Chapter eleven: One might as well believe the legends of Colonel Maximilian's ghost.

Previous Chapter

We picked up readables of the reports from the secretary, and she promised to pump the data sets over to PD headquarters that afternoon. Then we got into our waiting motor squid and left for the station.

"I don't like the way this is going," said Calvin as we pulled away from the Column.

"How so?" I asked.

"I don't like the way this case keeps expanding. Every time we see somebody it gets bigger. First we were looking into the history of Sheila Mason. Then we find ourselves looking for Doria Adams. Now we're trying to locate Thomas Grayling, and maybe Michael Deere as well. Every loose end leads to another loose end. And it's all a big tangle."

"Thus do I cut the Gordian Knot," I quoted.

"Huh?" he said, then caught the reference. "Yeah, maybe we need some sword work here. Damned if I know what to do about it though." He looked at me expectantly, but I was fresh out of wit.

"I haven't an inkling," I told him.

"In most homicides," he said, "at least here around Sky City, you get pretty simple situations. A cut up at a lifter bar is easy. Either you have the guy immediately, or 'nobody seen nuthin.' If you spend the time on those, sometimes someone will get convinced to help you out and you make an arrest. Otherwise, you're out of luck.

"Then we get the family kills. Some husband hits his wife too hard, and she dies. Or he hits her too hard and she sticks a knife in his gut for it. Or her brother does. Or somebody's father snores too loud and he has a little too much life insurance. It's a nice circumscribed situation and you either get it or you don't."

I wasn't quite sure why he was telling me all this. Maybe he was just trying to reassure himself that he really was an experienced homicide detective; that he had plenty of experience with murders, even if he was feeling a little out of his depth on this case. Or maybe he was trying to delimit our problem by listing all the things that it was not. For whatever reason, there was an uncustomary edge to his voice, a note that said that maybe this case was beginning to really get to him.

"Or maybe somebody kills somebody for money," he continued, a little louder than before. "Find out who profits and you find yourself a killer. The tough ones are where too many people make money off the deceased. Or there's a heist and somebody shows up who shouldn't and we find the body later. Those we usually write off. The trail goes cold 'way too fast.

"Sometimes people just disappear and we suspect foul play but have no corpus delicti. We usually don't solve those. If the killer manages to dump a body over the side or through the floor, we're clutching clouds. Nothing to go on, no investigation.

"Now we're stuck with not one but maybe three disappearing acts. If all three were cloud dumps, we're screwed."

"Sheila wasn't a cloud dump," I observed.

"That's right," he said. "So maybe the other three are still alive. Or maybe they're in some waste dump and mostly decomposed by now. We only found Sheila's body by accident, remember."

"I remember," I said. "Maybe it would have been better if you hadn't."

"Well, it's too late to put her back," he said. "We'll follow this as the tangle takes us."

# # #

We interviewed Grayling's investigators that afternoon and the following morning, but there wasn't a lot to learn. Mickey, Thomas, and Doria had last showed up on the data nets using Thomas' debit card in a small club called Turbolift, on the edge of the warehouse district. That had been nearly three weeks back, and no one at the club remembered seeing them, even though Grayling's people were willing to pay for information. The club personnel certainly weren't going to have better memories for the police.

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Deere even addicted himself to prescription painkillers so he could go through the treatment program with the kid.
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The trio had clearly been club hopping, since the money trail showed up in half a dozen clubs over the course of two days. In a couple of those clubs someone did remember something, usually just Doria's face, which was the sort that men sometimes remember. But that was it, just a couple of good-looking kids with an older man watching over them. Not the sort of contingent that tends to get into much trouble, not with as competent a chaperone as Mickey Deere seemed to have been.

Then nothing. Dead end. Deere had apparently left the City the following morning, but never again used e-money.

"Why would he leave?" Calvin asked me. "What could have made him abandon the kids and skip?"

"I don't think he did," I told him. "I don't know about Thomas or Doria, but I'm pretty sure that Deere is dead. At first I thought he might have turned somehow, thrown Thomas over for someone. But looking at his record, the photos of him and Thomas, the clinic records, there's no way. The man loved Thomas, maybe more than Grayling Senior did. Certainly he spent more time with Thomas than the father did. Christ, Deere even addicted himself to prescription painkillers so he could go through the treatment program with the kid."

"So why did he leave the City?" Calvin asked me.

"I don't think he did," I told him. "At least not through one of the checkpoints. I think one of his fingers did."

Calvin closed his eyes. "Oh, Jesus," he said softly. "I thought the ID mechs could sense a dead finger."

"Not if you attach it to the right machinery," I told him. Give it artificial blood and an artificial beat and the check-mechs will dance to it. You probably don't get that much of it here."

"So somebody really knows what they're doing," he said.

"Not really," I said. "They just think they do."


# # #


So loose ends became dead ends and night fell. Calvin told me that he had a few other things to follow up on and hinted that he had an important package on the way, but he wouldn't say from where. I didn't press him on it.

My internal clock was jangled again. The dark had come and I was wide awake. I wanted to make a couple of air runs, just to get away from people, or maybe go train at Sensei Mack's, but neither of those were available at that hour. I decided to go home and think about it. But when I got to my room, there was somebody already there.

Locks give a false sense of security, I think, which is one of the reasons why I don't have use them. I don't own anything worth stealing, and maybe once a month I come home to find that someone has been in my room, looked through my stuff, and left empty handed, probably cursing me for being a pauperous ass.

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Locks give a false sense of security, I think…
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I do have ways of letting me know if my door has been opened in my absence, however, and whether or not anyone is still there. What I came home to that night was telltales that told me of entry and the way the zipper was placed showed that they were still there. So it was with some caution that I unzipped my room door. I heard a voice coming from inside as soon as I began to open the second flap, and light spilled out into the darkened corridor. I relaxed a bit. People don't usually announce an ambush.

Robert Grayling was there with two of his men flanking the door. Grayling himself was on a mobile comm unit. He had noticed my entry immediately.

"Hey, Charlie, can I call you back later? ....Yeah, I know, but someone just arrived, and it's important that I meet with them... No, I'm not at my office... Yeah, give me maybe an hour, I'll get back to you."

Grayling looked at me. He was seated in the inflatable chair that Calvin Lee had left behind on his first visit.

"Hello, Mr. Honlin," Grayling said as he rose and held out his hand toward me. I ignored the proffered hand and looked at the two men who now stood beside me after my entrance. One of them was Smith, the other had also been in Grayling's office when Calvin and I had come calling.

"I don't think you've introduced me to your other shadow," I said.

"Oh, excuse me," said Grayling. He turned his outstretched hand and made a gesture. "Ed Honlin, Richard Lusk. Mr. Lusk is one of my personal assistants. I believe you have already met my other assistant, Mr. Smith."

"Yes, I believe we've met," I allowed.

Grayling looked at me and I looked back at him. I didn't figure that I had an end of the conversation to hold up, so I said nothing more.

After the awkward pause, Grayling said, "Walter, Richard, would you please wait outside in the corridor?"

"There's a lounge down at the end of the corridor to the right," I told him. "Plenty of light there, if your assistants want to read a book or something."

"I believe they will probably wait just outside your door," Grayling said in a neutral tone.

"Suit yourself," I told them. "If anybody asks, just tell them you're part of a new security system I'm thinking of buying. We've had a lot of break-ins around here lately."

Grayling forced a chuckle in appreciation of my sparkling wit, and his two men left the room. "If you don't want people coming in, you should get a lock," said Grayling.

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I didn't figure that I had an end of the conversation to hold up.
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I shrugged. "If I got a lock, someone might think I had something worth stealing," I told him.

He looked around the room. "I don't think there is much chance of that, do you?"

I shrugged again. "Should I flip you for the seat, or will you accept it as hospitality? Maybe as a going away gift?"

That one he actually found funny, for some reason. He laughed out loud. "Okay," he said. "You have me off balance. I have no idea what I expected when I came here, but this isn't it. You are a strange man, Mr. Honlin, and I think I may need your help."

"My help, or that of the police?" I asked him.

"Your personal help," he said. "Oh, I know. Before you say something about your relationship with the police, let me add that I do not propose that you do anything illegal or unethical. It is just that...." His voice trailed off, and he shook his head.

"Let me get to that later," he said. "You no doubt realize that I can and have performed a bit of an investigation on you. I have numerous connections back on Luna, so it was fairly easy to get your basic files and service records."

I shrugged. "Actually, that seems to be a common sport, these days."

He nodded. "And so you also know what those records contain, and maybe more to the point, what they don't contain."

"That has come up in conversation recently, yes," I said.

"The police here might not recognize your name, however," he said. "Whereas a Luna native might. Winslow Honlin was a relative of yours, yes?"

"If you got my full file, you know he was," I said. "My twice great grandfather. He was in Maximilian's first cabinet, then later he was mayor of Copernicus."

"He also had four children, according to records," said Grayling. "Again, a fact of significance to Luna citizens."

"He did it more honestly than some," I said. "He had four wives, one at a time."

"Ah, yes," he said. "Great Grandpere Grayling was also somewhat fecund. Two legal children and three illegitimate ones. Fortunately for my social standing, I am from the legitimate side of the family."

Well, it was really great to stand there and compare family bibles, but I was beginning to wish that Grayling would cut to the chase.

"Here on Venus, money counts for a lot," Grayling continued. "At least as much as position, maybe more. Quite the reverse is true on Luna, but of course you know that. You were born into a family of importance. Then you took a career of importance. One would have expected great things from you."

