Hide and seek (21 page)

 

She was too weary to argue. What she needed above all was sleep. “All right.”

 

She pulled the drapes closed and turned off the lights. She stripped off her pressure suit and all her clothes and fell facedown onto the soft bed. Within seconds she was unconscious.

Two hours later she forced herself awake. Dazed and groggy, she dressed herself in her one of her two outfits of civilian clothes. They did not soften her appearance. While she had yet to go into battle in real armor, the yellow net stuff the Space Board issued in case of a fire fight, her slick black pants, tight black top, and high-collared shiny white tunic were armor enough for the social world; they broadcast a blunt message:
noli me tangere
.

As she sealed the seam of her tunic, the fire under her breastbone seared her again, so severely that she cried out and stumbled to the bed. Within half a minute she knew she could not ignore the persistent attack. She leaned over and reached for the bedside commlink. “I need to talk to somebody at the hospital.”

The ruptured structures in her abdomen were poisoning her. Whatever the risk to her safety, she had to get help from outside.

“You say this was tissue replacement for trauma?” The doctor was peering at a three-dimensional graphic reproduction of Sparta’s guts, concentrating his attention on the dense layers of foreign material spread beneath her diaphragm.

“That’s what I told you, didn’t I?” Sparta had spent a lot of time in clinics and hospitals, and although they were hardly the torture chambers they’d been a mere century before, she hated them.

 

“What sort of trauma?”

 

“I was in a ‘ped accident ten years ago. I was sixteen. A drunk driver ran me into a light pole.”

 

“Your abdomen was punctured?”

 

“I don’t know that. All I know for sure is that some of my ribs were crushed.”

 

“Yeah. You’ve got a big staple right in your sternum. Not exactly elegant work, but at least it doesn’t show.”

Sparta grunted. Maybe she wasn’t the nicest patient a doctor might wish for, but this young doctor needed to brush up on his bedside manner, and as for the staple in her sternum, it was elegant enough considered as a microwave oscillator, which is what it really was.

“Well, I don’t know what the hell these people had in mind, but whatever it was it wasn’t such a bright idea,” said the doctor. “That stuff is deteriorating. Your pH is so low it’s practically falling off the scale– no wonder you’re complaining of stomach aches.”
“What can you do?”

“Best thing would be to excise it. We can replace it with modern tissue grafts, if you really need them. Probably you don’t. I’d guess your abdominal structures have already healed themselves. In fact you look in damn good shape except for that foreign gook in there.”

“No operation,” she said. “I don’t have the time.”

 

“I’m telling you what you’re going to have to face sooner or later. For now we can give you local implants to balance the pH.”

 

“Good, let’s do it.”

 

“But I want you back here within two days. You’ve got a complex internal environment. I don’t feel comfortable letting it go unattended.”

 

“Whatever you say.”

The procedure to insert the subcutaneous implants took ten minutes. When it was over Sparta shivered as she closed her tunic. She tightened the plastic sheath of her jacket around her torso and left the clinic, feeling an irrational attack of loneliness.

Irrational, or merely submerged? As she walked along the wide, green-glass pressure tube that led to the hotel she tried to bring to consciousness a thought, a feeling, that was playing at the edge of her mind.

There was no doubt her implanted polymer batteries were ruptured; she’d been able to interpret the scan with less confusion than the doctor, who didn’t know what he was seeing. The structures were not natural tissue; they would not heal themselves; they were long dead, long gone. They had never been truly alive.

She should have the stuff removed, as the doctor urged. Those gooey battery implants were part of what she resented most about what had been done to her; they were part of what made her other than human, a prisoner of what others had wanted to do with her body.

But lately she had begun to master the arcane power they conferred upon her, the ability to beam radio signals within a wide band of frequencies, which she could use–among other things–to control remote machinery. Action at a distance. Some part of her wanted not to remove the batteries but to have them repaired, replaced.

She was unsettled to recognize this temptation in herself–instead of resentment, a
desire
–to be more than human. Some controlling, power-seeking part of her did not wish to relinquish the ability to command the material world by fiat, by merely taking thought.

