Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (16 page)

There were enough viewpoints to ensure an ongoing symposium on any number of subjects. Should the conversation lag, there was always Marc Talley to stir the pot. Even the most cosmopolitan of our company seemed to relish his digs and thrusts. He was a fixture at our table. It seemed hard to picture this group without his catalyzing presence.

But we'd have to do without him soon enough.

Talley didn't appear for breakfast the next morning, and didn't answer his cabin hail. By the lunch hour Miro was concerned. Concerned enough to ask me whether her worry had any reasonable basis. That was delicately put. She knew better than to ask directly about someone else's lifeline.

This was a borderline question that I could answer. I looked at her oval face, her eyebrows pinched in with concern. Part of me, the part that had caressed that face, urged my hand forward to touch her in reassurance, if only on the arm. But I couldn't reassure. I didn't touch. I told her that she might be within bounds in summoning aid.

That response earned me no gratitude. Just a look I had seen before: close to accusatory, tinged with awe. Not so much awe this time. To a part of Miro that should have known better—and indeed did—I was now a son of a bitch. She bit her lip so the tooth marks showed, and turned away.

Talley's cabin was locked, and the locking code had been set from within. The Head Steward notified the first officer. Commander de Prado authorized the nullification of Talley's privacy shield, which rendered the door transparent.

Talley was inside and motionless in his chair. A scribepad lay at his feet, on its side with its display timed out.

The lock was breached and the cabin entered. Talley was dead.

The body was removed to the cold sleep compartment. Little else was done. The ship's doctor was no forensic pathologist, and lacked the facilities and the specialized knowledge to do a thorough post mortem. Small chance of isolating an outside agent when toxins and exotic paralytics were being discovered and bioengineered daily, and at an exponential rate. Talley's death looked to the doctor very much like heart failure. But Talley was only thirty-two.

Nonetheless, the captain deputed the first officer to conduct an investigation. Certainly there were a number of parties who had some interest in seeing Talley dead. Whether the first officer would make a determination of foul play—or would want to—was a matter of conjecture and skepticism.

The ship wondered, and some aboard seethed. Talley was a citizen of the Coalsack worlds. Other Coalsackers on board included an ambassador at large, en route to an All Quadrant conference on border disputes. He and his staff had been careful to distance themselves from Talley and his more or less unsanctioned and unofficial activities. Talley was nominally a journalist, but a singularly unobjective and undiligent one. He didn't record events; he made them. And on whose behalf there was little doubt. The ambassador's vehement insistence on a real investigation removed those.

Others were concerned as well.

I decided to make myself available and visible to all, and ensconced myself in a prominent corner of the first class lounge with a bottle of Campari at my elbow. I had in my pocket a supply of anti-intoxicants, but didn't need them. Two glasses into the bottle I had my first visit, from the first officer.

Commander de Prado was olive skinned, short, and brisk. His face was round, with contrastingly sharp features. The nose was aquiline but lacked any aristocratic cast. The first officer struck me as more sparrow hawk than imperial eagle, but no less a raptor for that. He did not seem to like mixing with the passengers, and it was hard to imagine him as a prospective captain of a jumpship. Perhaps his ambitions ran elsewhere.

We had barely gotten beyond opening pleasantries when we were joined by Ambassador Darvesh. He was accompanied by Peter McNally. Apparently the mining boss had an unsuspected high place in Coalsack councils.

This didn't at all suit Commander de Prado. He suggested that we—himself and I—adjourn to his office to continue the interview there. McNally seemed about to explode. I spoke up before the Coalsack mining boss could.

"You may have the power to ask me questions, Commander, but not to force my answers, much less dictate the time and place of our interview or its exclusivity. I will speak willingly about what I know or don't know to anyone with a legitimate interest. But I'd like to do it in as few sittings as possible. Besides, you all might learn more with the questions coming from several sides." I leaned back and picked up my bottle of Campari, poured some and activated the seltzer dispenser. "But you can be the lead interrogator, Commander. Fire away."

