I let them see my own amusement, then signalled Shannon over. ‘It might be a good idea to check out that theory of yours about the pistol being manufactured up here,’ I told her. ‘Get on to the Cybernetics Division, ask them to put a Colt .45 pistol together using exactly the same materials as the murder weapon was built from. That way, we’ll see if it is physically possible, and if so what the assembly entails.’
She agreed with a degree of eagerness, and hurried back to her desk.
I would have liked to hang around, but harassing the team as they got to work wasn’t good policy. At this stage the investigation was the pure drudgery of data acquisition. To assemble a jigsaw, you first have to have the pieces – old Parfitt proverb.
I went upstairs to my office, and started in on routine administration datawork. What joy.
*
The hospital was a third of the way round the town from the police station, a broad three-storey ring with a central courtyard. With its copper-mirror glass and mock-marble façade it looked the most substantial building in the habitat.
I was ushered into Corrine Arburry’s office just after two o’clock. It was nothing like as stark as mine, with big potted ferns and a colony of large purple-coloured lizards romping round inside a glass case in the corner. According to her file, Corrine had been in Eden for six years, almost since the habitat was opened for residency.
‘And how are you settling in?’ she asked wryly.
‘Well, they haven’t gone on strike yet.’
‘That’s something.’
‘What were they saying about me out at the lake?’
‘No chance.’ She wagged a finger. ‘Doctor–patient confidentiality.’
‘OK, what were the pathology findings?’
‘Penny died from the bullet. Her blood chemistry was normal . . . well, there was nothing in it apart from the prescribed viral vectors and a mild painkiller. She hadn’t been drugged; and as far as I can tell there was no disabling blow to the head prior to the shooting, certainly no visible bruising on what was left of her skull. I think the personality memory of her death is perfectly accurate. She walked out to the lake, and the chimp shot her.’
‘Thanks. Now what can you tell me about Penny Maowkavitz herself? So far all I’ve heard is that she could be a prickly character.’
Corrine’s face puckered up. ‘True enough; basically, Penny was a complete pain. Back at the university hospital where I trained we always used to say doctors make the worst patients. Wrong. Geneticists make the worst patients.’
‘You didn’t like her?’
‘I didn’t say that. And you should be nicer to someone who’s scheduled to cut your skull open in an hour. Penny was just naturally difficult, one of the highly strung types. It upset a lot of people.’
‘But not you?’
‘Doctors are used to the whole spectrum of human behaviour. We see it all. I was quite firm with her, she respected that. She did argue about aspects of her treatment. But radiation sickness is my field. And a lot of what she said was due to fear.’
‘You’re talking about her cancer treatment?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How bad was it?’
Corrine dropped her gaze. ‘Terminal. Penny had at most another three months to live. And that last month would have been very rough on her, even with our medical technology.’
‘Christ.’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t a suicide?’ she asked kindly. ‘I know what it looked like, but—’
‘We did consider that, but the circumstances weigh against it.’ I thought of the chimp, the bag, putting the pistol together in stealthy increments, the sheer amount of effort involved. ‘No, it was too elaborate. That was a murder. Besides, surely Penny Maowkavitz would have had plenty of available options to kill herself that were a damn sight cleaner than this?’
‘I would have thought so, yes. She had a whole laboratory full of methods to choose from. Although a bullet through the brain is one of the quickest methods I know. Penny was a very clever person, maybe she didn’t want any time for reflection between an injection and losing consciousness.’
‘Had she talked about suicide?’
‘No, not to me; and normally I’d say she wasn’t the suicide type. But she would know exactly what that last month was going to be like. You know, I’ve found myself thinking about it quite a lot recently; if I knew that was going to happen to me, I’d probably do something about it before I lost my faculties. Wouldn’t you?’
It wasn’t something I liked to think about. Christ. Even death from old age is something we manage to deny for most of our lives. Always, you’ll be the marvel who lives to a hundred and fifty, the new Methuselah. ‘Probably,’ I grunted sourly. ‘Who knew about her illness?’
‘I’d say just about everyone. The whole habitat had heard about her accident.’
I sighed. ‘Everyone but me.’
‘Oh, dear.’ Corrine grinned impetuously. ‘Penny was exposed to a lethal radiation dose eight months ago. She was on a review trip to Pallas, that’s the second habitat. It was germinated four years ago, and trails Eden’s orbit by a thousand kilometres. Her division is responsible for overseeing the growth phase. And Penny takes her duty very seriously. She was EVA inspecting the outer shell when we had a massive ion flux. The magnetosphere does that occasionally, and it’s completely unpredictable. Jupiter orbit is a radiative hell anyway; the suits which the crews here wear look more like deep-sea diving rigs than the kind of fabric pressure envelopes they use in the O’Neill Halo. But even their shielding couldn’t protect Penny against that level of energy.’ She leant back in the chair, shaking her head slowly. ‘That’s one of the reasons I was chosen for this post, with my speciality. Those crews take a terrible risk going outside. They all have their sperm and ova frozen before they come here so they don’t jeopardize their children. Anyway . . . the spaceship crew got her back here within two hours. Unfortunately there wasn’t anything I could do, not in the long term. She was here in hospital for a fortnight, we flushed her blood seven times. But the radiation penetrated every cell, it was as if she’d stood in front of a strategic-defence X-ray laser. Her DNA was completely wrecked, blasted apart. The mutation—’ Breath whistled painfully out of Corrine’s mouth. ‘It was beyond even our gene therapy techniques to rectify. We did what we could, but it was basically just making her last months as easy as possible while the tumours started to grow. She knew it, we knew it.’
