Better Angels (47 page)

“John Drinan,” said the apparition. “Your second cousin?

“Oh...yes! Of course!” Seiji said, recovering. “Sorry—I’ve never seen you except over vidlink from out beyond the moon, a couple weeks back. The picture was kind of snowy.”

Drinan smiled awkwardly and Seiji introduced Paul as a friend who knew all about what had been going on with Jiro. Together they walked with Seiji’s cousin through the Mediary stacks. Coming to a study lounge, they sat down. Paul thought the poor guy looked travel-worn and in need of a good bath.

“The bad news is,” John began, slouching deeper into the lounge seat, “I didn’t find your brother.”

Seiji nodded slowly.

“The good news is, I met lots of people who say they’ve seen him or someone who looks like him. Recently.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Seiji’s cousin said, smiling slightly, remembering. His words seemed almost to lilt with the fatigue of his journeys, as if he were sleeptalking. “The Trashlands are a strange space. The no-tek types don’t much like any prodding or prying from outside. The local sheriff was pretty uncooperative too, at first. Maybe my looks bothered him, I don’t know. I can understand it: I mean, here comes this guy claiming to be a second cousin, asking all these questions about some other guy who’s missing.”

Paul watched Drinan glance absently into his hands. He might as well have been staring off into deep space.

“Finally, though,” Drinan continued, “the Sheriff gave me an old student holo ID of Jiro’s. One of the deputies found it in Jiro’s apartment after Jiro moved off into the Trashlands. I guess they opened the place up when your mother called to report him missing. I used the ID when I made these.”

From his coverall pockets Drinan pulled two cheap hand-scanned holographic plaques. YAMAGUCHI Jiro Ansel PLEASE Contact Home or Seiji. They Are Concerned Enough To Send Me To Contact You. Your Cousin J.G. Drinan, said the first one. The other bore the holo and scan code from the student ID and the words HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi. If You HAVE...or KNOW him, Please Contact his brother SEIJI. Jiro was last seen in the CHERRY VALLEY-YUCAIPA AREA. We Are All Concerned...Cousin J. G. Drinan. Seiji’s home vidlink number was listed on the plaque.

“I showed these around in places where I thought people might have seen him,” Drinan continued, slouching further toward horizontal with fatigue and the weight of his message. “TechNot camps, food ration shops, Trashland entry stations, any place he might have come in for supplies or aid. I posted the plaques on all the power and light poles between Cherry Valley and Yucaipa.”

Paul and Seiji stared at the grainy reproduction of Seiji’s brother’s image on the plaque. The holo, showing a man with wide eyes staring like lost ghosts from the windows of a haunted face, deeply unsettled Paul. It made him think of dated snow-and-ashes photos of children missing for years. Of transients with an elderly Einstein’s face, dying of hypothermia on city streets. Of his own lost sister Jacinta. Of things he didn’t want to think about. He couldn’t even imagine what it might make Seiji think of.

“But people did say they’d seen him?” Paul asked, looking up at Seiji’s cousin. Seiji had as yet been unable to tear his eyes from the holoplaque in his hands.

“Yeah, or someone who looks like him,” Drinan said, laughing quietly and shaking his head. Seiji looked up at last. “A couple of places—when I went in and showed them the holo with your brother on it?—they looked at the image on the plaque, then at me, then at the holo again, then back at me, and they said, ‘This is your picture, isn’t it?’ I told them ‘No, it’s my cousin,’ and they said ‘Naw, it’s you! Sure looks like you.’”

Drinan stared at his heavy spaceboots for a moment, collecting his thoughts from the floor. Paul was amazed that someone so obviously fatigued as Seiji’s cousin was could still keep on speaking, even if it was in a rather wild-eyed, beyond-tired fashion.

“I went back to my ship, the Helios, and commanded the cabin to decouple from the rest of the ship and go to aircar mode. I overflew the Trashlands, up and down the canyons. A heavy rainstorm was underway so no one was. At one point I thought I saw someone wandering among the trash of the canyon floor. My infrared and motion sensors didn’t show anything, but I switched on my throat mike and the aircar’s loudspeakers.

“I maneuvered my vehicle to where I thought I’d seen someone, but once there I didn’t see anybody. I kept calling out ‘Jiro! Jiro Yamaguchi! Jiro, are you there?’ as I moved up the canyon. Did it until I was hoarse, but it did no good.”

Drinan turned and looked Seiji in the eye for a brief moment.