But at the cost of her humanity itself?

 

This was not the time for these thoughts. She snugged her plastic armor about her and walked faster toward the hotel.

 

“Mr. Prott? I’m afraid he’s not here just yet. I’ll be happy to show you to a table.”

She looked the place over. The far wall was a sweep of hardened glass looking out upon the Labyrinth, its otherwise sublime view spoiled by reflections. To her right was a long glass bar and glass tables, lighting the customers greenly from below. To the left, in a corner under spotlights, a woman with stiff black hair sat at a synthekord keyboard, crooning smoky old favorites in a fetchingly hoarse voice. The enchanting Kathy.

“All right,” said Sparta.

 

The waiter took her to a glowing glass table for two with a good view of the entertainment and the scenery. When he asked what she wanted to drink she said water.

She endured the cool and curious glances of the other patrons while she waited for Prott. Approximately every two minutes the waiter reappeared, inquiring if she would care for something else. A drink from the bar? A glass of wine? Another glass of water, perhaps? Would she like to see the hors d’oeuvres tray? Nothing, mademoiselle? You are sure? Certainly . . .

Ten minutes passed this way, and the next time a waiter descended on her she asked for a house-phone link. The waiter brought it and Sparta keyed the number of Prott’s office.

 

Prott’s robot answered and offered to take a message. She keyed off. Next she keyed Prott’s suite of rooms in the hotel. Another recording machine answered. She keyed off.

Prott was not the sort to put a guest in the spotlight and then embarrass her. That could be bad for the hotel’s image. If Prott were anything like the ambitious and slightly paranoid middle manager he appeared to be, unpleasantness would be the very last thing he would wish on
anybody
in his vicinity.

“Excuse me, I’ve left something in my room. When Mr. Prott arrives, please tell him I’ll be back within a few moments.”

“But of course, mademoiselle.” The steward who heard this bowed deeply. Sparta did not miss the amused contempt that lurked behind his carefully neutral mask.
She was past the simple lock of Prott’s outer office in as much time it took for her to sense its magnetic fields.

She did not turn on the light. The flatscreen on his assistant’s desk still glowed faintly from the day’s use, warm in the infrared. No normal eye would have noticed the glow, but Sparta’s read the last image readily. Nothing of interest, only a routine manifest of rooms and reservations. She had already ransacked the hotel’s computer, of which this unit was a terminal.

No one had been in the room for half an hour or more. There were no glowing footprints on the floor, no glowing handprints on the walls.

 

She
listened
. . .

The air ducts and the solid walls brought her the gossip and complaints of the hotel’s staff, the murmurs and cries and bored chatter of its guests, the rattle and thrum of its mechanical innards; she clearly heard the whisper of the outside wind.

She sniffed the air, analyzing the chemical traces that lingered: strongest was the alcohol and perfume of Prott’s cologne, but through the air vents she could smell kitchen grease, burned coffee, germicide, soap, cleaning fluid, stale booze, tobacco smoke–the concentrated essence of hotel.

And faint within it, a subtler essence. Something tugged at the edge of her consciousness, a presence, distant but menacing. . . .

Sparta reached for the door of Prott’s inner office. The lock was disguised as a standard magnetic type with an alphanumeric pad identical to the lock on the outer office. But the alphanumerics were dummies; the lock was actually keyed to its programmer’s fingerprints in the infrared. Only a precise pattern of warm and cool fingerprints ridges on the pad,
his
fingerprints, would open the lock.

Sparta did not have Prott’s fingerprints in her memory, but she had the means to reconstruct them.

Every human touch is unique; the skin secretes a mixture of oils and acids that ultimately depends on the genetic makeup of the individual–shared only in the case of identical twins or other clones. Sparta’s senses of touch and smell, combined with the processes of her artificial neural structures, analyzed Prott’s unique chemical fingerprints and produced a mental map of the whorls and spirals of his most recent touch on the pads–two fingers and the side of a thumb.

