As the time passed in the room, food became an obsession. He could never predict when the servobot would come or how much it would bring. At times he would get several good meals in a row; at others, he would lie hungry for what seemed like days. Next to food, he became obsessed with time, with trying to count out some sort of unit that would let him mark the passing of hours. He never found one. At times he wept, at times he screamed; mostly he was silent, wrapped in a ball in one corner.
Eventually two humans came in, one a guard with a stun-gun, the other an important official to judge from his shiny black suit all trimmed in red braid. Although Tomaso wanted to hate them, they were people, faces, human faces, someone there with him in the room. The guard never spoke. The official had a neat black beard that waggled when he talked.
“You going to be a good boy for me, Tomaso?”
“You killed my mom.”
“I dint. Our masters did. You going to be a good boy? If you dunt, they’ll kill you just like they killed her. She was psionic. So are you. You know what that means?”
“I felt it when they killed her.”
For a moment the official wavered, his mouth parting slightly, a moist pink thing in the beard, his eyes briefly sad. When the guard looked his way he hardened himself.
“Then you know what it’ll feel like if they kill you.”
He would not scream, he refused to scream, he wrapped himself tighter and tighter into the ball. Although he held the scream back he couldn’t stop the voice, pouring into his ears.
“Now if you’re a good boy, they won’t kill you. You’ll be special instead, real special. Know what the masters are going to do? They’ll send you to a big old private school, and you’ll learn to use your talents right. This school is so private that most folks dunt even know where it is. You’ll be part of a big, big secret. I bet you’ll like that.”
Anything would be better than the room, any sight better than the waterfall, nauseatingly familiar, endlessly rushing to nowhere. He unwound himself from the ball and turned over to lie on his back and look up at the official from the floor.
“Is there food at this old school?”
“Sure. Lots and lots.” He hunkered down close by. “Know something? Your mom tried to lie to the masters. That’s why they had her killed.”
“She told me they kill any donna if she got psionics. She told me they kill us dudes, too.”
“Now, now, that no is true.”
“You’re lying. I can always tell when someone’s lying.”
“I should’ve figured that. Okay. She was right. They did kill her once they found her, dint they? But they dunt kill all the dudes, just the weak ones. You’re pretty tough, and you’re going to be a big dude someday. So what are you going to do? Get killed or do what they say?”
“You tell me something first. This old school, what’s it going to teach me?”
“You’re pretty brave, kid, bargaining when you’ve got no chips and no cards neither.” The man smiled in sincere humor. “Okay, it’ll teach you how to kill people on the sly. Ever hear the word assassin?”
In sheer surprise he sat up, drawing his knees close and wrapping his arms around them.
“I heard the stories. You mean they’re true?”
“Real true. Hey, do you think your mamma would want to see you die, too? I bet she’d tell you to go for it.”
“Yeah. Bet she would.”
And the boy’s voice cracked into a waterfall of weeping.
It was later that same day, when he’d had a bath and a big meal and been given new clothes, that he got his first look at a Master. In the Alliance human beings were kept strictly isolated on their own pair of planets unless they’d proven themselves trustworthy servants, and while he’d heard of the Master Race all his life, (all seven years of it), and of course seen pictures, he’d never come face to face with one of its members. (That he and his mother had lived in hiding on his grandmother’s farm until the day when the police came for them doubtless had something to do with that, because the H’Allevae refuse to hide from their human subjects in spite of the regular murders of one official or another.) The man with the black beard, Señor von Hartzmann, told him to mind his manners and took him to a big domed room crowded with strange furniture made of aluminum: bars and platforms and ladders all joined together and marching up the wall. Sitting on the platforms or perching on the bars were some twenty H’Allevae, each about one and a half meters tall with long skinny arms and short, peculiarly jointed legs, all dressed in elaborately decorated suits, embroidered and crusted with gems and sea-shells, dangling with fringes and beads. Their hairless faces bulged with multi-lens eyes and extruded out to the long, semi-mobile noses, dead-white and drooping over mouths that bore such a resemblance to human lips that at first Tomaso thought they were humans wearing masks. Sitting on the lowest platform, which always belongs to the leader because it’s the most vulnerable position, was a particularly bejeweled H’Allev’jan. When he spoke, although the words were perfectly clear, no one could mistake that lilting, sniggering whine for a human voice.
“He no was broken by your methods, Señor von Hartzmann?”
“This little dude, sir, has more guts than most adults. He’s tough. He’ll do fine.”
The Master flicked his head this way and that to stare at Tomaso with the pair of emerald-green secondary eyes set just above the hair-fringed holes in his head that collected sounds. From his red and purple coat he took an atomizer and sprayed a sweet and flowery scent in a soft mist over the boy. Only years later did Tomaso learn that the scent signified he’d been marked as a member of that particular master’s clan-pack. In primitive times, when the H’Allevae were still gathering fruits and seeds and insects as they swept through the mountains in a wave of constant chatter and howls, he would have been marked with the leader’s urine every morning to ensure that in the evening he received a share of whatever food had been gathered during the day. With the Master Race (a term they themselves had proudly taken from Old Earth history) in firm possession of over a third of the Mapped Sector, food was to be had for the asking, and the ritual was only done once and with fine perfumes. At the time he was only aware of wanting to sneeze, of hating the cloying stink and the encrusted being who sprayed him with it. That night, when he cried himself to sleep in a proper bed, the smell wound itself up with his own furious voice, so that even years later, whenever he hears the small boy screaming inside he can smell the sweetness, too.
