Foundation (11 page)
“Hey, give it here. I love it full cream.”
Trumaine handed over the carton and they stood. They stared at each other for a moment then, with a smile, the woman offered her hand.
“Faith Alveraz.”
“Trumaine,” he said, shaking her hand.
He peered around at the dining hall, looking for an empty table, but he couldn’t see any.
“It’s chock full.”
Without thinking twice, Faith nodded her head toward the corner of the hall.
“Over there,” she said.
She led the way to possibly the only free table in the whole canteen and Trumaine wondered how come he hadn’t seen it.
They sat. Faith quickly unwrapped her breakfast and dug in ravenously. Trumaine, still shaken from the experience in the chamber, just watched her wolf down the milk and a yogurt.
“Why, you don’t eat?” she asked, at the same time trying to cram a large leaf of lettuce between her teeth.
Trumaine shrugged, opened a plastic holder containing something vaguely resembling porridge and stirred it with a fork. It didn’t tempt him in the least.
“You must be a new believer,” commented Faith, after she had swallowed a whole portion of vegetables.
“How’s that?” asked Trumaine with a disgusted face. He had tasted the porridge at last.
“You look like you just got off your first ride.”
“Why, what do I look like?”
“Kind of ... green?”
Faith studied with interest Trumaine’s white suit.
“Is that the new suit model?” she asked, slightly disappointed. “Surely the tailors didn’t rack their brains this time—it looks exactly like a suit bought at the local department store.”
“I
did
buy it at the local department store. This is my suit. I’m no believer, I’m a detective investigator.”
Faith’s eyes grew wide all of a sudden. She leaned over conspiratorially, keeping her voice low.
“You’re the one everybody talks about!? You’re here to catch Aarmo—I mean, Professor Jarva’s murderer?”
“If I’m lucky enough, yes.”
“Jesus! I’m curious. So? Tell me, am I a suspect?”
Trumaine scoffed. He had to admit to himself she was fun; her blithe cheerfulness had already taken him.
“I don’t know—well—not yet, at least,” he confided.
“You know something about Jarva?” asked Faith in the same mysterious tone.
“No, tell me. I’m all ears.”
Faith threw a watchful glance to her left and right, paying attention that nobody was overhearing her, then she craned her neck toward Trumaine.
“You know, everybody acknowledges him as the founder of Credence, since he came up with the theory. Well, I’ll tell you something: Credence is everything but what Jarva meant for it to be,” she said.
“You knew the professor that well?”
“When you read everything he’s ever written, you become privy to his thoughts, in some way. I read all Jarva’s books—it’s all in there. He wanted for Credence to be the cornerstone for a new Eden, not just a transport corporation! Jarva developed Pistocentrism to change the world!”
Again, she peered over her shoulder for unwanted listeners.
“It’s the rule of the Federal Law,” explained Trumaine. “Credence can only be used for intergalactic travels and long-distance communication. Imagine what believers could do if their ability was unrestrained.”
“That’s exactly the point!” said Faith, getting worked up. “But the problem is not the believers. The problem is the law—it’s too restrictive! Don’t you understand? Credence is an amazing technology and we mustn’t be afraid of using it! We are on the verge of an epochal change. The world we’ve grown used to won’t be the same anymore. If we were only given the chance, we could reshape it as it was in the beginning!”
Faith’s breath was labored by now and her face was flushed with excitement.
“You mean all green and flowery?” teased Trumaine. “Without traffic? I’d really love that.”
“I mean ... without evil,” she said in a dead-serious tone. “Maybe we should break the law,” she added under her breath.
Trumaine was struck by Faith’s fervor. She reminded him of the young protesters who fought with all their strength for a crucial cause, when the world was just too complicated or too stubborn to listen to them. He exhaled in a long sigh.
“I’m the law,” he said flatly. “You can’t break the law. If you break the law, I arrest you.”
With a snort, Faith slid back in her chair and checked her nail polish watch, which read
06:55 AM
.
“I have to go. See you around, Detective. And think about what I told you.”
“I will,” promised Trumaine with a soothing smile she deliberately ignored.
He stared after her as she wound through the tables, leaving the canteen.
After breakfast, Trumaine had gone back to the believers’ chamber. If there was the slightest chance of catching the crawler, he needed to stay in the empty feed as much as he could.
Once again, he moved to couch
144
. With a bit of surprise, he realized that the couch was still in its cradle. Benedict or Matthews must have assigned it to him; it would be available for use whenever he needed it.
Before he lay down, Trumaine glanced at the believers in the chamber, then peered into the distance, where the choice believers kept hovering about in square formation, still focused on picking up any signal that might come from the lost Hibiscus.
Trumaine sat on the couch and tried to relax, getting ready for the trance. To his wonderment, he couldn’t wipe Faith’s impassioned voice, or her piercing eyes from his mind. He could still feel the fire of excitement and passion that burned inside her.