Reproducing the prints was trickier. It needed warmth, precision, and speed. No human could wield a tool freehand with the precision required to draw another human’s fingerprint to exact scale, but Sparta was not quite human. The dense soul’s eye beneath her forehead was orders of magnitude more capacious than the control computers of the world’s most sophisticated industrial robots.

And for warmth she needed only her own hand wrapped around a steel paperclip. Heating it in her palm, she used the curve of the clip as a stylus to reproduce Prott’s latent prints with lithographic accuracy, laying the copies lightly and swiftly on top of the originals. Then gentle pressure . . .

The lock clicked open. The door to Prott’s inner office slowly swung back. She stepped through. The pressure from the inner office to the outer office was positive, and she felt the cool outward flow of air. The fine hairs rose on her scalp.

She stepped inside. The pressure-sealed door slowly closed itself behind her.

Sparta did not need enhanced analytical faculties to detect the difference in the atmosphere; anyone who had ever been near a slaughterhouse would have known it. Anyone who had been in a shooting gallery would have recognized the smell of burned powder.

Prott’s body was on the floor behind his desk. He’d been dead for perhaps half an hour. The heat had long retreated from his limbs, leaving them blue in the darkness, but in Sparta’s eerie eyesight the core of his head and his torso still glowed like banked fires.

She knelt carefully beside the body, not touching it–but breathing deeply, looking,
listening
. . . .

When he was killed he had been sitting in his enameled desk chair, which had fallen backward and to the side. There was a neat round hole centered above his eyes and a much larger hole in the back of his skull.

Prott’s head lay twisted to one side in a pool of blood, which was congealing on the gray industrial carpet. The expression on his face could not be read, for the bullet had triggered a reflex that had left the unfortunate Prott, so careful of his looks, cross-eyed.

Sparta glanced up. There was a crater in the sandstone wall behind Prott’s desk. The polished stone was marred with a splash of drying blood, at the level of a seated man’s head.

She stood and leaned close to the hole chipped in the wall. Zeroing in, she could see microscopic flecks of soft metal gleaming in the rock matrix. The spent bullet had not embedded itself but had fallen to the floor, where the murderer had retrieved it, for otherwise Sparta would have had no trouble locating it. The faint odor of oxidized lead and copper wrote their simple formulas across the screen of her consciousness.

Sparta crossed to the door and touched the light switch. Soft yellow room light came from scallopshell glass sconces near the ceiling.
Prott’s office was large and lavish, furnished with dark leather furniture–a couch as big as a bed, deep armchairs–with low side tables of polished basalt slabs. On the floor in one corner a full-bellied alabaster jar held an arrangement of imported dried plants. There was only one picture, an inane oil in desaturated colors, contrived so as to not look too much like anything. Maybe it was a landscape. Whatever. It was visual Muzak.

The room gave no hint of a real personality; the decor was high-priced, soulless industrial design by the same firm which had done the interior of the entire stone-and-glass hotel. The books and chips in evidence were restricted to business journals, biographies of successful entrepreneurs, inspirational tracts on management. . . .

Inset into the sandstone wall near the couch was a liquor shelf, glinting glassily of brown and red and green. None of the bottles seemed to have been opened recently. The adjacent crystal glasses showed a fine haze of room dust; when Sparta looked closely, she saw no recent fingerprints. Prott was prepared to entertain business guests, but apparently he had not lately had the opportunity.

Sparta looked around the room,
felt
for it.

 

It was too featureless. Too much the dressed set.

 

She had yet to begin a serious search for clues to the identity of the killer. What already bothered her was that she did not know the real identity of the victim.

She had the records which had been beamed to her while she’d been en route to Mars, of course, but like Prott’s office they were too sterile, the sanitized resume of a middle manager’s rise through the ranks of an interplanetary hotel chain.

How convenient. And how frustrating. The man who lay dead on the carpeted floor was surely a competent hotel manager, but also, according to the testimony of the local police, he was a lecher and an expert pistol shot. Sparta’s own sense of him suggested that he was a man on the edge of a psychotic break.

Yet his resume showed the smooth curve of an undistinguished and unmarred career.

 

There was no such person as Wolfgang Prott. Not the Wolfgang Prott of record.