The Gordon Mamon Casebook (16 page)

“Not getting your point, sorry, Sue,” replied Gordon, reaching for his handheld.

“Just take a step back, huh? Try to see the big picture …”

“Sue, I’ve no problem with taking a step back, as long as there’s a safety rail. But as for the big picture … I’d rather leave that side of things to the cops.”

She mumbled something he didn’t catch, and left to get a start on the breakfast menu.

Gordon, revelling in his hardwon solitude, flicked a crossword up onto his handheld’s screen. He was soon lost in an interlocking set of cryptic clues, as all the while the Skywards Corporation’s lift-module 270 carried its lucrative cargo of passengers and freight on the ponderous three-day descent from the sprawling geostationary hotel towards the Earth’s surface.

A Night to Remember

(originally written as an ‘event’ for SpecFicNZ Blogging Week 2012, in seven daily episodes.)

There were several ‘alert’ tones programmed into Gordon’s handheld. The tone it was emitting now was reserved for the higher-ups in Skyward’s admin hierarchy (who, ironically, seldom shifted upshaft from Skyward Island, with more than one voicing the opinion that “they wouldn’t go on that thing if you paid me”) was that same ‘baaa-dum’ sound that occurs to nine out of ten middle-aged people when they see slow-motion footage of an approaching shark. From the way the handheld was sounding off, it seemed as if Gordon, and the beachfront hoverbus he was currently travelling on, must be surrounded by a veritable school of white pointers. He looked out the hoverbus’s window, at the happy vista of palm trees, tourists, and mid-afternoon tropical sunshine, and toggled the handheld’s ‘Mute’ setting.

The handheld
baaa-dum
med again.
Damn
. There weren’t that many people who had an admin override code for Gordon’s device. Whoever it was must really have a good reason for contacting him. Which was precisely why Gordon thumbed the handheld once more to ‘silent’.

With the next override, the alert tone evinced not sharks, but an infamous shower sequence in which a knife might just possibly have featured. It was probably unwise to delay further.

“Gordon here.”

“Gord! Thank goodness—been trying to reach ya. Where you at?”

“Col?” Gordon’s heart sank (not that it had been at that high an altitude to begin with, what with the inferred sharks and all). He could remember the upshot of the last call he’d taken from Colum O’Cable, the space elevator’s ops manager and HR troubleshooter. And the call before that, and the call before that. None of them had ended well, from Gordon’s perspective at least. “I’m … look, what is it you’re after? I’m kind of busy.”

“Got a job for you. Urgent. Freight run, climb commencing in one hour.”

“
One hour?
Sorry, Col. I’ve only been dirtside six hours, after the last descent. And I’d never make it back to Skyward in time. I’m … uh, in the Swiss Alps.”

“Swiss Alps? Then how come I can hear a
carousel
in the background?”

“Ah … yeah. They have carousels in the Swiss Alps, you know. One or two. Wish I could help, Col, but …”

“And a splash pool, from the sound of it. Waterslide. Kids laughing. At
this
time of night? In winter?”

“Sorry, Col, did I say ‘Swiss Alps’? I meant, ah, Acapulco Beach.” (Was Acapulco Beach more than an hour’s flight from Skyward I? He sincerely hoped so.)

“Gordon. Are you forgetting there’s a GPS telltale on your handheld? It’s showing you here on Skyward, at the corner of Clarke and Heinlein, just opposite the Marsport Without Hilda nightclub. I can see the hoverbus from … look, if you’re at Acapulco Beach, I’m at Santa’s grotto.”

“No, I—”

“Splendid. I’ll have a flitter there to pick you up in five minutes. Get off at the next bus-stop.”

“Five minutes? Col, I—look, isn’t there anywhere else crewed for this run?”

“There was. But the regular freight jockeys missed their air-taxi connection. Some team-building exercise at a stately home, in old England, that went a little too well—power failure, alarm clock malf, jetlag. Hangovers, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m still sorting out the details, and there
will
be blood. But right now I need boots on the ground, and you’re the only qualified pair of boots I can get my hands on. Thanks, Gord. There’ll be a bonus.”

For you or me?
Gordon wondered. “It’s not about the bonus, Col, it’s—oh, what the hell. What’s the freight?”

“Tell you when you get here,” said Col.

“It’s not another conference, is it? Because I swore after that last one, what was it, the
First Interorbital Symposium
on Solipsism
—”

“What are you complaining about? That went well, by all accounts.”