“I can see why you and your folks are worried. I mean, I’m outside the mainstream too, like your brother. I’ve been living out of Helios these last few years, just me and my dog Oz rambling all over human space. Still, I guess that hasn’t been as far outside as your brother, in some ways.”

Drinan’s gaze wandered very far away, very abruptly, as if there were now no walls around him, no space and no time.

“When I was out there in all that nothing looking for your brother,” he said at last, “I felt like I was looking for myself. It was a strange feeling. The longer I was out there, the stronger it got.”

Drinan shook his head, whacked his suit gauntlets against his thigh, and turned his glance toward Paul. The young spacer seemed quieter now, a messenger who has discharged his duties. He looked back toward Seiji again.

“But I’ve always had my dog, anyway,” Drinan said. “And I’ve always kept in touch, always let somebody know where I was going. I guess that must be what worries you and your folks most—Jiro hasn’t kept in touch.”

“Yes,” Seiji said, looking at his hands in his lap, then moving them to his knees, then exhaling sharply and standing up. “The uncertainty’s the worst part. But I’m glad that people say they’ve seen Jiro. At least that means he’s still alive. Now we just have to find him and figure a way to get him back to civilization.”

Paul saw that Drinan had slouched onto one elbow, almost prone, on the lounge seat.

“Look,” Seiji said, “you must be tired after all the traveling you’ve done. Why don’t you relax here a bit while we finish up with our research, then maybe we’ll get some lunch? Sound like an idea?”

“Sounds good,” John said with a nod. “I am tired. What date and time is it?”

“About fifteen minutes shy of 1200 hours, November 9,” Paul told him. “We’re synched to Greenwich Mean here in the habitat.”

“Been on the jaunt eighteen, nineteen days, then,” he said with a crooked smile. “Can’t say for sure—time zones, y’know.”

Paul smiled and he and Seiji turned back in the direction of the research stacks where they had been working. By the time they’d finished their research and returned to where Seiji’s second cousin was seated, the man’s eyes were closed. As Paul and Seiji approached, however, his eyelids flicked up as alert as if he had just wakened from a nightmare.

“How’s it going?” Seiji asked, quietly.

“Fine. Just resting my eyes.” Drinan smoothed out his face with his right hand and slowly stood up. As the three of them walked toward a ramp, each of the several young students they passed along the way darted furtive glances and surreptitious stares in their direction.

“Wow,” John said, laughing a bit nervously when they reached the top landing of the ramp. “What is it with the kids here? You’d think they never saw a deep spacer before.”

“Yeah,” Paul said with a smile as the three of them moved down a ramp-and-handhold corridor. “This is a pretty squeaky clean environment. Highest per capita population of anal-retentive overachievers in known space! You stick out like a sunflower in a cornfield.”

“I guess so.”

The transport corridor was cold and gray by haborb standards, one of the few areas that wasn’t Hawaiian warm and green.

“Where are you docked?” Seiji asked his second cousin.

“At the white port. It had the most spaces available.”

“That’s Administration. We’ll take a ridge cart to the nearest station and cut through Admin sector.”

They boarded a bulletcar which shot them upline and disgorged them near Admin. As they cut through that sector on their way toward the nearest docking bay, they got hard looks from the young Admin types fresh up from Earth in their corporate warrior wear—charcoal Nehru suits and piano-wire string ties.

“Pretty chilly in there,” John said when they came out into the docking bay.

Seiji nodded.

“Always some tension between the high-frontier folk in the habitat,” he said, “and the corporate and governmental administrators who rotate up from Earth. A lot of them don’t quite get what we’re up to here.”

Paul agreed silently. The cold, hard expressions on the faces of too many of the administrative types up from Earth made him think of fallen leaves rattling across hard winter lawns when he was a kid back on Earth.

The mooncrete bays were stacked with all kinds of neat, conventional cislunar flyers. John’s ship—a large, micrometorite-scoured, battlewagon-gray Solar Harvester Travel-All, with multiple docking dents and taped-over busted landing lights—stood out like a derelict at a debutante ball.

“It’s unlocked. What’s this?” John said, pulling a plastic kinneagram card from the edge of his front viewport. “A ticket.”

“Habitat citizen-policing in action,” Seiji said. “I’ll handle it.”

Paul noted the BEWARE OF DOG sign in one dirty viewport as they walked around to the crew-side hatch. He was startled by the sound of the hatch door squawking out its cranky metallic complaint as it opened. Cousin John must have popped the hatch remotely, he realized.