But he doesn’t listen to the voice anymore, except sometimes when he’s falling asleep. For a brief second then he feels the abraded pain in the small hands and hears the cracking hoarse hatred, in the merciless intervals before his trained mind snaps itself off like a comp switch and falls to restful oblivion. When he’s awake, as he is now, strolling down H Street after stuffing Sally Pharis’s body into an organic refuse pickup bin behind a restaurant, he doesn’t remember, he refuses to remember the child. But the rage is another matter. The rage is a friend, a useful companion who keeps his mind hard and sharp and centered on death. When the time came this noontide he regretted having to kill Sally after the pleasure she’d given him; it was the rage that bit out her life with a knife for teeth.
He stops in front of the mirror-dark polarized window of a closed shop to adjust the helmet of the suncloak that muffles him in perfect obscurity. As long as he speaks to no one he is for all practical purposes invisible, just another white ghost drifting along the semi-deserted street in the glare of late afternoon. If the police should find Sally before her dead flesh is pulped to strip it of its precious water, who will be able to remember or tell which of the suncloaks concealed the sentient responsible? The blunt boots showing beneath the hem could as easily belong to a lizzie as a human, though he is too tall for a carli or a Hopper, as other races so inelegantly term the H’Allevae. With a grin invisible behind the reflective face-plate he goes on, walking slowly and deliberately like a tired sentient with nothing to hide. As h
e turns down the alley leading to the cheap hotel where he stowed his gear, he wonders if anyone will find the body. Perhaps so, if the recycling crew is alert, because there was an odd smell about that bin. He didn’t notice it until he had Sally safely tucked inside, but as he left a waft drifted after, a scent like rancid vinegar that will probably make the crew decide to check the contents carefully for something that might be spoiling the batch of reusable proteins. As he thinks about it, he can still smell it, clinging perhaps to his hands or jumpsuit. He decides he’ll have to pay the fine for an extra shower, even though he hates doing any of those small things which get a person entered into comp-logs and remembered by clerks.
By the time he reaches the small, spare room the smell is noticeably stronger. He tosses the suncloak onto the bed, kicks off his boots, then strips off the maroon jumpsuit. Since the silky fabric is tightly-woven, he’s been sweating all day, and the moisture seems to reek of vinegar with an overtone of Sally’s perfume. He drops the suit onto the blue tiled floor of the closet-sized bathroom, out of the way in a corner to prevent the smell from getting into the frayed carpet, while he gets a plastic bag out of his duffel. Like most spacer’s gear, the suit rolls up to a light and tiny wad that he can slip into the bag for a later jettisoning.
The shower and some strong soap wipe the smell away and leave him feeling as relaxed as he ever is. By then he can barely remember Sally’s face, and the rage has eaten the last of his regret. As he gets dressed, this time in a pair of gray shorts and the plain white shirt of a businessman, he finds himself thinking a lot about eating. Not that he’s hungry—it’s merely that images of biting and chewing and digesting seem to be running through his mind. When he focuses on them, he realizes that he’s picking up psychic signal from somewhere very close to him. He sits down on the edge of the bed, opens his mind, and listens carefully. Whatever being is sending the signal has such a primitive mind that words seem to be beyond it. Only images come to him, and dim confused sensations, all of eating, sucking, dissolving. Although the room is empty except for himself, the mind is close: very close, this eater, scraping, slurping, an inexorable scavenger.
For the first time in years the cold mouth of panic brushes across his skin and nibbles at—he cuts the thought, the damned rotten image of eating (chewing, sucking, swallowing, always searching for food to nip and gnaw) off clean in his mind. His long training taught him to empty his mind, to feel nothing, image nothing, verbalize nothing, to focus on his breath and that alone, but now he feels taking a breath as an eating, stripping the air of oxygen and sucking the precious gas deep into his self. The panic begins to chew at the edges of his mind. He jumps to his feet with an audible curse, but even the curse draws its force from excrement, the outer and visible result of inner and invisible digesting.
The signal seems to be getting stronger. He begins to tremble, standing alone in the room with the frayed gray carpet and the purple flowered curtains rippling endlessly without really changing position. The vinegar smell is back—he’s sure of it.
Although he doesn’t realize it, all the conditions have been met for his madness to start chewing its way through his skull.
Chapter Four
Lacey’s message reaches Bates an hour before sunset, when he returns to his office after personally fetching the preliminary coroner’s report on Ward. Although he’s been considering getting a little sleep, instead he goes to the locked drawer in his desk and retrieves a couple of illegal pills, leftover evidence from a bust some months back, that will keep him awake and functioning all night. After he washes them down with mineral water, he checks in with the duty desk. “Okay, Ricardo, I’ll be at A to Z Enterprises on a tip. That’s in an alley off D Street, right by the port gates.”