"One could always be mistaken," I said.

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"Fortunately for my social standing, I am from the legitimate side of the family."
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"Perhaps," he replied, "But I may doubt that a little. Your records come to a blank nine years ago, and don't unblank until you emigrate to Venus, where you live in a hovel wearing a hair shirt. Why is that?"

"Well," I pointed out, "All bloonsilk fabrics are technically made of hair. It's a spun protein, after all..."

"Stop it!" he demanded, clapping his hands together and startling us both by his loud vehemence. "Stop making light of this! This is my son's life at stake here! I need to know who you are and why you are here and whether or not you can help me find my son! Answer me! What happened to you on Luna, and why are you here?"

"I think you should lower your voice," I said quietly. "Your two goons are right outside my door, and if they come in here too quickly, I might have to do something we'll all regret a little later."

Sure enough, a little beep at Grayling's waist gave a yelp, and Grayling lifted the comm to his mouth and said, "It's okay, remain where you are."

Well, that answered the question of whether or not the guys outside were hearing the whole exchange. Grayling didn't want them to hear any more than they could get through a sound absorbing door.

Grayling was pacing now, shooting me little darting glances while he talked. He was doing a really good job of looking like a man at the end of his tether, ready to crack from the strain. I think I mostly believed that he was actually what he looked like.

"My business success depends in large measure on my family contacts, I admit that freely," he said. "I have an uncle who is on the Skyhook Authority, and relatives back on Luna who can keep me informed on the latest fashion trends. Actually, not a few of them help to set the trends. A man of your background must be aware of the importance of family, yes?" I nodded, as much to mollify him as anything else.

"Some of my contacts tell me of some odd occurrences over the past ten years. Nothing that you can really get your fingers around, but odd nonetheless. When a few too many of a certain sort of person die within a short period of time, there is talk. When well-placed people resign for reasons of health, or to spend more time with their families, there is likewise talk. Such talk leads to rumors, and sometimes the rumors get specific. They name names. They are fabulous yarns. One cannot believe them all. One might as well believe the legends of Colonel Maximilian's ghost."

I continued to say nothing. He'd get to the point eventually, and this not a man to prod. Nor did I want to tell him about who and what Maximilian's ghost really was.

"Have you ever hear of Operation Andorra?" he asked me.

I pretended to think. "No," I said, which was the truth.

"You would say that even if you had heard of it, of course," he said.

"Yes," I admitted. "But I haven't heard of it nevertheless." I had a good idea of what it was, though. Pretty much the same as Operation Monaco, would be my guess.

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They are fabulous yarns. One cannot believe them all. One might as well believe the legends of Colonel Maximilian's ghost."
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He looked at me sideways, a wave of considerable anguish washed over his face. "I've said too much," he said. Nice to know that reason hadn't completely left his grasp. "This doesn't get us anywhere."

"I'll second that," I told him. "Why don't you just tell me what you want from me?"

"Find my son," he told me, to my complete lack of surprise. "Alive, if possible, but if he is dead, find out who killed him and why."

"I'm sure that the police will spare no effort..." I began.

"Of course, of course," he interrupted me with a wave. "Just as they are sparing no effort to find the killer of this Mason woman. Maybe her death has something to do with my son. I hope not, God, I hope not, but it may. Either way, I want word of my son. I'll make it worth your while, if you wish. I can be quite generous to those who do me favors."

Yeah, I thought. I have a real knack for doing favors for important people. "Look," I said. "I'll do what I can. But I'm not Superman, okay? I don't have any magic powers, no matter what sort of crap you may have heard from your folks back on Luna. And I do things for my own reasons, and nobody else's. Right now, it looks like finding your son would suit me very well, so I'll give it a shot. But that's all I can promise. I'll give it a shot. And I don't like to have my elbow jogged while I'm working, so lay off me from here on out, got that? If I find something, I can tell you what my price will be, and that's to leave me alone after this is over, too. I like to be left alone, in case you haven't picked up on it yet. Maybe I'm wearing a hair shirt, but it fits me swell, and I like it just fine. So just leave me alone, okay?"

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Yeah, I thought. I have a real knack for doing favors for important people.
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My little speech was complete with hand gestures and intonation changes, and I watched his face during the performance. Somewhere about the middle of it he finally got his mask muscles working again. That was something at any rate. And maybe he got what he came for, whatever that was. I got what I wanted too, because he turned and left without saying another word.

Next Chapter

Chapter ten: Could I take this guy?

Previous Chapter

I went home and caught a few hours sleep and sometime while I slept, the winds of the upper air propelled Sky City into the light. The dawn came, morning advanced, and I had just finished breakfast in the hotel coffee shop when a busboy came over to my table to tell me that a motor squid had arrived for me.

Calvin Lee was already in the squid. "Sleep well?" he asked.

"I don't remember, which means I slept pretty well," I told him. He grunted in response.

"We're off to see Robert Grayling," he said after the squid left the dock. "We called and his secretary told us to come right over. That's odd, isn't it?"

"No stalling, no runarounds, no 'please see my people about it?' From someone with Grayling's sort of money?" I nodded. "Yeah, something is up with Mr. Grayling. Did you tell them the purpose of the visit?"

"They didn't ask."

"Something has him rattled," I said. "Whatever it is, we'll find out soon enough."

"That's the way I see it, too," Calvin replied, nodding.

Grayling's office was in the Skyhook Column, the large cluster of bloons that were directly connected to the Skyhook. They don't have direct access to the Hook, of course. There's a fairly narrow terminus mouth to the Skyhook, with a lot of ancillary equipment and a huge organization to insure the most efficient transport of material up to and down from Anchorage, over seventy thousand kilometers up. The bloons surrounding the Skyhook serve as extra lift, and allow more servicing equipment and personnel to work on the Skyhook itself.

The Column towers above even the Heights where Marjori Low and the others of the social elite of Sky City live. The outer layer of the Column has the most expensive office clusters on Venus. Robert Whitley Grayling had one of the largest of them.

The bloons that housed Grayling's business offices were over a kilometer above the mass of Sky City. From that height the bloons below looked like a frothy mass of bubbles, both large and small, in hues of silver, green, and brown, stretching out nearly to the horizon. Only a line of white marked the north and south directions, where the City's edge was closer. To the east and west, the Circle stretched forever.
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"Something has him rattled," I said. "Whatever it is, we'll find out soon enough."
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Grayling's company was named Cytherean Flux, an import export firm with a number of manufacturing subsidiaries. Some of the displays set up in the lobby showed beautiful women in bloonsilk garments. I made the assumption that the company traded in garments, rather than women, but I might have been wrong. Other photographs came with text descriptions of the fine work done by imported electronics, pharmaceuticals, small electric motors, and bioengineered organisms. One ongoing project apparently involved the flavor alteration of bloon produced proteins to mimic unavailable Earth delicacies like lamb and salmon. As if anyone had an idea of what they really tasted like, I thought uncharitably.

The receptionist was a short blonde woman with a reserved smile, but we had almost no chance to speak with her before a smooth young man with an even smoother manner came out of an elevator toward us.

I felt a certain adrenalin twinge as the young man approached. He was compact rather than short, with a bland face that could disappear in a crowd. He had the usual brown eyes, average brown hair, and the general mixed race look that most of us Lunars have. But he looked like someone who was not going to stop at obstacles, for all his seeming deference.

"Mr. Lee, Mr. Honlin?" he said, holding out a hand to greet us. "I'm Walter Smith, Mr. Grayling's assistant."

Calvin and I shook the indicated appendage, each in turn. One shake of Smith's hand confirmed my initial impression. There was an easy solidity to his grasp that put several more of my inner sentinels on alert. I'd have been willing to bet that he worked out at least six times a week in some activity that, if used to a purpose, could kill or maim an antagonist in seconds. Smith had the look and carriage of a trained fighter, hidden beneath a mannered exterior. The automatic internal question "Could I take this guy?" had come back, "You don't want to find out."

We followed Smith into the elevator, and let it haul us up the three levels to Grayling's private office. It was an older elevator, with a slow motor, so our eyes had begun to adjust to dimmer light by the time the doors opened. The sudden brightness made us blink.

Grayling's office was almost overpoweringly bright. The basic color was white, relieved only by dead black furniture and a few abstract wall hangings in primary colors. The exterior wall was an unbroken sheet of transparency, utterly clean and with so few reflections that it seemed almost invisible, as if the entire office perched on the side of a cliff with a sheer drop to the curve of the City below. The effect was almost overpowering, probably intentionally so, a bit of an edge in any dealings that Grayling might pursue.

Smith preceded us as we stepped out of the elevator into the office. There was another man cut from the same mold as Smith, seated to our immediate right as we entered the room. In the distant corner was what I presumed was Grayling's desk, since the man I took to be Grayling was seated at it. Smith announced in a flat voice without inflection, "Mr. Lee and Mr. Honlin are here to see you, sir."

I was mildly surprised that Smith's voice carried all the way to Grayling's desk, which was a good fifteen meters from the elevator. But Grayling rose and met us halfway. He must have made some signatory gesture to the other men in the room, or maybe they always left the room when Grayling took a meeting. At any rate they both vanished behind sudden openings in the walls that were not apparent to the eye once they had closed again. Whether or not they continued to observe us after they had left, I couldn't say, but from time to time skin on the back of my neck would tighten.