“Don’t bother fixing the ticket,” John said as Paul and Seiji climbed inside. “Odds are I’ll never come through here again. This boat’s still registered in my brother’s name anyway. I bought it off him for more money than it’s worth. Let them go after him—he can afford it. He’s a millionaire.”

Moving aside the clutter of newsfaxes and junk, Seiji and Paul helped Drinan haul out his meager luggage. The interior of the vehicle smelled of dog food and dog, dog, dog.

“Hey, what breed of horse d’you have here, anyway?” Paul asked, ruffling the scruff behind the canine’s massive head.

“Mastiff. Pure bred and pedigreed.”

“So this is what a mastiff looks like!” Seiji said, genuinely pleased, as if the world were offering up an answer to a question he hadn’t formally asked yet. “I thought they only guarded the homes of Nepalese villagers or something. I’ve never seen one of them and I wondered what they looked like. Now I know.”

Seiji’s second cousin glanced around at the maze of exits angling off the docking bays, then donned anachronistic dark glasses and, with both hands, telescoped out the red-tipped white cane that traditionally signified blindness. Paul stared at him.

“This way I don’t get hassled about the dog,” Drinan explained. “Okay, where we going?”

The dog’s wagging tail thumped Paul hard across the leg.

“Ouch!” Paul said with a startled laugh. “The wag of that dog’s tail is like someone whacking on you with a thick length of rope!”

“Yeah,” John Drinan said. “He’s three years old and he weighs more than I do. C’mere, Oz. Up.”

Rearing up on its hind legs and resting its front paws on John’s shoulders, the dog was a good head taller than its master—and its head dwarfed John’s own.

“See all this?” John asked, grabbing two great fistfuls of loose neck-scruff. “They were bred for pack-hunting lions. When a lion tries to bite a mastiff in the throat, what it gets is scruff. Then the mastiff can use its own big jaws in return.”

The dog dropped back to all fours and ambled a pace or two away.

“They’re a very old, aristocratic breed,” John continued as they walked left, toward the part of the habitat that sheltered the neighborhood where Seiji lived. “That’s why I named him Ozymandias—Oz for short. Hey, you wouldn’t mind if we found someplace where there’s grass nearby, so Oz can do his thing?”

“There are several along the way,” Seiji said, setting a brisker pace. “Follow us.”

“Right.”

As they walked the three of them talked about their jobs and what they had done before coming into space.

“I did the infosystem thing for a while,” John said. “Robotic systems analyst.”

“You’re not still doing that?” Seiji asked.

“Not really. I don’t know how much my aunt or your mother told you—”

“Not much,” Seiji said.

“Lately, I’ve been riding herd on prototype robot miners. The production models are supposed to go out to the asteroids on the Swallowtail, the mass-driver tug they’re building up here. That’s what I was doing when my sister contacted me, to tell me my mother had taken ill. That’s why I started back toward Earth. On the way down, your Aunt Marian asked me to detour over to the Trashlands to look for your brother. I did it on my way back out, since I had to launch from Edwards anyway.”

“My mother must have asked my aunt to get in touch you,” Seiji said nodding.

“No problem,” John remarked, looking down. Paul saw that Oz had found a spot of grass suitable to his needs. “I got to spend some time with my mother. Looking for your brother was a good reason to move on before we could start arguing too much. I should be able to make another trip down to see Mom again in a couple weeks.”

John called his dog over toward them.

“When was the last time you talked to Jiro?” John asked.

“Over vidlink,” Seiji said. “Almost a year ago now, I guess. Before he headed for his cave or wherever he is in the Trashlands. He sounded pretty much okay when I talked to him.”

They walked in silence for a time, down a pathway and into Seiji’s home, leaving the dog to flop down behind them on the porch. As the three of them walked through the NeoVictorian parlor, John noted with approval the woodwork and moldings.

“Nice detail work,” he said, smiling. “A carpenter notices these things.”

In the front room Seiji took the claviform rocker and Paul took an overstuffed arm chair, leaving the hammocouch for Seiji’s second cousin to sprawl out on. John snatched off his knit cap and mussed up his longish hair with one hand. Absently or contemplatively scratching his beard, he stared down at Seiji’s makeshift but functional coffeetable. Sandwiched between the two glassteel plates of the table’s top was a posterboard reproduction of a sixteenth century painting celebrating the glorious reign of Elizabeth I. The Spanish Armada burned and sank endlessly in the background.