“Sure, Chief. I’ll route any news straight to your beltcomp.”
As he drives toward Porttown, a little too fast, taking the corners a little too widely, he wonders if he’s doing the right thing by bringing Lacey into this. He hates asking simply because her help is so valuable that he doesn’t want to overuse it. He knows perfectly well that she dislikes cops and might simply decide to have nothing further to do with them if he makes a nuisance of himself. Besides, if she should get known as a copbot, half her sources of information would dry up. On the other hand, since Mulligan is a friend of hers, he can stress the very real danger that the psychic’s in and maybe enlist her help that way.
When he reaches the warehouse Nunks shows him straight in and leads him across the garden to the staircase up to Lacey’s rooms. Walking through the green and growing things gives the chief a brief but much-needed respite, a welcome reminder that most sentients have pursuits other than murder on their minds. Down at the far end, assiduously tying young tomato vines to wire supports, is a strikingly beautiful young girl with a purple frost to her hair. When Bates hesitates, admiring her, Nunks growls under his breath and points firmly onward.
“I take the point, yeah, pal,” Bates says. “She’s off-limits, huh? Too bad.”
Nunks’ growl rises to a snarl. Bates lets the matter drop.
In Lacey’s sitting room Mulligan snores in the corner, wadded up like an old shirt on the floor. Bates briefly wonders how any human being can sleep in such an impossible position, then turns to Buddy, who’s blinking and humming in his butler mode.
“Good afternoon, Chief Bates. I have sent a signal to Lacey’s alarm. She will be with you shortly. Please help yourself to an alcoholic beverage if you should wish.”
“Thanks, Buddy, but I’ll skip it. She got you working on this carli murder case?”
“My programmer has not authorized me to impart those data.”
“Course not. She’ll get her pound of flesh out of me first, huh?”
Buddy blinks in what appears to be alarm.
“I am unaware that my programmer possesses cannibalistic traits.”
“Just a joke. Forget it. Can you tell me if Mulligan’s been here long?”
“Oh yes. Those data are open file. He has been here, off and on, for the last twenty-nine hours.”
“Good. When he wakes up, make sure that he stays here.”
“My programmer has already given me a similar order.”
At that Lacey herself comes staggering out of her bedroom, her hair an unbrushed blonde thatch and her eyes red-rimmed.
“No sleep today, Lacey?”
“Just two hours, two and a half maybe. Sit down, chief. I see Mulligan no is using the sofa any more.”
“Does he always sleep twisted up like that?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Hey, sorry, I dint mean anything risqué.”
She shoots him a genuinely furious look and stumbles over to the wet bar to splash water on her face while he curses himself for his lack of tact. The hyper pills, he assumes, are beginning to take effect.
“What can I do for you, chief?” She comes back and flops into the armchair behind her desk. “The two-carli murder?”
“Just that, but now there’s been a third—a human, and one of my best officers, damn it.”
“I’m sorry.” The sympathy in her voice is as genuine as the earlier anger. “Losing a good man hurts.”
“Yeah, it does.” He glances away. “I’m no going to ask you how much you know or where you learned it.”
“Gracias. Then we maybe can do business. I assume that’s what you’re here for.”
“Yeah, but I no can bargain over the price. The department’s got fixed rates for information.”
“Oh, I don’t want anything crude like cash.”
“Yeah? What, then?”
She gives him a small, amused smile that makes her look about fifteen years old.
“Just having you obliged to me is enough. I might need to call a favor in someday.”
Trapped, Bates hesitates. The last thing he wants is that kind of sword hanging over his head, but if he refuses, he risks having her turn him away.
“We’ll leave it at that, the
n. You know what’s wrong with you, Lacey? You’re bored, being retired. Why the hell dunt you just come work for us?”
“Maybe I will—someday. What do you need?”
“I’m no even sure, but let’s start with Sally Pharis. She might be an important witness.”
“Yeah, Buddy told me you thought she was in some kind of danger. You got her in custody?”
“No, we no can find her.”
“Oh sweet jeezus.”
“Yeah. Damn right.”
“Well, I’d better see if I can find her, then.”
“I was hoping you’d say that, yeah. Now, Mulligan’s involved, too, but he’s probably safe enough here. Nunks no would let in anyone who was trying to hurt his friend.”
“Mulligan could pick up an enemy coming for him, too, probably. But what happened to your officer?”
Even though it hurts, Bates keeps his voice low and steady as he tells the story, including the coroner’s statement that whoever used the knife must have been exceptionally strong to slash that deep with one cut. From there he moves on to tell her everything he knows about the case. As he talks, she types, her fingers moving fast over the old-fashioned equipment, the screen casting odd flecks of glare into her face.
“Are you going to put a release on the evening news?” she says at last. “There no is a lot of people around in broad daylight, but your killer must’ve been one hell of a sight. Madre! Of all the messy ways to off someone! If anyone did see him, I bet they remember it for years.”
“Hell, for the rest of their lives! Makes me wonder, does he have a reason for using a knife? They’re quiet, but so are military lasers, and I’m willing to bet that anyone could buy one on the black market if he had the right connections.”