.
It wasn’t till they were much closer—the kid and the old man had gotten out by that stage at a stop that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, leaving him alone in the shuttle with Yellow Coat—that Jack had a true appreciation for what he was seeing. Spread at even intervals, great white blades turned, stirring with the breeze, line after line of windmills. There were hundreds, thousands of them stretching away to either side and beyond. The tall white poles supporting them were broader at the base, narrowed, and then broadened again, reaching up to a cylindrical housing that Jack guessed held the main mechanism being activated by the motion of the blades themselves. A small green and red light blinked at the back end of every cylinder. Stuck inside the shuttle, Jack couldn’t hear, but he bet those vast blades made a sound as they cut the air. His fellow passenger seemed unfazed by what he saw, but Jack sat there openmouthed as they neared, then passed within the ranks of turning propellers, his head turning as he tried to trace the extent of the lines, but they carried on right into the distance until they
all merged into one another.
Jack was impressed. Damned impressed. That was one hell of a wind farm. He’d never seen anything on such a scale. He guessed that Balance City must have a voracious need for power. A wind farm like this must provide enough to keep Balance City ticking over and then some. There were no factories, no industrial centers as far as he’d seen, but then he’d completely missed this lot on the way in from orbit.
In fact, he’d missed more than a lot, being too damned worried about that little flier.
The wind farm held his fascination for only so long. After about a mile it was behind them, and they were back to open fields. The other man who rode with him had still not made eye contact nor
acknowledged Jack’s presence. For the moment, that suited Jack just fine.
Small clusters of neat dwellings appeared on either side of the road, and at long last, off in the distance, he could see trees. Not one or two, but whole stands of trees. Jack guessed it had to be more thick forest of the kind he had seen on the way down from the orbital. A mere ten minutes later, long, low buildings grew in the distance. Off to one side, broad dishes pointed skyward. More glass and metal. Clearly this was the technology park of Summergarden, in the center of which sat the University of Balance City.
The place was large enough to be a small town, and he wondered how many people worked or studied here and how many lived nearby. His fellow passenger alighted and disappeared down a side road. As the doors slid shut, the man turned, looked over his shoulder, and watched as the shuttle pulled away.
Just for an instant, Jack thought he saw him talking into something concealed within his palm. Jack frowned. He tried to watch the guy, see what he was doing, but the shuttle pulled around a corner and the man and his canary coat were lost from view.