“Well?
That’s
what you’d call ‘well’? One hundred and ninety attendees, one hundred and eighty-nine of whom took it as a personal affront that they hadn’t been offered the keynote speaker’s spot, and who then decided to mob the lectern, all shouting “Impostors!” at each other … worst four days of my life, Col. I’d almost rather spend my time looking down the barrel of a needle-gun, wielded by this month’s homicidal maniac.”

“Ah, well. You needn’t worry about that. Just freight. Unless you wanted to swap with Barry, and depart an hour later.
That
one’s a conference. ‘Legless and Lethal’, I think it’s called, overseen by Electra Keel and Anna Conder.”

“Thank you, no. Freight? What sort of freight?”

“Tell you when you get here. It’ll be fun.”

I rather doubt that
, Gordon told himself as he reluctantly alighted from the hoverbus, to be met by the sauna-like heat of a Skyward Island afternoon, and shortly after by the promised flitter.

Something else had caught up with him, too. His handheld was showing ‘message received’. Another call must’ve come through while he was talking to Colum. Climbing aboard the flitter, he checked the handheld’s log: voice only, no callback.

The message was brief. Just five words, intoned in an ominous mechanical accent: “You will meet certain death.”

See?
thought Gordon.
That doesn’t sound like fun at all.

* * *

Was it too much of an exercise in blind optimism, he wondered, to hope it was simply a wrong number?

He made his way through the plastiglass dome of the Skyward ascent concourse. (Only Skyward would think to fashion its shopfront as what was, in effect, a gigantic greenhouse. Or more to the point, only Skyward would do such a thing on a man-made equatorial ‘island’ with 105% humidity, and then skimp on the air-conditioning … A good proportion of the milling prospective passengers within the concourse looked lost, which might have been true in some cases, but it was more likely they were suffering from the initial stages of heat exhaustion.)

Gordon fanned himself with his handheld, and swore as he noted that the escalator was out again. The stairs held no appeal in this heat.

Colum O’Cable’s hexagonal second-floor office had windows on four sides, which contrived to look out on the beaches, the parks, and the high-end shopping precincts with which Skyward Island was studded, and not on the elevator shafts which were its
raison d’etre
. It was a nice office, big, solidly constructed—remarkably well air-conditioned—yet Gordon never felt comfortable in it. A lot of that unease could be down to Colum, of course.

“So what’s the deal?” Gordon asked.

“Like I said, simple freight run. One of the tower units.” (Most of the elevator cars were six-storey, and capable of carrying a dozen guests and several staff on the three-day ascent to the Skytop Plaza; but there were a few twenty-storey units, popular for academic conferences, executive retreats, short-run reality-3V shows, and media conventions, and also used for bulky freight deliveries.)

“Carrying?”

“Ah, you’ll like this. Waxworks.”

“Waxworks?”

“Simulations of famous people—or more often infamous, I suppose—fashioned entirely from—”

“I’m familiar with the concept,” said Gordon, curtly. “I was querying the circumstance.”

“Oh. Yeah. The Iyzowt Museum’s going off-planet. Claudia herself, too.”

“Off-planet? Where? Why?”

“Moon, I think. Though we’re only tasked with the job of getting it all to Skytop, of course.”

“Why the tower block?”

“It’s a big collection. Over three hundred pieces.”

“Still, three-hundred-odd waxworks … you’d be able to fit all that on a six-floor module, I’d have thought. I mean, it’s not as though each of them would require their own room.”

“No, old lady Iyzowt wanted the space of a tall unit. Said it was important the waxworks not feel cramped, or forced into anachronistic tableaux.”

“Meaning?”

“Damned if I know. Nix on the idea of putting Ghengis in with Emily Pankhurst, or something like that.”

“She sounds a bit eccentric.”

“Did wonders for the cause of women’s suffrage, by all accounts. Though I can’t really imagine her hitting it off with Gengh—”

“
Iyzowt
.”

“Oh, Claudia Iyzowt’s more than just eccentric. She’s like a winter’s day on Orkney.”

“Meaning what?” Gordon asked.

“Short, grey, and miserable,” replied Col. “You’ll have a great time.”

“Me and who else crewing?”

“Nobody else on board. Apart from Claudia, and the waxworks, of course.”

