The Light That Never Was (21 page)

Brance said slowly, “None of that fits what’s happening here. Wes Alof is agitating against Jorno because Jorno brought animaloids to Donov. Alof may be a paid agent, but he’s also from the world of Xeniol, he saw an animaloid eat his mother and two sisters, or so he says, and he acts as though he came by all that hatred honestly.”

“We didn’t know that,” Gair said.

“Most of the artists have been making money painting Virrab scenes, and Jorno has put up a new lodge so artists can visit Virrab, and except for a few of Alof’s cronies the artists are out of this. They like Jorno. The townspeople don’t—Jorno has a loudmouthed assistant who went around proclaiming that Virrab would put Zrilund out of business, and the Zrilunders took that seriously. So they’re trying to get Jorno’s resort license canceled, and they’ve held up his application for membership in the league of resort owners, and if they can think of any other petty harassment they’ll try it. What is it you want me to do?”

“Keep your mouth shut about all of this, and keep your eyes and ears open. If you notice anything that seems connected with it, let me know at once. Will you do that?”

“I can’t think of any reason why not. I recently gave a friend of mine a lecture about how I love this old island, and the island won’t amount to much if the world it’s on is smashed.”

Bron Demron brought a distinguished visitor to Wargen’s office. He said, “This is Jaward Jorno—oh, you know each other.”

“But certainly,” Jorno said, and Wargen politely touched wrists with him.

“Mr. Jorno has handed me a police problem that’s slightly outside my jurisdiction,” Demron said. “I suppose I should give it to the Minister of External Affairs, but it’s such a strange thing—here, have a look.” Jorno silently passed a box to Wargen, and when Wargen finally managed to speak he was amazed that his voice sounded so calm.

“Where’d you get it?” he asked.

“It was displayed at Mestil Space Central,” Jorno said. “The departure terminal.”

It was a common type of merchandise display, a counter-top automatic dispenser. It contained tubes of a white powder. The display was labeled, “
Donov Travelers
: Virrab Island water is unsafe. Avoid illness, take your own water purifier with you.”

“Were there others?” Wargen asked.

“This is the only one I know about,” Jorno said. “There’s a kind of fiendish cleverness in that, too. If whoever did it had placed a lot of them in the terminal, someone would have brought it to my attention at once. Just the one was overlooked until finally one of my own men chanced to see it.”

“We’ll have to have the stuff analyzed,” Wargen said.

“I already have. It is a water purifier, a well-known brand on Mestil and a rather good product. It’s potent against a shocking number of diseases, all of which are enumerated on the label—implying that they are endemic on Virrab. The manufacturer denies any knowledge of the display—truthfully, I believe—and there is no other identification.”

“Do you have any idea as to who could have done it?”

“If it’d happened a month ago, I’d have said Zrilund—the townspeople or the artists or both. They had this foolish notion that Virrab Island posed some kind of threat to them, and unfortunately my assistant made some silly remarks that were easy to misinterpret. We now have this straightened out. Zrilund and Virrab have established a new resort association to publicize art colony vacations, and I’ve made the Zrilund artists happy by constructing facilities for guest artists at Virrab, No, I have no idea at all, except that if my resort were to fail, no one on Mestil would grieve.”

“It’s the obvious conclusion, but I’m suspicious of obvious conclusions. As for your differences with Zrilund, this display could have been placed there before they were resolved.”

“True,” Jorno agreed.

“I’ll take charge of this, if you don’t mind. I’ll see that the Minister of External Affairs lodges an immediate protest, and we’ll alert our diplomatic staffs everywhere to be on the lookout for similar material. Without a definite clue as to the source, that’s the only action possible.”

Wargen took the display to the Department of External Affairs, and after a brief conversation with the minister he went to see the World Manager.

Korak heard him out in silence.

“I never realized how vulnerable Donov is,” Wargen said. “Our enemies on other worlds can spread the most outrageously libelous material, and if those worlds choose not to co-operate, there’s nothing we can do.”