‘Three months at the most,’ I said numbly.
‘Yes.’
‘And knowing that, somebody still went ahead and murdered her. It makes no sense at all.’
‘It made a lot of sense to somebody.’ The voice was challenging.
I fixed Corrine with a level gaze. ‘I didn’t think you’d give me a hard time over being a company man.’
‘I won’t. But I know people who will.’
‘Who?’
Her grin had returned. ‘Don’t tell me Zimmels didn’t leave you a bubble cube full of names.’
My turn to grin. ‘He did. What nobody has told me is how widespread Boston’s support is.’
‘Not as much as they’d like. Not as little as JSKP would like.’
‘Very neat, Doctor. You should go into politics.’
‘There’s no need to be obscene.’
I stood up and walked over to her window, looking down into the small courtyard at the centre of the hospital. There was an ornate pond in the middle which had a tiny fountain playing in it; big orange fish glided about below the lily pads. ‘If the company did send a covert agent up here to kill Maowkavitz, he or she would have to be very biotechnology literate to circumvent the habitat personality’s observation. I mean, I couldn’t do it. I don’t even understand how it was done, nor do most of my officers.’
‘I see what you mean. It would have to be someone who’s been up here before.’
‘Right. Someone who understands the habitat surveillance parameters perf
ectly, and who’s one hundred per cent loyal to JSKP.’
‘My God, you’re talking about Zimmels.’
I smiled down at the fish. ‘You have to admit, he’s a perfect suspect.’
‘And would you have him arrested if he is guilty?’
‘Oh, yes. JSKP can have me fired, but they can’t deflect me.’
‘Very commendable.’
I turned back to find her giving me a heartily bemused stare. ‘But it’s a little too early to be making allegations like that; I’ll wait until I have more data.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ she muttered. ‘I suppose you’ve also considered it could have been a mercy killing by some sympathetic bleeding-heart medical practitioner, one who was intimate with Penny’s circumstances.’
I laughed. ‘Top of my list.’
*
Before I went for the implant, they dressed me in a green surgical smock, and shaved off a three-centimetre circle of hair at the base of my skull. The operating theatre resembled a dentist’s surgery. A big hydraulic chair at the centre of a horseshoe of medical consoles and instrument waldos. The major difference was the chair’s headrest, which was a complicated arrangement of metal bands and adjustable pads. The sight triggered a cascade of unpleasant memories, newscable images of the more brutal regimes back on Earth. What one-party states did to their opposition members.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Corrine said breezily, when the sight of it slowed my walk. ‘I’ve done this operation about five hundred times now.’
The nurse smiled and guided me into the chair. I don’t think she was more than a couple of years older than Nicolette. Should they really be using teenagers to assist with delicate brain surgery on senior staff?
Straps around my arms, straps around my legs; a big strap, like a corset, around my chest, holding me tight. Then they started immobilizing my head.
‘How many survived?’ I asked.
‘All of them. Come on, Harvey, it’s basically just an injection.’
‘I hate needles.’
The nurse giggled.
‘Bloody hell,’ Corrine grunted. ‘Men! Women never make this fuss.’
I swallowed my immediate short-and-to-the-point comment. ‘Will I be able to use the affinity bond straight away?’
‘No. What I’m going to do this afternoon is insert a cluster of neuron symbiont buds into your medulla oblongata. They take a day or so to infiltrate your axons and develop into operational grafts.’
‘Wonderful.’ Sickly grey fungal spores grubbing round my cells, sending out slender yellow roots to penetrate the delicate membrane walls. Feeding off me.
Corrine and the nurse finished fixing my head in place and stood back. The chair slowly tilted forwards until I was inclined at forty-five degrees, staring at the floor. I heard a hissing sound; something cold touched the patch of shaved skin. ‘Ouch.’
‘Harvey, that’s the anaesthetic spray,’ Corrine exclaimed with some asperity.
‘Sorry.’
‘Once the symbionts are functioning you’ll need proper training to use them. It doesn’t take more than a few hours. I’ll book your appointment with one of our tutors.’
‘Thanks. Exactly how many people up here are affinity capable?’
She was busy switching on various equipment modules. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a holographic screen light up with some outré false-colour image of something which resembled a galactic nebula, all emerald and purple.