Grayling was a tallish man, maybe one hundred and eighty centimeters, who walked with the carriage of one who had grown up under lower gravity -- another Lunar transplant, in other words. Smith had also had a trace of that look to him, as had the other man, whose name had never been given to us. So Grayling was Luna-born and hired Lunars for his staff. What that meant, I didn't know. His file has said he'd come to Venus while in his teens, along with his father who had left Luna after some failed business dealings and a divorce. The elder Grayling had then died a few years later, leaving his son with a small textile business on the eastern edge of the City.
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The sudden brightness made us blink.
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After that there was a typical story of business success. Young Grayling had leveraged his newly inherited textile business into the Luna/Venus trade, abetted both by family connections back on Luna and a good sense of what the newly fashion conscious consumers on both worlds might like to possess in any given year. By his mid-thirties, Robert W. Grayling had become rich. By his mid-fifties, he had become extremely rich.

The man who now shook our hands was trim, with an oval face topped by graying brown hair long enough to hide his slightly prominent ears. His face betrayed a certain amount of strain, recent enough to clash with the already established lines of his skin. The established lines of his face were those of someone who was long accustomed to giving commands and having them obeyed. "Hello, gentlemen," he said to us. "To what do I owe the visit?"

"We would like to talk to your son," Calvin told him. "He has a comm line, but he does not seem to answer it."

Grayling tightened at the mention of his son. Then relaxed slightly when Calvin's entire statement had sunk in.

"Why do you want to see him?" he asked. "Is he suspected of any wrongdoing?"

"No," Calvin assured him. "The entire matter is a bit complicated. We are investigating the murder of a woman named Sheila Mason. One of our leads in the case is a friend of Miss Mason's named Doria Adams, who we think may have been a friend of your son's. So we need to talk to your son about Miss Adams and her whereabouts.

Grayling bit his lip for an indecisive moment as he took that in, then seemingly made a decision. With that decision came an almost inaudible sigh. He said, "When I heard that two homicide detectives wanted to see me, I expected the worst. Now I don't know what to expect."
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[F]rom time to time skin on the back of my neck would tighten.
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He looked at us and made a gesture of explanation. "I was afraid that you had come to tell me my son was dead, you see. I haven't seen or heard from him, no one has, in over two weeks. Quite frankly, the worry is enough to drive me nearly insane."

Calvin scowled at this news. I don't want to even think what my own face looked like. "Why haven't you reported this?" Calvin demanded.

Grayling winced. "Because I thought it might be a kidnapping, of course. I was hoping that I would be able to get Thomas back by paying a ransom, and I feared that involving the police might panic the kidnappers. Or whatever. I hired several private detectives, of course, and I made some discreet inquiries through my contacts in the bureaucracy at City Central. They tell me that Thomas' bodyguard, Mickey Deere has left the City, but Thomas has not. That absolutely should not happen. Mick is a reliable man, or so I thought, and he would not have left Thomas voluntarily. So I don't know what to think."

"Have you received any other information that might indicate that there has been a kidnapping?" I asked.

"No, none," Grayling replied. "But the other possibilities are much too horrible to think about."

"Do you know of anyone who might try to get at you through your son for reasons other than ransom?" I asked.

He looked blank. Which was odd. He wasn't dumb, the idea must have occurred to him. But he asked, "Like what?"

"Such as business dealings where someone might be trying for an extra advantage, or deals that have gone sour enough so that someone might try to exact revenge."

"Lord no," he said. "At least I don't think so. I mean, there are often sore losers in any big deal, but . . . ." He paused. "What sort of maniac would harm a man's family for revenge over business dealings?"

That was a little too ingenuous for a man who'd made millions, I thought to myself. He must really be under a lot of strain to be trying "poor naive little me," on us. But I let it pass.

"You say that you hired private investigators to check into your son's disappearance," I said. "Can we speak to them? Are you willing to turn over their reports and other files to us?"

Grayling bit his lip again. "I suppose so," he said. "Yes, that would probably be a good idea."

He looked at us and another flicker of anguish made it through his expression. "I love my son," he told us, as if he were afraid that someone might think otherwise. "I try to do right by him, but I'm often unsure as to what that means. His mother died fifteen years ago, a suicide. You don't get over something like that, even as an adult. As for an eight year old boy . . ."

He paused, again trying for control. He was obviously used to being in control, and his lack of it where his son was concerned was an open wound. He started up again, "I presume you know that my son was in a drug addiction program a while back?"

"That was where he met Miss Adams," Calvin told him.

"Yes, that is true," Grayling said. "Thomas was seen in Miss Adams's company just before he vanished. You will find that in the investigators' reports. Thomas may have been in love with Miss Adams, in fact. I never met her, however, and although Mr. Deere was supposed to report on such things to me, I think that he may have had some mixed loyalties. If Thomas asked him to keep a secret from me, Mickey might have done so from time to time, even though I paid his salary."

Grayling looked at us. "Mickey Deere is a good man. He has been my employee for nearly twenty years and for much of that time he has served at Thomas' companion. I cannot believe that he would be involved in harming Thomas in any way. Nor can I believe that he would have left Thomas, if Thomas were still alive. So I'm at my wit's end."

"When can we see the investigators' reports?" I asked.

"I'll have my secretary give them to you," he said.

"We will probably wish to speak to the investigators themselves," I suggested.
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Thomas may have been in love with Miss Adams, in fact.
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"That will be fine," he said absently. His face had developed that look again. Of trying not to think about images that came all to easily to the imagination. Not even money can buy off imagination. That is one of the reasons why money has few charms for me.

"We'll check out these reports and such and get back to you, Mr. Grayling," Calvin told him. "Come on, Ed. Let's see the secretary." My partner was obviously uncomfortable. Maybe he wasn't used to seeing so many important people quite so naked.

Next Chapter

Chapter nine: AKA, 'not his real name.'

Previous Chapter

Besides Wilma Fiore and Jean Fallow, both of whom lived nearly half the world away on the Circle, Deeth Moran was our only remaining contact for the therapy group that was itself our only slim connection to Doria Adams. Neither Calvin nor I expected much from Moran, and we were not disappointed.

Moran worked the docking bays and warehouses on the underside of the City Hub, well below from the Skyhook terminus, but within the City's center zone. Reaching the Hub underside from the area of the police headquarters was a matter of elevator transport and a modicum of walking. The warehouse bloons are very large, dirigible-sized, each with a single entry point for security. The connecting corridors are narrow, large enough for a two narrow wheeled lifts to barely pass.

From what Mrs. Low had said about Moran, it seemed a good idea to be discreet in our inquiries, so I asked the shift boss to see Moran, but didn't identify myself as being from the police.

"Who's looking for him?" the shift boss asked, in a tone that made me dislike the man instantly. He was a short stocky little fellow, with shoulders not quite broad enough to carry all the chips stacked on them.

"I'm a private investigator working on a missing persons case," I told him. "Mr. Moran knows a friend of the individual who is missing, that's all. I'm just looking for a little information, nothing fancy."

"Moran gets off in fifteen minutes," the boss said. "You can see him then. Until then, get lost, we've got work here."

Calvin and I beat a retreat. "Very diplomatic," he observed. "And you didn't even have to lie."

"I probably should have, though," I said. "Telling bits of the truth is dangerous. If you just decide to lie it's not as easy to get tripped up."

"I've heard people say the opposite," he replied. "That twisting the truth is the best way to lie."

"They're wrong," I told him.

Moran got off his shift a bit late, probably because his boss decided to jerk our chains a little. Such men are their own punishment. It's too bad that it spills over onto the rest of us sometimes.

"There's a bar two levels up," Moran told us. "Let's go there to talk."
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"Telling bits of the truth is dangerous. If you just decide to lie it's not as easy to get tripped up."
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The bar was a laborer's hangout. Moran asked for his usual, Calvin for soda water, and I had a gin and tonic, maybe from remembering Marjori Low. Moran's usual was a beer. When we sat down he took a sip of it, leaned forward a bit and whispered, "It's non-alcoholic. I try to stay away from the real stuff these days."

It was both funny and sad, actually. Moran was a large man, nearly my height and probably out-massing me by ten or fifteen kilos. His hair was mid-tone brown and close cut, and he had small ears. He also had several tattoos, fancy ones of dragons and firebirds, of the sort that spacers get up in Anchorage. Some spacers have their entire bodies covered, to make up for the induced baldness and to help shield them from solar UV.

But there was something timid about Deeth Moran, for all his size and strength. I knew at a glance that in a fight I could take him in about two seconds, and that he probably couldn't even out-tussle Calvin Lee. Moran had a boss that bullied him, and he was embarrassed by a former set of addictions and embarrassed by his abstinence, embarrassed enough to drink de-alcoholized beer while acting like he was just having his usual brew with the boys.

Well, none of that was my problem. Moran told us briefly how he'd gotten hooked on uppers while working two shifts, because he'd needed the money for some extra expenses that had come up. Moran supported his mother and two sisters, and one of the sisters had some medical bills that had caught them by surprise, so the loyal son had stepped into the breach. After a double shift with an amphetamine buzz, alcohol was the downer he began to need put the brakes on to sleep. By the time he realized he was hooked, it was too late to kick without help. So he took his vacation time and checked into Fields.

We asked him about the people in his group, Doria especially. It turned out that Doria was the one he remembered. He spoke of her with the sort of obvious love that the downtrodden show for the unattainable. And no, he'd never heard from her after the program ended. I gave my number to Moran in the outside chance that he'd think of anything to help us find Doria or any of the other missing group members, then Calvin and I left for police headquarters.