The first officer gave me a sharp, feral look, and I began to see where his ambitions did lie: not in command of a ship, but in control of men. And I was slipping the leash he was trying to secure.

McNally and the ambassador eased into seats across from me, the ambassador with some difficulty. He was a tall and slender man, a study in mahogany skin against white linen. An athlete, perhaps, in his youth; he had kept his weight down, but moved slowly and stiffly. McNally signaled a passing waiter for something stronger than an aperitif.

"Mr. Nystrom," the first officer said, his voice as stiff as the ambassador's joints. The commander alone remained standing. "You list your occupation as 'diver.' Did you practice your trade on board, and, specifically, on Mr. Talley?"

"Two questions there," I replied. "I'll try to answer both. Yes, I have hired out my services, but not to Mr. Talley." That earned me some raised eyebrows. I paused and continued. "I did plumb him, but for knowledge and pleasure. Mutual knowledge and pleasure."

The raised eyebrows turned to looks of exasperation.

"Let's have some precision here," I went on. "I'm not for obfuscation and hairsplitting and indirection, as you seem to think. But if you question a diver—or an oracle, as some call us, a warlock as some defame us—you'd better be precise with your questions. Otherwise you'll get imprecise, open-ended answers. Particularly when we're dealing with death. Death seems like a precise finality to most, but to a diver it's a jumping off point to a very open end."

"I thought divers didn't tolerate direct questions about their brotherhood,
kyr
Nystrom," the ambassador said mildly. "Which I understand to be something more than a mere trade guild."

"That's right. And we don't answer questions about how we work or about its morality or lack of it. So be careful of asking a diver how he does it or why, or challenging him on his ethics."

"How about asking—precisely—what you do?" McNally said.

"That's fine. We even advertise it. We plumb our clients' minds to access and free up memories of past lives. It's a thing of mutual interest. The client learns; we learn. It's also how we earn our keep and our passage."

"Talley wasn't a rich man," the ambassador stated.

"Some people—not clients—we plumb simply because they are of interest. If in this life, likely also in past ones. Miro Banks, for instance. She is an artist of considerable talent. She had likely been so in past lives, even were her medium cave walls and charcoal. Which once it indeed was. I plumbed her to tap those resources and potential, as she might have asked me to model for her. And we both profited by it."

"Anyone else?" Commander de Prado asked.

"A Terran businessman, Herr Grunwald. He dines at the captain's table. He hired my services for the standard fee."

"The death thing," McNally said. "What will you tell us about that?"

"If a person is about to die, imminently about to die, it leaves an imprint on the surface conscious mind, a mind that we cannot read. The surface mind is a churning froth that we plunge through to reach the centers of long-term memory. But an imminent death leaves its shadows on those waters, a backshadow. It shows up to us as a current life about to become a past life."

"Did you reveal Talley's death to him?" McNally pressed.

"A diver never reveals a subject's death to him. It never helps in its avoidance, as many early attempts taught us. Changes in behavior or routine still ended in imminent death, and the diver was often blamed. Sometimes killed."

"But you did read Talley's death?" the first officer asked. He sounded like he believed none of this.

"Yes, but I know nothing of its circumstances or whether it was a natural death or murder."

"If it were murder, would you have reason to suspect any particular person?"

"No."

"Is there any information you might have that would shed further light on the situation?"

"No."

Silence held. There seemed little reason to expect further questions, least of all from a skeptical Commander de Prado, who seemed to feel that he had satisfied form and protocol. The ambassador rose stiffly from his seat, massaging his upper legs. I assumed that the group interview was over.

"A moment," McNally said. "As a result of your reading Talley's upcoming death, did you pay particular attention to his comings and goings and the persons he associated with? I include myself, of course."

Very shrewd. There was a devious mind at work here, one capable of thinking several steps ahead. And perhaps one with an agenda of its own.

"Yes, I did," I said deliberately. "These things always interest a diver. It seems like excessive morbidity or playing with death, to some. It earns us a bad name. But we learn. And that, at the core of it, is why we dive. However, I saw no untoward manifestations or behavior by others, or I would have said so."