‘Just about all seventeen thousand of us,’ she said. ‘They have to be, there’s no such thing as a domestic or civic worker up here. The servitor chimps perform every mundane task you can think of. So you have to be able to communicate with them. The first affinity bonds to be developed were just that, bonds. Each one was unique. Clone-analogue symbionts allowed you to plug directly into a servitor’s nervous system; one set was implanted in your brain, and the servitor got the other. Then Penny Maowkavitz came up with the idea of Eden, and the whole concept was broadened out. The symbionts I’m implanting in you will give you what we call communal affinity; you can converse with the habitat personality, access its senses, talk to other people, order the servitors around. It’s a perfect communication system. God’s own radio wave.’
‘Don’t let the Pope hear you say that.’
‘Pope Eleanor’s a fool. If you ask me, she’s a little too desperate to prove she can be as traditionalist as any male. The Christian Church has always been antagonistic to science, even now, after the reunification. You’d think they’d learn from past mistakes. They certainly made enough of them. If her biotechnology commission would just open their eyes to what we’ve achieved up here.’
‘There’s none so blind . . .’
‘Damn right. Did you know every child conceived up here for the last two years has had the affinity gene spliced in when they were zygotes, rather than have symbiont implants? They’re affinity capable from the moment their brain forms, right in the womb. There was no pressure put on the parents by JSKP, they insisted. And they’re a beautiful group of kids, Harvey, smart, happy; there’s none of the kind of casual cruelty you normally get in kindergartens back on Earth. They don’t hurt each other. Affinity has given them honesty and trust instead of selfishness. And the Church calls it ungodly.’
‘But it’s a foreign gene, not one God gave us, not part of our divine heritage.’
‘You support the Church’s view?’ Her voice hardened.
‘No.’
‘God gave us the gene for cystic fibrosis, He gave us haemophilia, and He gave us Down’s syndrome. They’re all curable with gene therapy. Genes the person didn’t have to begin with, genes we have to vector in. Does that make those we treat holy violations?’
I made a mental note never to introduce Corrine to Jocelyn. ‘You’re fighting an old battle with the wrong person.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. Sorry, but that kind of medieval attitude infuriates me.’
‘Good. Can we get on with the implant now, please?’
‘Oh, that?’
The chair started to rotate back to the vertical. Corrine was flicking off the equipment.
‘I finished a couple of minutes ago,’ she said with a contented chuckle. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to stop chattering.’
‘You . . .’
The smiling nurse began to unstrap me.
Corrine pulled off a pair of surgical gloves. ‘I want you to go home and relax for the rest of the afternoon. No more work today, I don’t want you stressed; the symbiont neurons don’t need to be drenched in toxins at this stage. And no alcohol, either.’
‘Am I going to have a headache?’
‘A hypochondriac like you, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’ She winked playfully. ‘But it’s all in your mind.’
*
I walked home. The first chance I’d had to actually appreciate the real benefit of the habitat. I walked under an open sky, feeling zephyrs ripple my uniform, smelling a mélange of flower perfumes. A strange experience. I’m just old enough to remember venturing out under open skies, taking backpack walks through what was left of the countryside for pleasure. That was before the armada storms started bombarding the continents for weeks at a time. Nowadays, of course, the planet’s climate is in a state of what they call Perpetual Chaos Transition. You’d have to be certifiable to wander off into the wilderness regions by yourself. Even small squalls can have winds gusting up to sixty or seventy kilometres an hour.
It was the heat which did it. The heat from bringing the benefits of an industrial economy to eighteen billion people. Environmentalists used to warn us about the danger of burning hydrocarbons, saying the increased carbon dioxide would trigger the greenhouse effect. They were wrong about that. Fusion came on-line fairly early into the new century; deuterium–tritium reactions at first, inefficient and generating a depressing quantity of radioactive waste for what was heralded as the ultimate everlasting clean energy source. Then He3 started arriving from Jupiter and even
those problems vanished. No more carbon dioxide from chemical combustion. Instead people developed expectations. A lot of expectations. Unlimited cheap energy was no longer the province of the Western nations alone, it belonged to everybody. And they used it; in homes, in factories, to build more factories which churned out more products which used still more energy. All over the planetary surface, residual machine heat was radiated off into the atmosphere at a tremendous rate.
After a decade of worsening hurricanes, the first real mega-storm struck the Eastern Pacific countries in February 2071. It lasted for nine days. The UN declared it an official international disaster zone; crops ruined over the entire region, whole forests torn out by the roots, tens of thousands made homeless. Some idiot newscable presenter said that if one butterfly flapping its wings causes an ordinary hurricane, then this must have taken a whole armada of butterflies to start. The name stuck.
The second armada storm came ten months later, that one hit southern Europe. It made the first one seem mild by comparison.
Everybody knew it was the heat which did it. By then more or less every home on the planet had a newscable feed, they could afford it. To prevent the third armada storm all they had to do was stop using so much electricity. The same electricity which brought them their newly found prosperous living standard.
People, it seems, don’t wish to abandon their wealth.
Instead, they started migrating into large towns and cities, which they fortified against the weather. According to the UN, in another fifty years everybody will live in an urban area. Transgenic crops were spliced together which can withstand the worst the armada storms throw at them. And the amount of He3 from Jupiter creeps ever upwards. Outside the urban and agricultural zones the whole planet is slowly going to shit.