#

Dawn was only a few hours away, and we were still bleary-eyed staring at another holorez computer screen. The Venus citizen registry database is incomplete compared to Luna, where every living thing is cross-filed down to its DNA patterns. On Venus, out of maybe ten million humans, probably ninety nine percent of them have at least a listing in the main storage memory in Anchorage at the other end of the Skyhook. Luna immigrants, of course, have full personal files, as do Anchorage and Skyhook personnel. A Sky City visa at a minimum requires a coded Ident bracelet plus fingerprints and retinal scans. City residents have school and work assignment records as well.

Beyond City borders, records vary. Most Great Circle residents are as Big-Brother-visible as City folk. At the other end of the scale are the comm-less clusters, of which there are an unknown number, many tracing their histories back to the early settlers who came before the Plague that took the Earth. Most clusters are on the comm net, though, and most with comm links participate in the census, because Skyhook Authority gives a price break if they do. The accuracy of the volunteered information has been the subject of numerous studies.

"Our problem," said Calvin Lee in frustration, "is that the Fields Clinic is outside the City and they have that damn confidentiality policy. They don't do ID checks, in other words, and many of their clients pay cash. Apparently, at least half of their clients come in under phony names and they don't bother to ask them about it."
______________________________
"That could turn up every other homosexual couple in Sky City that took a vacation outside."
_______________________________

"Well, I certainly agree that all substance abuse clinics should set themselves up to make our job easier," I said, and saw my irony rewarded by a dirty look from Calvin. "But, gosh, they seem to have tried to take their clients wishes into greater account. Go figure."

I waited a moment, then said, "Chan knows more than he lets on. It's maybe not worth shaking his tree too hard, not until we run out of other options."

He looked at me in mild surprise. "Yes," he agreed, as if to encourage further signs of empathy and restraint from my direction. "Well, it behooves us to come up with other options, then, doesn't it? Any suggestions?"

"I was hoping for a brainstorm from the Sky City representative," I said. "Finding Thomas Roberts sounds like a good first move."

"Agreed," he said. "Or maybe we could find Michael Williams, probably not his real name, who may or may not have a connection to Roberts, also aka, 'not his real name.'"

"Mrs. Low did suggest that Roberts was a City resident," I observed. "Which means that he probably had to pass through the City checkpoints when he went out, and then when he came back in."

"Yeah, I thought of that," he told me, indicating the computer screen. "But there are over two thousand City limit checkpoints, each averaging over a hundred passes per day. That's almost a quarter million exits and entrances each day we choose to sort."

"Most are day trips though," he continued. "And three quarters of the longer trips are tourists coming in."

"So how many City residents took month-long trips at the correct time?" I asked.

"Nearly three thousand," he said. "Way too many."

"Males in their mid twenties with light brown hair?"

"Over two hundred."

I thought for a moment. "That's low enough for a photo lineup. Mrs. Low or Deeth Moran could..."

He interrupted me with a shake of his head. "We don't do yearly photo IDs like on Luna," he said. "You get photographed only if you need a special license. We might have file photos on thirty or forty of them, and most of those would be older photos. We'll try it, but..."

"We'll probably come up dry," I finished for him. "While we're trying long shots, let's try something else. Let's guess that Thomas and Mick came in together. Let's guess that Mick was there to keep an eye on Tommy boy, in fact, maybe he's a bodyguard or a nanny, or something. If Thomas was a golden child, he might well have come with a keeper."

Lee pondered this for a moment. "That might explain how Mrs. Low thought she'd seen him before, mightn't it? Overlapping social circles. Okay, so if that was the case, then we're looking for a double pattern. Two men leaving and coming back together. At most a fifteen year age difference, so that will eliminate father/son combos." He grinned. "That could turn up every other homosexual couple in Sky City that took a vacation outside."

"Try putting a filter on it to keep out co-residents, then," I told him.

He shook his head. "If Mick really was a bodyguard, he might live on the same premises. But we can put in an income and job status filter. The younger man would class as wealthy, the older man as salaried."

A few minutes at the keyboard and we were left with a blank screen. "Progress of a sort," Lee said blackly.

"Expand the time window," I suggested. "Put three weeks on either side of the clinic time." But that still gave us nothing. Apparently, wealthy young men were not prone to the company of slightly older working stiffs, even as lovers.

"Okay," he said. "Let's follow this. Maybe Thomas has a job. Instead of a trust fund from mommy or daddy, he has a job in the family firm."

"That gets rid of the income filter," I said.

"Maybe not," he replied. "The bodyguard probably won't make as much as the kid."

"Unless he's on a tight leash," I said. "Try just killing the income filter and see what we get."
_________________________________
"Progress of a sort," Lee said blackly.
_________________________________

He shrugged and entered the codes.

We couldn't have found them if we hadn't already expanded the search, because they'd stayed out of the City for an additional two weeks after the clinic. But among the four sets of two names that came up on the screen, there they were. Robert Thomas Grayling, and Roy Michael Deere had left the City together and returned together. Thomas Grayling worked for a company that was owned by his father, Robert Whitley Grayling, and Deere was on the elder Grayling's personal staff.

And Robert Whitley Grayling was one of the wealthiest men on Venus.

Next Chapter

Chapter eight: How can you keep in touch with dreams?

Previous Chapter

Pneumotube transport cars are a lot like motorized squids. They have an internal fan that pulls in air from the front and pumps it out the back, so they ride the pressure differential without the loss of efficiency that comes from moving air around. They are noisy, though, so once we got onto the express, I was spared any more of Calvin Lee's insights. There's not much to look at in a tube car either; they don't bother to make the transport car windows clearer than translucent, so all we got was the regular flash of exterior corridor lights, too fuzzed to even focus on.

We had to leave the tubes for the final leg of the journey to our next interview. We had four names, two in the City, and two more out on the Circle and at least half a day away. Of the two in the City, one agreed to see us immediately which was a pleasant surprise.

There are no criminal penalties to drug possession, even back on Luna. But as Lee and I had seen at Marley Farm, addictions are frowned upon even in the loosest of societies. On Luna, possession per se was legal, but sale and addiction were not, and that led to a catch-22: Possession of greater than a certain amount of many drugs was prima facie evidence of either trafficking or addiction, so you wound up on a work gang either way.

Things were a lot less strict on Venus, even under Skyhook command, though possession or intoxication on a job was grounds for dismissal. In Sky City there were a slew of ways you could get yourself banished, your City residence revoked or your visa canceled. So people tended to be discreet in their habits, discreet in their histories.

Marjori Low was a society widow; her husband had owned a string of clothing factories and sales shops on the outer edge of the City. Her husband had been nouveau riche, but she was fourth generation Venus-born, and her family was from what passes for old money on Venus: those who'd staked out positions near the Skyhook when it first came down, and who had managed to retain ownership of those positional rights throughout the legal jockeying and occasional outright uses of force that followed.

Her home was in the Heights, where the City bloon curved up to meet the Skyhook. The place could only be called a mansion, with windows of real plexiglass to take advantage of the view. At night, the curve of Sky City seemed to issue from the feet of the Low residence, lit by the diffuse radiance of the internal lights of the City leaking through the translucent bloonskins. It looked like a carpet of bubbles, soft and warm, with occasional wisps of clouds drifting over the fairy landscape.

Marjori Low was in her mid-fifties, though in the modest light of her home she could pass for thirty, still attractive and well-groomed. Age retardants aren't that good, not by themselves, so she'd taken care of herself, regardless of what chemical habits she'd acquired and shed along the way. Her hair was that shade of red that happens when black begins to lighten, and it was cut to show off her high cheekbones and vaguely Eurasian eyes. Some of her vigor obviously came from exercise, because she walked with the kind of balance that comes from dance training or something very much like it. We had a good view of that walk while she graciously led us to vista seats, and I glanced over to see if Calvin was as affected by her as I was. Then I lost even that bit of concentration when she asked if we needed anything like food or drink. Her voice was set exactly in the register that feels like it caresses your ears before it is heard. Calvin declined her offer; I asked for water, which a servant quickly brought.

________________________________
It looked like a carpet of bubbles, soft and warm, with occasional wisps of clouds drifting over the fairy landscape.
________________________________

Then we asked her about her time in Fields Clinic. Most people are loath to speak of past falls from grace, but Mrs. Low spoke without a trace of embarrassment.

She spoke almost as if reciting lines she'd spoken often before. Perhaps she had satisfied other morbid curiosities, those of family, friends, who knows?

"When Henry died, that would be my husband, of course, Mr. Henry Low," she began. "When Henry died, after the grief passed, I became bored, not to put too fine a point on it. Henry and I had led an active life, full of both work and play, and we did both perhaps to excess. Still, my mother was an Experientialist, from one of the original Venus Bloon colonies. The Experientialists have a saying, 'Is it better to live too much or not enough?' Henry and I made our choices and I can't say we ever regretted them.

"But, with Henry gone, my former activities lost much of their allure. When a hole appears in your life, things that previously had been small and easily dealt with can grow much larger, without your knowing it."

She looked at us and smiled. "I remember some of the parties that we used to attend, the sort that the gossip columnists love to report, and always get wrong. There was plenty of drinking and music and dancing and drug taking, flirtations leading to affairs, sometimes affairs leading to divorce, all the delicious hints of scandal, you see. Such indulgences are childish, perhaps, but they can be quite fun, so long as you keep your perspective.

"But without Henry, I lost my perspective, I'm afraid. I began to drink more heavily without realizing it, and when there was a social function, I'd rely on stimulants to give me a lift that I couldn't find naturally. Well, you know the cycle. I shan't burden you by dwelling on it.