That’s what it was like being young and not yet disenchanted and cynical as he was about the way the world went, he thought. He had been quite like her, a very long time ago. When he was filled with hope and willing to change the world. Long before the world had showed him it couldn’t be messed with. He had learned the hard way that the world was too hard a contender—it always won. Reality over dreams. Disillusionment over hope. Illness over health. Age over youth. Death over life. It was the DNA of all things. The DNA of the human race as well. You could never change that. Trumaine didn’t need any more face-offs. He had enough.
Trumaine sighed, then lay down ...
Strangely enough, the couch didn’t activate. No snakelike stem rose from the abyss of the chamber to pick him up.
He lifted his head, then dropped it again on the headrest, a little harder this time. Maybe it wasn’t as sensitive as it was supposed to be? But nothing happened, not even then. The couch was dead.
“Detective Trumaine?” called a familiar voice.
He sat up again to see a panting Matthews.
“I think the couch isn’t working,” he said.
“It’s I who deactivated your couch,” she explained. “Captain Firrell just phoned in. He wants to see you as soon as possible.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“I’m afraid yes,” said Matthews, flicking a lock of hair off her face. “One of our believers has just been found dead in his apartment ...”
A look of bewilderment spread across Trumaine’s face as he took the note Matthews handed him.
“It’s James John Boyd,” she said.
The note read:
SUNSHINE AVENUE 1537, APT. 342
.
Sunshine Avenue was the legacy of the past modern era.
It was to be found in what little remained of the old city that had survived the Renewal. Its few crumbling, decrepit buildings stood out like jagged, broken teeth against the outline of the City, but there wasn’t any place for them in the urban master plans the administration had developed. Soon enough, they would be taken down and forgotten for good.
You wouldn’t find anything cheaper than Sunshine Avenue, since it had very little of the comforts a modern man has grown used to—a good wireless connection and a clean Jacuzzi in working order.
It was a place for the students, for the low-income elders who refused to enlist in the administration’s rest-house program, and for the renegades of the City who had lost everything and needed sanctuary to lick their wounds, before they were back again.
But Sunshine Avenue was also something else. Since it had the least street monitoring in the whole city, it was the perfect place for small-time hoodlums, dope pushers and chip hackers to run their illegal business. It was a smart, unobtrusive market that bustled and thrived in the quiet hours of the night, while the day was made for studying, recovering from the excesses of the previous night of carousing, or just for hiding.
That’s why it was an almost deserted street which Trumaine drove along that morning.
He pulled to the curb and parked along with a squad car and the same sienna sedan car he had found the previous day in Jarva’s yard—it was Boyle’s car. He climbed out from the electric car and looked up at the building looming in front of him.
Number 1537 wasn’t the most dilapidated apartment building to be found on the entire street; certainly it was the most eccentric and there was no doubt that it had seen its glorious days.
It was an overly-decorated Art-Deco champion heavy with flamboyant stuccoes. It had huge stained-glass panes for windows, assembled with a bizarrely exotic floral motif. A massive dark-green marble staircase with a central, twin railing made of brass led to the masterpiece of wrought iron and brass craftsmanship that was the entrance, above which a gigantic copper plate hung, reading:
THE RAMPART
.
Everything told a great deal of a gaudy, carefree era when the main pastime of stinking-rich people was to rack their brains and come up with the most quick and showy way to get rid of their money.
Trumaine bounded up the few steps that separated him from the antique revolving doors and slipped inside.
The hall was possibly louder and way more pretentious than the entrance had foreshadowed.
Mahogany panels lined the walls up to four feet’s height, where a molded brass lath marked the boundary with the wine-red velvet that lay beyond it, climbing up to meet a wide floral fresco. Painted against a pale cream background in the darker shades of green, orange and yellow, the mural ran all over the hall and the corridor, including the main staircase and elevators.
About twenty armchairs and a bunch of couches, all upholstered with floral velvet, all stained, threadbare and covered in dust, scattered about in the hall, along with a dozen cracked coffee tables and the same number of dying ferns.
Trumaine sniffed at the acrid, stuffy smell that lingered in the hall—that place could be the death of some fellows he knew that happened to be allergic to dust mites.
A uniformed old man stood behind the reception desk, looking like he was made of the same worn-out velvet of the armchairs.
As Trumaine approached, the man glanced up idly from the electronic pad sitting on the counter in front of him, where a spicy slideshow of hot, scantily-clad girls was playing. He didn’t seem to mind if someone else took a peek at his light literature.
“Do you want a room,” he asked with a slow, croaky voice, “or you with the police too?”
Trumaine didn’t say anything. He just flashed his badge.
“Cop, huh? You’ll have to bring your own chair, I’m afraid. Looks like they’re having a conference in there.”
The man grinned at his own wit, then pointed at the elevators to his left.
“Room three-four-two,” he said. “That would be the third floor, the corridor on the right.”
Trumaine nodded his head in acknowledgment and moved on. Like a turtle, the old man stuck his wrinkled neck out of the counter, looking over at the detective, as if to make sure he was following his instructions.
The brass door to the closest elevator opened with a ding and Trumaine disappeared inside it.
The man shook his head, made a harsh noise with his throat, then went back to reading.