“But—but surely, there has to be more than one staff member on board. Regulations. I mean, what if something goes wrong?”

“What can go wrong?” asked Col. “The waxworks aren’t going to cause you any problems. And Iyzowt keeps to herself, from what I’ve heard. You’ll probably hardly see her, the entire ascent. It’ll almost be like taking a vacation, and getting paid for it.”

I get paid for going on vacation as it is
, Gordon thought bitterly.
It’s called leave. It’s what I’m currently on, supposedly,
right this minute
. Though he knew from bitter experience—one-hundred-and-eighty-nine-jilted-keynote-speakers-bitter—just how futile such an assertion could be, in disputes with Col.Aloud, he asked, “Don’t suppose I have a choice, do I?”

“According to the sealed section on your employment contract?” Col replied. “In words of one syllable: not exactly, no.”

Gordon opened his mouth, thought better of it, closed it and then said instead, “Right. I’ll do it. Under protest, mind.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Col, smiling, and Gordon suddenly remembered
why
he’d chosen that ‘baaa-dum’ alert tone for his handheld.

“I need to make a call first, though,” said Gordon. “It should only take five minutes.”

Col waved him away.
Audience dismissed
.

* * *

Outside Col’s office, the heat had if anything increased as the sun slid slowly down the sky. The twinned elevator shafts, rising seemingly to infinity behind him across the concourse, left a pair of blinding-edged, metres-wide dark stripes that stretched unending across the tiled floor and beyond. Walking through the shadows, Gordon pulled his handheld out of his pocket and thumbed an icon.

“Gordon?” Belle Hopp’s voice sounded anxious and slightly impatient, though that might just have been projection on Gordon’s part.

“Sorry, Belle. Change of plan. Col called.” And Gordon was sorry. He’d been looking forward to this for weeks, for all that it was probably a mistake: office relationships, and all that. (Not that all relationships didn’t have their ups and downs, but …) Then a potential silver lining occurred to him. “I don’t suppose he called you too?”

“No. No, he didn’t,” said Belle. “A couple of months back I paid Sue to fudge my contact details on file. Best day’s salary I ever spent.”

“Sounds like I need to try that, too. Belle, I really
am
sorry.”

“Not your fault, Gord …” But there was no denying that Belle sounded disappointed, perhaps a little put out. “And … take care, huh?”

“Will do, Belle. Another time?”

“We’ll see. I hope so.”

An alert sounded. “Whoops, better go. I’ve got another call.”

But the caller had already gone by the time Gordon switched icons, leaving only a voice message: “Detective? You will meet certain death.”

Detective.

So
, thought Gordon, suddenly uneasy on as many levels as a Skyward freight tower.
Probably not a wrong number, then. Pity.

* * *

The twin columns of the space elevator, anchored into the seabed seven kilometres below Skyward Island, towered like a pair of too-straight giant beanstalks. They reached impossibly up to the clouds … and beyond. The sight always seemed to beguile the elevator’s passengers, arriving on the artificial island for what might well be their first trip off-Earth. But the elevator shafts, just a few metres wide but tens of thousands of kilometres high, had long since lost their magic as far as Gordon was concerned. It was just a job, and a job which involved placing a large dollop of trust in a monstrously extended and fundamentally delicate piece of engineering designed to hang upright in exactly the same way that incredibly long lengths of string don’t.
If climbing one-twelfth the distance to the Moon in a lightweight, mostly well-designed, and largely airtight building with no real defence against gravity was the sort of thing you enjoyed, then all power to you …

Gordon wasn’t good with heights. Well before he’d reached the top floor of the twenty-storey freight tower, he was feeling shaky. It didn’t help that the building, though still on
terra
firma
, wasn’t properly motionless: currently waiting in fourth place (behind three regularly-sized hotel modules of the type he normally crewed with Belle and Sue), it lurched in step with its neighbours along the departure facility’s heavy-duty crawlway queue towards the waiting ‘up’ shaft.

He’d let himself in on the basement level and was momentarily startled to be confronted by a couple of large wooden crates and a suit of armour, until he remembered this climb’s cargo.
Waxworks
. He picked his way past the obstacles—they didn’t look like they’d been properly stowed, but Gordon wasn’t freight handling: he was just listed as ‘staff on duty’. He’d put through a call to Freight, in the half-hour that remained before ascent commenced. It’d only take them a couple of minutes to put things right.