"But I do have real friends and real family," she continued. "People who actually care for me. One of my sons expressed some concern about me and I snapped at him. That surprised me, that I should feel anger for that. I was quite concerned about it. Then a week after I read some article in a magazine, 'How to Tell if your Spouse is an Alcoholic' something like that. If I hadn't been worried about it I would have passed it up, but I was worried, so I took the test, asking the questions of the woman in the mirror, you see."
__________________________
[W]ithout Henry, I lost my perspective, I'm afraid.
__________________________

She smiled again. It was an odd smile, mixing rue and pride perhaps. "I scored 95 out of possible 100," she told us. "A mere 50 was a good enough score to qualify for alcoholism. I was quite impressed." She smiled that same smile again.

"So I saw my physician and said, 'Time for this to stop, Angie.' She agreed. I could have checked into one of the really posh drying-out spas, but Angie knew Dr. Chan from school in Anchorage, and to be frank, I figured that part of my problem was that the only people I'd been seeing were other bored and boring people like me."

Calvin opened his mouth, about to ask her about Doria, I supposed, but I shot him a look. Sometimes you spend hours trying to get an interviewee to be forthcoming, and Mrs. Low was candidly telling us her story. We could do back-and-fill later.

But Marjori Low was a very sharp lady. She saw the exchange and grinned at me. "Ah, your partner wants me to cut to the chase, is that it? He's probably right. I should probably join AA if I want to spill my guts in front of strangers."

"Mrs. Low," I said with as much sincerity as I could muster. "Most people are very reticent about speaking to the police at all. You're doing fine. Just tell your story in your own words, any way you want to tell it. We have plenty of time."

She smiled gratefully at me, and for a moment her reserve slipped and I realized that this wasn't as easy for her as she made it seem. My admiration moved up yet another notch.

"Anyway," she continued. "I checked into Dr. Chan's clinic. They gave me some shots to help me detox and to keep the shakes and horrors away, and that went very easily. Dr. Chan explained that addiction has at least two sides to it, and that the biochemical part is the easy half. The more difficult part is to change the way you deal with yourself and other people."

She called to the servant, "James, please bring Mr. Honlin another water, and one for Mr. Lee also this time." Calvin was about to protest that he still wanted nothing, but she put up her hand to silence him. "A tonic for me, also, James." she said. "No gin."

She looked over at us. "I do still drink alcohol occasionally," she told us. "More often though, I drink tonic without gin, dealcoholized wine, rum free daiquiris. Part of Dr. Chan's program is to desensitize people from their usual chemical cues."

She paused again as the servant returned with our glasses. After he'd left, she said, "His name is not James, actually, but I call all my servants James. It's an eccentric affectation, you see. I'm rich enough so that all my oddities are eccentric affectations." She smiled at her own joke and sipped her tonic slowly, obviously enjoying the physical sensation of it.

"Where was I? Oh, yes, the group sessions, which is what you came to hear about. Dr. Chan's group therapy classes were part of the idea of changing how a person related to other people. We were supposed to redefine our methods of social interaction to include sobriety. Hmm. That sounds very toney, doesn't it? That must have been the way that Dr. Chan put it. I think he would have preferred a posh clientele in a classy detox spa. Naturally he gave me special treatment, hoping I'd give good referrals, perhaps."

"Perhaps he had other designs on an attractive wealthy widow," I offered.

She looked at me with an expression of faint surprise. "Why thank you," she said. "I never thought of that. I wonder why? It's an obvious possibility."

"Perhaps you weren't inclined to think along those lines," I suggested.

She shrugged. "You're probably right," she said. "Anyway," she continued. "We were supposed to learn to get along with people without drugs. And to enjoy it. That was the idea.

"I remember the group very well," she said. "There was Doria, of course. She's the person that you are interested in. She was an absolute charmer. There were two boys in the group who were very interested in her. Well, actually, all of the boys and maybe one of the girls was interested, but only two of the boys really acted like they had a chance. Doria was obviously high priced merchandise. I knew that even before our first session, where we learned everybody's background.
______________________________
Thomas was a City boy, I'm sure of it.
______________________________

"Anyway, the two boys were Thomas and Jean. That's J-E-A-N, but he pronounced it 'John.' They were both in their twenties, so I probably shouldn't call them boys, but everybody below the age of thirty is a boy or girl to me, so what do I do about it?

"Those would be Thomas Roberts, and Jean Fallow," Calvin said, consulting his list. "Those were the names they gave at the clinic, anyway. Fallow lives out on the Circle, quite a way out, in fact. We haven't been able to track Roberts through the registry."

"Hmm," said Mrs. Low. "That's a little surprising. We only used first names at the clinic, but we did talk about our backgrounds to a certain extent, where we grew up, things like that. Now Jean, he grew up in a free cluster, so he might not have even been registered. But Thomas was a City boy, I'm sure of it. In fact, he looked a little familiar, though I could never place his face."

She stopped for a moment with a look of intense concentration on her face. "No," she shook her head. "It never came to me." She paused for a moment, then continued. "There was also Mick, or Mickey. He wanted us to call him Mick, and everyone did except for Thomas, who occasionally slipped and called him Mickey. I could tell it annoyed Mick a little bit, since he was in his late thirties, so he was older than Thomas by at least ten, maybe fifteen years. But he seemed deferential to Thomas, almost like an employee, at times. On the other hand, sometimes when he was talking about things, Thomas would look over at Mick before he said something, or he'd be talking and then stop in the middle, again, after he looked over at Mick."

"Mick would be Michael Williams," said Calvin. "He's another of our mystery clients."

Mrs. Low stared out at the City lights for a while, remembering, I suppose. Then she blinked and gave her head a quick little shake. "Sorry," she said. "It's easy to reminisce, isn't it? Sometimes the past is better than the here and now. I liked all our group, and it had such a while since I'd really liked anybody.

"So who's left? Wilma Fiore, who was about Doria's age, maybe a little older. But she was plain, poor dear, and felt badly about it.

"Then there was the fellow with the delicious name: Deeth Moran. Doesn't that sound wonderful? He was a warehouse laborer. Doria called him a stevedore. He pretended that it annoyed him to be called a stevedore, but he secretly enjoyed it, or we'd not have all picked it up. Some groups tear each other down, Dr. Chan told us, but he was glad to see that ours gave each other support.

"Deeth was really a dear. He had several tattoos and such pretty muscles. I think I fancied him, but he never noticed. He was so embarrassed that he was there and said he'd be fired if his boss ever found out that he'd had a drug problem. It was liquor and pills with Deeth, just as it was for me. Maybe that's why I thought I fancied him. Or maybe it was just the muscles."

She looked at our faces and laughed aloud. "Ah, I'm pulling your legs, dears. But your expressions are priceless." She laughed again.

"But enough fun with the polite policemen. You want to know about Doria. Her parents died, you know, and she didn't get on well with her aunt and uncle. To hear her tell it she had both a wicked stepmother and stepfather, but reading between the lines it was just a case of an easily bored teenager descending on an inexperienced childless couple who couldn't cope."

"There's that word again," I observed.

"You mean 'bored?'" she asked, her smile remaining. She sighed. "Yes, so much of life comes down to a matter of keeping boredom at bay."

"What about afterwards?" Calvin asked her. "Have you heard from any of the others?"

"I received a couple of posts from Doria," she said. "Both were from that place where she worked, Marley Farm. Very pretty -- the cards I mean. They print them on paper that they make there, I believe, and sell them to collectors, for the most part."

"Do you still have them?" I asked.

"The cards? I should, shouldn't I?" Her mouth twisted into a faint frown. "But I've misplaced them. I'll continue to search if you think them important."

I shrugged. "Probably not," I admitted. "But you can never tell, so if you find them, please notify us."

"I'll do that," she nodded absently, an abstracted look on her face. She said, "As for the rest of them, no, I haven't heard. At the end of it, you feel so close to your group mates, and you all promise to keep in touch, but once back in your regular life, the clinic time seems dreamlike. How can you keep in touch with dreams? They fade so easily."

She looked at us straight on. "Being in an S.A. program is an admission of defeat, isn't it?" she asked, rhetorically. "An admission that you've lost control of your bodily functions, like being incontinent or vomiting in public. It's embarrassing as hell, actually. I resolved not to let my embarrassment rule me. So I tell people about it if they ask. It's rude to ask, but understandable, and I tell them. I don't blush at the telling, either. Perhaps I used to, but I don't anymore."

She gave us a final smile and rose to her feet. The audience had ended. That's exactly how it felt. The audience had ended, the performance was over. Time for the performer to retire.

"James will show you out when you are ready to leave," she said. Feel free to stay and watch the City for a while, if you wish. It's a beautiful sight but one grows accustomed to almost anything after a while, and I confess I'm a little tired of this place. Henry used to call it 'regression to the mean,' which is a fancy way of saying 'you get jaded.'" She smiled at me and said, "You'll notice that I did not again use the word 'bored.' There are many synonyms, after all."
_________________________________
How can you keep in touch with dreams? They fade so easily.
_________________________________

She turned and walked to a portal. Turning her head, she said back over her shoulder, "I'll continue to search for Doria's cards, and I'll call you if I think of anything else."

Then she was gone, closing the portal behind her. After she left, the sheen of the closed portal took up the blurred lights of the City, a faint reflection remaining to remind us that she had been there.

Next Chapter

Chapter seven: But of course he knew I was lying.