I stood up, denoting the true end of this interview. "Our ethics do not preclude informing on murderers."

Miro Banks decided that either I wasn't a son of a bitch, or that she didn't mind one in her bed. Or both.

She'd given the matter thought. Her lovemaking had a fitful but arousing quality to it as she drifted off on some abstracted tangent while riding me rhythmically, then brought herself intently back to the job at hand with vigorous lifts and bucks. I rose to meet her at it and we got to that violent release that we both needed.

Once satisfied—but not for long, as I knew and appreciated—she gave herself over to analysis. The subject was Talley, whom she had cared for. Miro, for one, had no doubt that it had been murder.

"Breville, maybe," she said, knitting her brow. "He's basically a mercenary. He may be in someone's employ, someone who wants Marc dead. Jacques was sitting next to Marc at the dinner table. Next to Marc and his food and his wine."

"Possibly," I said. "But not likely. Proximity doesn't equate with homicidal action. Breville is in your mind because his face is. Talley had a lot of political enemies who'd gladly see him dead. And most of them are faceless."

Miro shook her head. Her dark hair, still heavy and damp with perspiration, brushed my chest.

"You saw Talley as a man of feeling," I said. " A passionate lover, a fighter for a noble cause. And he was, to someone emotionally involved with him. Grab him by another handle and see what you get: firebrand, agitator against entrenched social orders and monied interests, inciter to rebellion.

"In short, his job was to travel the border worlds, most of them still nominally aligned with Terra, and pry them loose. Or worse—to alliance with the Coalsack worlds. Can you doubt that some Terran plutocrat or corporate minion looking to make his mark would bribe a steward or waiter to slip a slow acting toxin into Talley's soup? Or maybe the captain gave the order; this is a Terran ship. Or the first officer, more likely. He's some kind of political officer, and I don't think he's under the captain's control on matters of state policy."

"Is that how you think it went?"

"Quite possibly," I said.

Miro heaved herself up and rolled back on top of me. No renewed onslaught of passion here. She wanted to pin me down with her weight and with her eyes.

"But probably?"

"No."

"Goddamit, don't go into your oracle mode on me. Do you think you know how it was done? And by whom?"

I nodded.

"But you told Commander de Prado you didn't know who did it."

"Not quite. He didn't ask the right questions." I brushed back Miro's hair and put a palm on each cheekbone. A tear of sorrow or rage fell between my fingers to my chest. "Don't ask yet. I'll tell you without your having to ask. But you don't hide your feelings, and it's dangerous to show them, particularly if they've got a focus. Let the situation work itself out a bit. There are interests and parties aboard who aren't emotionally involved but who want the murder solved. They'll act."

Life goes on, and there's plenty of it on a jumpship. A couple of hundred passengers and most of the crew viewed Talley's death as little more than a passing item of titillation or variation of routine. Gambling continued in the casino. Sexual alliances, misalliances, melanges were initiated, consummated, broken up. Vast amounts of vacuous conversation filled up space and time. Nuggets of conversational insight and wit peppered—but could never fill—vacuums of empty talk.

Some things got done. Papers and treatises were written by scholars returning from their studies, digs, and researches. Poems, both jejune and accomplished, were composed. Quotidian journals were filled.

Miro Banks sculpted, her work taking on new direction and depth.

The crew worked, some at serving the passengers. Many of these functions were automated in second class, but the first class passengers were paying for human waiters, barkeeps, and croupiers. The captain and his officers provided an overlay of command and stood ready as shiphandling backups. The ship's AI performed the jump navigation and routine drive adjustments. A handful of technicians serviced the AI and lesser machines. In a pinch they could be transformed into a lightly armed landing party. A jumpship was a quasi-military vessel, and enforcer of Terran policy on the border worlds where jurisdiction was a word of shifting meaning.

Then there were the third class passengers in cold sleep. It was by far the cheapest way to go, and thousands did it. Among the frozen sleepers were two hundred forty miners bound for the outermost system on the jumpship's curve: a Coalsack world that they would open up, work, and perhaps colonize. Peter McNally was their boss.