“That’s one of the reasons why Donov was so reluctant to make itself a haven for refugees,” Korak said. “Fortunately there is an Interworld Tribunal, and worlds that don’t co-operate can be called to account. Unfortunately, stopping this kind of thing won’t eradicate its effects. Those who read the message remember it long after the display has been removed.”

Wargen nodded. “Just as exposing those responsible for sending thieves to Donov won’t restore the former good relations between our rural population and the artists. That’ll take time.”

“Ah! You think there’s a similarity?”

“Only in that both are malicious and both are clumsy—childishly clumsy. I’ve wondered if what we’re experiencing isn’t the result of someone’s fumbling attempt to emulate what happened on the riot worlds. Some of the things that caused the riots could have been done deliberately—the thefts on Tworth, for example, or the arson on Bbrona, or perhaps even the landslides on Mestil. If so, they were done with a fiendish efficiency of an entirely different order than the one that sends us thieves disguised as artists and sets up libelous merchandise displays. If that master touch ever appears on Donov, I’m sure we’ll recognize it.”

“Very well. As for the display of water purifier, at least we’re alerted. We know what to look for.”

Wargen shook his head. “Being alerted doesn’t help much when we’ve no idea who’s responsible, or what they’ll try next, or where.”

The flashing night signal awakened Wargen. Bron Demron’s scowling face announced, “Jorno. Asked me to come to Rinoly at once. Want to come along?”

“Did he say why?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. From what I’ve seen of the man, he wouldn’t summon a world superintendent of police at this hour if it were merely a question of another merchandise display.”

Wargen squinted at his clock. “It’s already daylight at Rinoly. Shall we meet at the port?”

“Right. Police office. I’ll arrange a special flight.”

Two hours later, with Jorno beside them, they stared down at an undulating, blood-red sea. White blobs dotted it—the bloating bellies of dead fish—and here and there could be seen the iridescent plumage of giant sea birds floating limply with vast wings extended.

Jorno spoke hoarsely. “There’s much less damage out here.”

Demron’s voice was a stunned whisper. “Why? Why would anyone—”

Wargen did not speak at all. Like Demron, he did not want to believe, but he had seen the filmstrips of the Mestil riots and read M’Don’s reports. The correct question was why men hate, because someone assuredly had hated enough to wantonly destroy, but the answer to that lay in the provinces of medicine and philosophy. The police question was not why, but who.

“Any idea what the stuff is?” he asked finally.

“A mesz chemist is analyzing it now,” Jorno said. “It’s an oil, it’s a dye, and it’s a poison. He’s trying to find out which of each, and in what combination. As you saw, it was much more deadly inshore. The current and wave action may have reduced its potency, or maybe the kinds of fish out here are less affected by it.”

“When did you discover it?”

“At dawn the meszs found the seaward beaches of Mestil Island stained and littered with dead fish. The stuff is especially deadly on the gulpers. They breathe air, you know, and they seem to take in a little surface water with each breath. Meaning a little poison, probably one breath finished them. The entire population along this shore may be wiped out. Then the scavenger fish were poisoned when they ate dead gulpers, and the birds were killed the same way. The chain of life along the Rinoly coast will be altered for generations if not forever.” He spoke to the pilot, who made a long, banking turn. “Now we’ll land and have a look from Virrab.”

Jorno’s calm seemed monumental and ominous. Demron was muttering half-audible plaints about such things not happening on Donov, Wargen reserved his anger for later; he had more pressing uses for his energy. He needed to know which members of the Mestillian embassy had been absent from Donov Metro the previous night, and whether any of Ronony Gynth’s group of congenial henchmen had slipped the scan his men were maintaining. He needed to know whether anyone on Zrilund was not happy about the agreement with Jorno and whether any of the Zrilund fishing fleet could not be accounted for. The moment they landed, he insisted on dispatching a stack of messages.

He also informed the World Manager that the master touch had come to Donov.

They stood at the northern tip of Virrab Island looking across at the mainland, and Jorno said, “My guess is that they made two dumpings. They were expecting the stuff to drift south along both shores and ruin the resort beaches, but they didn’t know the currents. There’s a strong southern current that follows the mainland close inshore and then veers around the islands and heads out to sea. Then there’s a weak northern countercurrent between the islands and the mainland. As a result the poison was carried past the islands on the seaward side. When you start looking for the person responsible, you can take it that he’s no native of Rinoly. A native would have known the currents.”