Previous Chapter

Calvin and I took a pneumatic tube to the clinic where Doria had dried out a year earlier. Most of the transport tubes run east west because of the wind shear, and every year they extend them a little further out along the Circle, the linkage of connected bloon clusters that circumnavigates Venus at the equator. Someday there will be tube transport that circumnavigates the globe as well, just like the data pipes do now. Maybe someday they'll widen the damn things enough so that more than two people can sit abreast in them, or make the roofs high enough so someone as tall as I am doesn't get his head bumped when the top is zipped down on the tube car.

City expansion favors the east/west direction, just like the transport lines do, and the cluster that contained the rehab clinic could expect to be annexed sometime in the next few years. The clinic itself was an old bloon, still viable, but with streaks of brown and yellow in its photosynthetic surfaces. Inside it felt warm and homey, just the sort of place for a detoxing patient to try to learn to master the cravings that had led them to make whatever Faustian bargains that had gotten them there.

Biochemical detox itself is no big deal; there are at least a dozen treatments that bring about a gentle shift of metabolism from drug dependent to sobriety. Maintaining the sobriety is something else again, because the cravings can sink their hooks into the personality and soul of the addict. Many addicts run a cycle of euphoria, habituation, detoxification, then relapse, okay if you can afford it, maybe, but society as a whole often cannot. On Luna, the cycle gets broken in a straightforward manner, get addicted and you get forcibly treated. Relapse and you're work-ganged. On Venus, the options are more variable.

Skyhook Authority and the Sky City government run a number of charitable programs, and the rehab clinics are an example. Turn yourself in for detox, and for a small fee or subsequent contract work, they'll take care of you. But rehab counseling comes with the deal, and if the overall success rate is lousy, its backers can rightfully claim that it works better than doing nothing at all, though maybe not as cheap.

The Fields Clinic ran on a Skyhook grant and private donations. It was City licensed, even if it wasn't yet in the City proper, so most of its clients were City inhabitants. Some were even City employees. Being outside the City, though, had its advantages, since it made it easier for those who passed through to remain obscure. You didn't need to pass through an ID checkpoint to get to Fields Clinic, and many of its clients came under a pseudonym.

Much to our annoyance, of course.

The doctor who had treated Doria Adams was named Lou Chan. Despite his name he was a male caucasian with graying hair and smile lines on his face, though he wasn't using the smile when we came in. He'd stood up from behind his desk when we entered his office and I figured him at about a hundred and sixty five centimeters, and maybe sixty five kilos, with not much of it muscle. He looked fiftyish, but age retardants can shave five or ten years off somebody's looks, and Dr. Chan was highly enough placed to have access to all the best gerontologicals. I could think of no obvious reason for the immediate dislike I felt for him, except that it might serve our purposes for me to be abrasive. Chan's record indicated that he was a psych therapist and he had an obvious concern for his patients that was probably sincere. I expect that he did as good a job of separating a client from his or her soul killing habits as anyone. It was just too bad that he stood in the way of our investigation.

"Look, Mr. Lee, Mr. Honlin," he said after our initial questions. "Confidentiality is part of the service that we offer. Surely you can understand that."

"I don't give a goddamn," I said. It's not too much of a stretch for me to sound menacing, so I let nature take its course. "We're investigating a murder here. A very nasty murder that one of your patients may have been involved with. You can plead patient privilege all you want, but if it turns out that you've withheld even a scrap of information that might be important, I'll have your license for toilet paper, and I'll see to it that Skyhook shuts this place down, you got that?"

His lips compressed in a brave line and he seemed about to offer a retort, but Calvin beat him to it.

"Lay off, Ed," he told me. "Dr. Chan, my associate is a little excitable about this because he knew the murder victim. We don't know what sort of information might help us, so we're a little bewildered and frustrated. But we do think that we need to talk to Doria Adams, who was a client here about a year ago. Conceivably, you or one of your other clients might know something to help us get in contact with Miss Adams. And if she is involved, it might be very dangerous for her if we don't find her soon. Is there anything at all you can tell us that might help?"

He considered this. "You've already got my notes and records," he observed. "Over my extreme protest, I might add. I do remember Miss Adams, albeit more vaguely than I would like. We have twenty to thirty patients here at any given time, and the duration is less than a month, so you can imagine that I can't remember them all.

"I do remember that she was young, bright, and attractive, exactly the sort of person prone to burn-out in the fast life. I recommended that she try positional employment in the farm clusters when she left, and I'm happy to see that she took my advice. Farming is good occupational therapy, and migratory work can give vent to some of the more flight prone natures.

"She made friends easily. The men in her group were obviously attracted to her, but she got on well with the women also. She had the knack for not letting her attractiveness reflect on others."

He paused for a moment of reflection, then said, "Frankly, as I talk about it some of it comes back to me. She was a good group therapy patient, not so much for how much it helped her, but because she was so good in drawing out the others. She seemed forthright in speaking about her own past, although I am always a little suspicious of that, but the others always took her revelations as a cue that it was all right to unburden themselves. It made my work much easier."

He paused for a second, and shook his head. "I don't encourage my patients to remain in contact with me," he said, as if admitting a failing. "When my methods work, they work fairly quickly. We use a combination of 'the talking cure' and behavior modification. If you watch what you are doing, you have a better chance of changing it. So most of what I hear from the clients of this clinic comes from the voluntary follow-ups.
_________________________________
If you must contact any of the clients, please try not to let them know that their privacy was ultimately just a sham.
_________________________________
"But the patients often vow to remain in touch with each other; often they actually do. In the follow up interviews, this often comes across as a big reason why it works when it works. The clients learn a new skill, sobriety, and they develop a network of people who appreciate that skill.

"And as I said earlier, Doria was attractive. I would not be surprised to learn that some of the other patients had made an effort to keep in touch with her. I daresay that one or two of them may have had romantic designs on her. Something may even have happened while she was here. We try to give our clients as much privacy as we can."

He looked at Calvin and shrugged. "That's all I have. You have my notes. If you must contact any of the clients, please try not to let them know that their privacy was ultimately just a sham. They may need the refuge of another sham someday."

He turned to me. He said, "I'm familiar with the usual interrogation techniques, of course, and the 'good cop/bad cop' ploy is moderately effective even when the suspect knows what is going on. Even so, I could be more obdurate except that there is the possibility that Miss Adams might be in the sort of danger to which Mr. Lee alluded. But please don't again threaten me with political interference. I don't like to be bluffed."

I hadn't been bluffing exactly, since Skyhook was capable of doing everything that I had said. But he was correct in that they probably wouldn't use a hammer on him just for being recalcitrant.

"Fair enough," I told him. "If I ever want to do you harm, I won't bluff. I'll just break all the bones in your left hand."

I meant it as a joke, I think, but something of it must have come out wrong, because some of the blood drained from his face, and Calvin Lee beside me gave an almost inaudible gasp.

#

We left the clinic in an awkward silence. The tube was several bloon lengths away and we walked silently through the dimly lit corridors, periodically passing through the air curtains that separated each public bloon from the next. The floors of the public thoroughfares are springy and make walking easier, unlike house bloons which tend to have softer, more damping surfaces to reduce noise. You think about stuff like that when you're trying to avoid thinking about something else.
____________________________________
I meant it as a joke, I think, but something of it must have come out wrong…
_____________________________________
"I've tried getting more information about you from Luna, you know," Calvin Lee said at length. I grunted noncommittally. He was a cop with a cop's curiosity. Besides, nobody expected him to be comfortable working with a question mark.

"Most of it came up dry, of course," he said. "But our chief of police knows a guy, I'm naming no names here, and this guy knows some pretty well-connected people back on Luna. So after a few questions, messages back and forth, yesterday I get this email message from a guy named Josephson. You heard of him?"

"If it's Dewey A. Josephson, he's the assistant deputy head of Pan Luna Security." I said. "Or at least he was when I was there. Every Luna cop pretty much knows about every upper echelon security politico, and they stay put for quite a while, so he's probably the guy."

__________________________________
"'One of the finest law enforcement officers ever to serve in the solar system.' That's laying it on pretty thick don't you think?"
__________________________________

"He's first deputy, now," said Lee. "Answers only to the Minister and Chief of Security. Pretty powerful guy, I'd say. Very upside."

"Good for him," I replied.

"Anyway, I get this message from him. It says, blah, blah, blah, heard about your case, blah, blah, blah, would appreciate any information that develops concerning Skyhook/Luna trade, blah, blah, blah.

"Then it says, 'We've been told that Mr. Edwin Honlin, formerly of Luna City Police and Pan Luna Security operations has been involved in the case on an advisory basis. Let me mention that it is our belief that any involvement in any capacity by Mr. Honlin is a positive development. Pan Luna Security holds Mr. Honlin and his capabilities in the highest regard, and considers him to be one of the finest law enforcement officers ever to serve in the solar system.'" Lee smiled at me. "'One of the finest law enforcement officers ever to serve in the solar system.' That's laying it on pretty thick don't you think?"

"Josephson's a politician," I said. "Believe him like you believe any other politician. Someday, he'll probably want something from somebody for the testimonial. Shake hands, count your fingers."

"Maybe," Lee said thoughtfully. "Or maybe he already got his pound of flesh. My well-connected friend told me that Josephson mentioned off the record that he owed his job to you. You have something to do with his promotion?"

I said nothing.

"Maybe not his promotion," Lee continued. "I've studied law a little, and the Lunar constitution is a real nice piece of work. There's an article in it about succession after untimely death and assassination, did you know that?"

"I've read it a few times," I replied.

"Yeah, I'll bet. Anyway, part of the deal with assassinations is that if one of the top guys gets bumped off, the head of Pan Luna Security loses his job and is forbidden to hold office again. Any public office. Ever. And tradition has it that he takes the first two or three layers of the Security organization with him. They all get fired. The idea was to keep any Security heads from getting power hungry and maybe participating in an assassination plot."

"Grade school history," I told him. "Seventy, no, eighty years ago. The plot of '06. Nearly caused a civil war."

"Right," he said. "So if there were a major assassination on Luna, our Mr. Josephson would lose his job, as would his boss and maybe twenty or thirty other guys. Really important guys."

"So what's your point?" I asked, anxious to get this entire topic of conversation over with.

"Well," he said, with just a trace of smugness. "I was just wondering how grateful those guys could be. Seems to me that anyone having to do with foiling the sort of thing that could make them join the ranks of the unemployed, well, that sort of thing could be pretty big news. If it ever got out, I mean. But there was never any news like that, so it either never happened, or they put a deep black security blanket over it. Even so, those guys should be mighty grateful, don't you think?"

"I wouldn't know," I told him.

"Maybe not," he said. "But gratitude like that can usually let a man write his own ticket. What do you think would make a man take the ticket and make it a one way to Venus, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars?"

"I wouldn't know that either," I told him, but of course he knew I was lying.

Next Chapter

Chapter six: …merely lying to keep in practice.

Previous Chapter

The physical requirements for the Luna police force are stringent. It's easy to get by on one-sixth G; add in a history of a malnourished population, and you can understand why most Lunars are a pretty puny lot.

Luna Security, on the other hand, likes its cops to be big and well-muscled, on the theory that there should never be any doubt about who will win a tussle. Standard issue weapons are mace and a shock stick, but it was considered bad form and a reflection on your abilities if you had to use them. Intimidation was always our prime stock in trade, and only a full-scale riot was supposed to require air guns and dope darts.

The physical regimen that went with being a Luna policeman made it a lot easier for me to make the changeover to a higher G life than was the case for many of my compatriots. I still went for regular workouts, from physical habit and the demands of a body that craved a certain background of physical activity and protested any loss of range of motion or lessening stamina and strength.

The martial arts training was something else again. High G styles are different from low G, and I'd had to start out practically at the bottom in the Venus schools. That suited my mood at the time of my entry into this brave new world, and I'd kept at it with desultory diligence for my first year or so in the bloons. Once my old, inappropriate habits had been mothballed, I'd progressed rapidly; another year of really intensive effort would have brought me back up to dan grade. Instead, I let it drop, for what reason I could not say.

After my talk with Calvin Lee, I went for a workout at the hotel gym, and pulled and pushed against the appropriate spring-loaded machines for what seemed to be a considerable time. But the sweat that covered me didn't seem sufficiently baptismal, I suppose, so I showered and took a squid to the cluster where my old dojo resided.

The first day after sunset is usually a quiet time, as I've said before, and that was the case for my dojo, as well. I paid a visitor's fee, my membership having lapsed some months before, and went out on the mat to await the next class. Sitting seiza, legs folded beneath me, I tried to put my body's affairs in order, but I'd barely had time to let my breath settle before the sensei came out onto the mat.

His name was McElroy, and off the mat we called him "Sensei Mack." On the mat he allowed no talking of any sort, except a naming of techniques, and he did all teaching through wordless demonstration, for reasons he never chose to explain. This policy suited my temperament, so it was Sensei Mack whom I chose to study with when dojo shopping after I first arrived.

He did not acknowledge my presence as he led us through our initial exercises, but when we began to practice, he called on me for ukemi.

On Luna I had trained in two styles, a karate-derived linear style and a lock and throwing technique that once had been a kind of aikido, and now was almost completely in the form of exercises, kata, for one or two people. As a policeman, the karate was what I principally used, but I'd loved the aikido for its own sake.

________________________________
It felt like there might still be something worth living for again.
_______________________________
Sensei Mack taught an almost classic form of aikido, a bewildering wealth of techniques and mannered throws. I'd come to appreciate its subtle lessons, even as I was finding it more and more difficult to maintain my concentration during practice. Aikido became a beautiful woman that I loved but could not bear to be around.

As uke for Sensei Mack, he had me come at him in a variety of attack maneuvers, each time with the result that I soon become airborne and have to twist to take a proper fall. I should have been feeling the effects of the earlier workout, but there was nothing, only the exhilaration of survival at the end of each throw as I'd slam into the resilient bloon floor, turning the power of my fall into sound, or rolling it back into my body and coming lightly to my feet.

It felt good. It felt very good. It felt like there might still be something worth living for again. That feeling transferred to the practice with other students, each pairing feeling like there was a human connection to be made, that ritual combat could ennoble the soul. That perhaps our lives are not doomed to waste and despair, despite appearances to the contrary.

Then it was over. When we had all bowed and Sensei Mack had left the mat, and we all began to diligently sweep the entire dojo with brooms much too small for the purpose, I checked my internal compass once again and noted that it again had an idea of north and south. It was not a reliable instrument yet, but maybe someday...

And after I had dressed, as I left the dojo, Mack was standing by the door talking to another student about some mundane matter. He looked briefly in my direction and nodded. "You will return," he said. It was not quite a question.

"Yes," I admitted. "I thank you for the lesson, Sensei."

He nodded again and returned to talking about the proper way to boil water for tea.

#
_____________________________________
Ninety percent of police work is desk work, either writing reports or sifting through various databases looking for telltale patterns.
____________________________________

Back in my hotel, I caught an early show in the lounge, then went back to my room and read for a couple of hours. After that I went to bed, with half a night of dreamless sleep being the reward for my good behavior. The nightmares came eventually, of course, but had the good grace to fade with the clock chimed morning.

I caught a squid for City center and arrived at police headquarters just as the shifts changed. Lee was already there, having come in early to begin more computer searches.

Ninety percent of police work is desk work, either writing reports or sifting through various databases looking for telltale patterns. We were trying to find someone who knew someone who knew someone, which put our potential list at half the population of Venus. Great. When we did find someone who knew either Sheila or Doria, we wanted as many answers to most of our questions beforehand, to sift the guilty consciences and chronic liars from those who were merely lying to keep in practice. The possibility of finding someone who tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is judged unlikely by experienced policemen. Human discourse is viewed as a stew of necessary lies, with unnecessary falsehoods as seasoning.

"Doria Adams' parents were bloon fishers down south." Calvin told me. "She was fourteen when they died."

"How did they die?"

"Miasma mold," he said. At my quizzical look he explained. "It's a fungus that attacks bloons. Bloons sieve nitrogen and photosynthesize oxygen. Miasma mold temporarily cripples the oxygen making capability. The bloon still consumes O2 for respiration, though, and so does the mold. And the bloon still filters out CO2, so you don't get a CO2 excess warning. It can happen quite quickly sometimes, over maybe a day. If it's already underway and you go to sleep without noticing, you can wake up dead from breathing pure nitrogen. There's not enough physiological warnings."

"Don't people have O2 sensors?" I asked, automatically fingering my earring, which served that function by emitting a low volume warning beep when my personal air got too depleted.

"Usually," he said. "They don't always keep them fully tested and operational. You know how people are."

Not entirely I don't, I thought to myself. "So where was Doria when it happened?"

"She was in a three day a week boarding school. Education can get a little haphazard for the fishers, but most manage at least a secondary level education. Doria was in one of the data net schools until the accident, then she went to live with an aunt and uncle, according to school records."

"And?"

"Whatever additional schooling she got, it was off-line. So then we have nothing until she entered Sky City briefly three years later. Six week visa, then out to shadowville is my guess. Next visit to the City a year later, and her two prostitution raps. Then license, a couple years on a hyperbolic trajectory, followed by rehab. That brings us to Marley Farm."

"Not an easy trail to back track," I observed. "Her former clients aren't going to hold up their hands and step forward. How many of her fellow rehab folks have you tracked down?"

"The clinic is just outside the City on the Circle. Their patients go through bundled in groups of five to eight, who do some sort of 'socialization therapy' along with some behavior mod to try to help them stay clean after detox. We've pulled the electronic records on the group that went in with Doria. They don't record the sessions themselves, unfortunately. Aside from Doria herself, the records list six who fed through at the same time. We have addresses for two of them, here in the City, and another one out on the Circle. Three are blanks; no fixed abode, no known address. We're going to see the doctor who was their shepherd in the psych work."

"Sounds like the place to begin," I said.

"The doctor was none too happy about having his records pulled, either," said Calvin.

"Well, big surprise," I replied.

Next Chapter

Chapter five: But there's not a man on Venus you'd lift a finger for

Previous Chapter

I'd only had six hours sleep in the last forty-eight, so Lee dropped me off at my hotel when we got back to Sky City. It was one of those achingly beautiful sunsets that we never see from the City's shadow, and Calvin and I lingered over a sandwich in a small Edge-of-City cafe that had a view window, to watch the last of it, as the color of neon faded through the color of blood into darkness.

After Calvin dropped me off, I went through the main lounge of the hotel on my way back to my rental. The main lounge has the front desk, plus a small restaurant and bar. It was almost empty at that hour and Madame Fumio, the owner, was having a quiet meal with her latest boy toy. I could hear him from across the space, his voice was neither loud, nor penetrating, but it had a rich quality that carried well. All of Fumio's boys had rich voices, that was always their most distinguishing characteristic, that and each one's belief that he was special, never to be cast aside.