Wargen turned and walked along the rocky northern shore of the island. The cliffs towered abruptly over the narrow beach, and he had to press close to them to avoid a drenching from the occasional heavy surf. The standing pools of water were stained red, as was the base of the cliffs, and a few dead gulpers floated in the pools. The next high tide would probably obliterate the damage.

On Mestil and the smaller islands, where the land sloped away in lovely beaches, the once gleaming white sand was a filthy red. The meszs had cleared only a short stretch of their seaward beach, and already their pile of dead fish was mountainous.

“We can’t dispose of them until we find out what the poison is,” Jorno said. “If they can be used for fertilizer, that’ll solve the problem—every farmer in Rinoly needs some—but we’ll have to he certain that the poison wouldn’t affect the soil or seep into water supplies. I don’t know what to do about the beaches. We may have to remove the sand and replace it.”

“Are you certain that your differences with Zrilund were resolved?” Wargen asked.

“Positive. I went there myself and had a very amicable meeting with everyone concerned. Anyway, I’d hardly expect the people of Zrilund to be ruining their own island, and the same thing has happened there.”

“You mean—poison dye—”

Jorno nodded. “Early this morning I was willing to suspect anyone, so while I was waiting for you I called a friend of mine in Zrilund. Rearm Hylat is his name, he’s the landlord of the Zrilund Town Hostel and a very good man. I told him what had happened and asked him whether any of the leading troublemakers—of which Zrilund has several—had left the island. He called back a short time later. It wasn’t dawn yet, so he didn’t know whether it was the same red dye, but some early-rising fishermen found the beaches filled with dead fish.”

Through most of the year the principal currents about the island of Zrilund were those generated by the gentle winds. They blew east, toward the mainland, at night, and west during the day, and it required no involved calculation for Wargen to deduce that the Zrilund beaches would be awash with poison for days or even weeks as the winds took it back and forth and made the island a quiet vortex of death.

Awash with poison and buried in dead fish and birds. This was the native home of the gulper, and where Mestil Island had mountainous piles, the Zrilund beaches were inundated and the blood-red sea choked with them.

A few painters were at work on the cliffs even though no tourists had appeared or were likely to. Some painted the red sea, a novelty, and some even included the dead fish. Since the souvenir-hunting tourists would be repelled by such a scene, Wargen was forced to conclude that crises sometimes jolted the most prosaic painter into heroic leaps of imagination. One was painting a bird’s-eye view of Zrilund, which he envisioned as shaped like an enormous dead fish surrounded by millions of tiny islands. The catastrophe might even provide an impetus that would convert one or two souvenir painters into genuine artists, but it was, Wargen thought ruefully, an excessive price to pay for art.

No local authority or combination of authorities could cope with a catastrophe of such colossal scope. The dead fish would have to be strained from the sea before they became a serious health hazard and an offense to the nose as well as to the eyes. The poison would have to be neutralized. If action were delayed, the first strong onshore wind would pile poison and dead fish onto the mainland.

Wargen sent the necessary messages and had another terse conversation with the World Manager. Then, meditating a problem even more immediate than dead fish and poison, he walked over to the town oval. Something had to be done about the people of Zrilund.

They moved about dazedly, they spoke to each other in whispers, and they did not seem to notice Wargen when he passed them. He circled the oval and entered the Zrilund Town Hostel, and the two men seated at the back of the room looked up at him irritably. One, Arnen Brance, he had seen before. He recognized Rearm Hylat from Jorno’s description.

“We’re closed!” Hylat called bitterly.

“When did a Zrilund landlord ever turn away a customer?” Wargen asked with a smile. He sat down and introduced himself.

“Zrilund is ruined,” Hylat said gloomily.

“Nonsense! It’s ruined only if you people persist in sitting around with your mouths drooping. To work, man! Zrilund has twenty registered fishing boats. I want them out there at once seining the dead fish.”

“What are twenty boats with a billion billion dead fish?”