"Ed!" It was Fumio, and since she was occasionally my boss as well as my landlady, I padded over to her table to see what she wanted.

"Billy at the front desk told me you needed to cut back on your shifts," she said as I reached the table. The hotel needed extra air, like all the clusters in shadowville, and I did one of my regular runs for Fumio.

I shrugged. "Another deal came up. It's only temporary and if you need me any time, I'll make a special run."
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Fumio snacked on men for breakfast, then spat out their bones before lunch. It was part of her charm.
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"That's reassuring," she said in a mildly sarcastic tone. "I doubt we'll have that much of a shortage of air jockeys, though. Even Meren here can make an air run, can't you, Meren?" The fellow with her assured her that he would walk one end of Sky City to the other for her. It was touching enough to almost get a laugh out of me.

"But the word is that your 'something that came up,' is the police, Ed. Is that true?"

I shrugged. "More a personal matter," I said. "But I took a consultant contract with Sky City police to work on it."

Her face clouded. Fumio had no truck with the police. She started out in shadowville many years ago as a stripper, and slowly worked up to "exotic dancer" with an act involving feather fans and see-through fabric. She saved her money and first bought the hotel showroom, then the hotel itself. She still danced occasionally, and even in her late fifties she could make a room full of men feel the heat of her compact curves and olive skin. She once commented that it was too bad I wasn't twenty years younger so she could take me on as one of her "boys." I told her I was flattered, but that she'd have been too much for me even when I was twenty.

Which was true, of course. Fumio snacked on men for breakfast, then spat out their bones before lunch. It was part of her charm.

Like most Darkunder dwellers, Fumio had little use for cops, especially Sky City cops. She knew I'd been a Luna cop, but considered that I'd learned my lesson and given up a misspent youth.

"A friend of mine was murdered, Fumio," I told her. "Tortured, then murdered. I don't intend to let whoever did it get away with it. Getting on with the Sky cops is the only way I can go after them. Besides, the pay is good. I'll be able to buy a new comm unit for my bloon."

She considered it. "Well, you're no snitch," she said finally. "I'll try to get the word out to let you alone on this. But you'll have to curtail certain...associations, you know?"

I understood. "Sure," I told her. "Just tell everybody that I can do an air run or two every now and then, but no side trips. I'm not looking to bust anybody's chops."

She nodded. "This girl who died, Ed, was she special?"

"I didn't say it was a girl, Fumio," I said.

"No," she told me. "But there's not a man on Venus you'd lift a finger for."

I sighed. "I don't know, then," I told her. "Maybe she was special, maybe not. But some things you just don't let pass."

She gave me another look. "Go get some sleep," she said, but the way she said it sounded like she thought she'd never before seen me this awake.

#

My dreams that night were olfactory and hallucinatory, full of odd smells amid a shifting landscape where solidity was a vague misconception. The smells were of must, and smoke, and the smell of singed flesh, and my own identity transmogrified with each change of the wind.
_________________________________
"This girl who died, Ed, was she special?"
_________________________________

I awoke several times, each time covered in sweat, each time unwilling to do anything more than turn over and try to plunge once more into unreality. Finally even dreams were denied me and I reached over and snapped a glow bulb. My watch told me I'd been asleep for sixteen hours, a personal best.

I got up, showered and shaved, dressed and headed to the dining areas. The ninety-six hour cycles of dark and light on Venus tend to scramble the normal human diurnal cycles, but even in the City's shadow some patterns are typical. The time immediately after nightfall tends to find everyone asleep, catching up on the time missed when the light prevailed. The light itself has little effect on the inhabitants of Darkunder, since we see so little of it, but the rhythms of the City above are felt below. So many of the activities in shadow involve the supplying of entertainment of various sorts to the well-lit folks above, that when those folks are all asleep, activities down below come to a crawl.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course, because some things are best accomplished while the world sleeps, but the cops know this rule also, and they pay particular attention to the hours between 4800 and 6000 on the light clock. After that, the cycles slip, with many bodies seeking their own internal rhythms and by dawn many folks can find themselves quite confused and in need of caffeine or other regulatory chemicals. Most of these are legal, even in central Sky City, but the exceptions can make for lucrative business.

In central Sky City, artificial lighting makes the rules, central Sky City time being more an extension of offworld time than part of Venus itself. There is an extension of offworld Law, as well, and the gradient between offworld and true Venus culture has made many a lawyer rich. We all play the Sky City gradient in one way or another. When the money river flows, you can sit on the banks dangling your feet in the water and never starve.

#

I had breakfast at what was nominally suppertime, though there were as many people dining on Bloody Marys and eggs as there were on chicken and potatoes. I usually avoid animal products myself, for no good reason other than my eating habits were of long standing, and I prefer the taste of spiced tofu and corn meal grits.

After breakfast, I went to the main lounge and used my nice new debit card to order a new comm unit. Twenty-four hour delivery and I'd be back in contact with the world, even when hiding in my single compartment bloon. Great. Then I put in a call to Calvin Lee from a rented phone.

"Hello, Ed," he said as he came on the line. "Your comm is still out of commission."

"I know," I told him. "I just ordered a new one."

"Fixed or mobile?"
______________________________________
When the money river flows, you can sit on the banks dangling your feet in the water and never starve.
______________________________________

I snorted. "You're not paying me enough to afford a light pipe connection. It’s a no roam mobile, and low priority. If you want security, you'll have to spring for a scrambler."

"We'll take it under advisement," he said. "For now I think that we'll just assume that no one cares enough to eavesdrop."

"You got that right."

"It's getting near the end of my shift, where have you been?" he asked.

"Asleep," I told him. "Happens to the best of us."

"Uh, huh. I've got some information for you to chew on."

"Spill," I said.

"Which do you want first, tobacco or Doria Adams?"

"Make it tobacco."

"Okay, my search demon found two hundred forty instances of tobacco or nicotine possession, sales, or usage violations in all offworld jurisdictions in the past five years. That's pretty low, I'd say."

"About what I figured," I told him. "Venus is the only source, and security through Skyhook is tight. Tobacco is pretty bulky, and very hard to smuggle. The only market is rich thrill seekers."

"Yeah," he said, "But nicotine isn't bulky. It's hard to get and dangerous to handle, though. Of the two hundred forty cases, only six of them were nicotine rather than tobacco, and five of have show a lab analysis of mixed isomers, meaning that it was probably a lab synthesis somewhere."

"Mixed isomers?" I asked.

"Nicotine has mirror isomers, left- and right-handed. Tobacco produces only the left-handed kind. Lab synthesis gives a mixture. You can separate them, but why bother for a street drug, even one for rich kinks?"

"How about bioengineered sources?" I asked.

"You'd have to go through either the Luna or L-colony biodesign labs. They make Skyhook security look like first-level school hall monitors."

"So what was the one remaining case?" I asked him. I can subtract five from six as well as anybody.

"It was on Ceres," he said. "It showed up as skin absorption patches and a white powder called 'Old Nick.' The powder was microencapsulated nicotine. The stuff's a liquid normally, and the pure stuff is so toxic even a drop will kill you. The encapsulated stuff was maybe three percent nicotine, tops."

"And the Ceres connection was...?"

"No one ever found out," he said. "The stuff showed up one day, got a lot of miners and work gangs hooked, then vanished. As it went away, the price went through the roof. That was when Ceres security found out about it. There were some incidents of violence."

"My encyclopedia hookup is the same as yours," I said. "It says that there's few things more addictive than nicotine. It's co-active with alcohol, too."

"Yeah," he agreed. "What does the Ceres thing sound like to you?"

"One of two possibilities," I told him. "Either a single batch was smuggled by some lone wolf, and he milked it for all he could get, or...."

"Or number two is that someone was doing market research," he supplied. "Yeah, that's the way I figure it, too."

I sighed. Great. All we needed was a system spanning conspiracy. "Let's pray for a lone wolf," I said.

"You don't sound very hopeful," he said.

"I'm an atheist." I replied. "Prayer is for saps. So tell me about Doria."

"Rap sheet has her down for two convictions, both minor, prostitution without a license. She must have saved her money, because a little while after the second, she bought a license. No problems from then on, except that she spent a month in a substance abuse program about six months ago. Checked herself in with an expensive set of habits. Signed up for positional placement after leaving the program; Marley Farm was her second job."

"Anything else?" I asked.

"That's it. Both parents dead, no close relatives other than the couple who took care of her after her parents died. They haven't seen or heard from her since she ran away. I commed them and spoke with the husband. I got the feeling they were relieved when she left. That was about six years ago. We want a background trail, we have to start at the clinic."
_______________________________
"I'm an atheist. Prayer is for saps."
_______________________________
"I thought that clinic records were confidential," I said.

"Don't act naive," he told me.

"Any idea of where she is now?" I asked.

"She should be in Sky City. She checked in on a tourist visa just after she went on vacation from Marley Farm. But it was a two week visa and she didn't check out after it expired, so she is officially overstayed. One the other hand, we haven't been able to locate her. She used her deb card several times in the first week, then zip. She got automatically checked out of her hotel when her stay was up and she left behind a few things, nothing important. No one at the hotel really remembers her anyway, it was a high volume people packer."

"So she could be dead, in hiding, or she could have left the city illegally," I said. "Great. That really narrows it down."

"Don't forget that she's probably a blind alley anyway," he said.

"I never forget an unpleasant fact," I told him.

"I've noticed," he replied.

Next Chapter