Royd might be making an early day of it. It was just after seven.
Nohar keyed in Royd’s office.
Again he got the comm asking for his voice-mail.
Royd could be on the comm with someone else. Nohar didn’t want to leave a message, though. Nohar wanted to see Royd’s eyes when he called him. If Royd was behind the attack, he would give something away the first time he saw Nohar again. That was the theory anyway.
Nohar spent the next few minutes doing a trick that an old hacker friend had taught him. He built a little script program into his comm’s memory to keep calling Royd’s numbers and to alert Nohar when something other than a comm answered the line.
That accomplished, he needed a car. There wasn’t any way to exist in Los Angeles without a groundcar at the least. While he waited for contact from Royd, he started calling rental agencies.
• • •
There weren’t any rental agencies in the area, and getting a rental car delivered to Compton was like trying to invite some deer for dinner at his cabin. Nohar eventually had to settle for a little no-name rental company that charged an exorbitant delivery fee and insisted on three times the normal liability insurance.
Nohar figured he had to get to Royd in person. He got himself ready, grooming himself and putting on the old suit he had liberated from his locker. The suit was conservative, black, and itched like hell.
He looked even more out of his element now. But he hoped that he was ready for a trip into the pinkest part of Los Angeles.
He was dressed by the time the car showed up. His comm had yet to get through to Royd.
He heard the horn blare a few times. Nohar took the gun, the comm, and the binoculars and went out to the waiting car. He walked out and saw a nervous-looking pink looking back and forth as he reached in the driver’s side and laid on the horn. He stopped when he saw Nohar come out of the motel.
The guy stared at Nohar as he walked up and held out his hand.
He kept staring.
“Keys?” Nohar asked.
The guy shook his head, as if to clear it. “Mr. Rajasthan?”
“Who else?”
He seemed too young to Nohar, barely half his own age. That seemed even younger on a human. He was blond, tan, and smelled as if he expected to die. He handed a cardkey to Nohar. His hand was shaking.
Nohar felt sorry for the guy. “You need a ride back?”
He shook his head vigorously and pointed his thumb back to the street, where a sleek-looking Chrysler Tempest idled by the mouth of the motel’s parking lot. Even the car gave the impression that it would spring into a hasty retreat at any moment.
Nohar looked at the waiting car. “Better go, then.”
The kid nodded and almost ran back to the waiting Tempest.
Nohar looked at the car he had rented, and quietly sighed. A Tempest it wasn’t. The car was an old GM Maduro sedan—which would have been a luxury car five years ago. But the vehicle showed its age with a dented body, threadbare interior, and the smell of decaying ceramic inductors.
Probably the worst part of it, aside from the smell, was the fact that it had been repainted a matte-finish lime green. Nohar thought it the color of dried phlegm.
Fortunately he’d called for a large car, and that’s what he got. It took him a few tries to force the driver’s door open, but he managed to slip inside. He pushed his seat all the way back, almost off the rails, so he could drive comfortably.
It took a few more times to close the door. And a few more to disentangle himself from the too-tight automatic safety belt that tried to strangle him. Eventually, he was on his way.
The comm in his pocket had yet to contact Royd.
• • •
Rush hour was just starting, and it took Nohar nearly an hour to drive through to Wilshire Boulevard. All the time he had a death grip on the steering wheel. The traffic got to him, the traffic and the feeling that he was sinking in a quicksand of urban landscape. He felt trapped.
He tried to get some music on the Maduro’s comm, but the speakers were shot. So he sat behind the crawling traffic in silence, the news feed scrolling across the screen between the two front seats.
The major news item was the launching of the America. It had spent nearly twelve months in transit past Jupiter’s orbit, and it had just test-fired the main drive within the past few days. In a few more weeks it would start a twenty-five-year journey to Tau Ceti. The news made a lot of the fact that the crew of the America had a high percentage of moreaus.
Getting their trash off the planet, Nohar thought.
The sad thing about the America was that the Americans had precious little to do with it. It was all a U.N. project now, and had been since the first completed ship, the Pacific, was taken over by Japanese Nationalist terrorists. That takeover was the last media news event that Nohar remembered being aware of, back in ’63, just before he exiled himself.
Back then, the manned interstellar project was run by VanDyne International and the U.S. Government. Since then, the U.N. had taken over all seven starships, finished construction on four, and launched three. Pacific was halfway to Alpha Centauri, Atlantic was heading toward Sirius, and Europa was on its way to Procyon.
A lot had happened in seven years.
Nohar wondered what it would be like to be on one of those ships. Strapped in a can going half the speed of light.
The next story that Nohar noticed scrolling across the screen was about the alien containment facility on Alcatraz. It caught Nohar’s eye during a spasm of paralysis in the traffic. He caught the words “. . . search for survivors . . .” and pressed the “back” button on the screen.
Nohar shook his head as the story replayed.
Someone had blown up the dome on Alcatraz. The place had been leveled, destroying the entire habitat. The explosion had killed off a good fraction of the alien population of the dome, and nearly a hundred of the scientists that studied the aliens. That had been the single repository of all the extraterrestrials on the planet, if the government and the U.N. were to be believed.
A car honked at him, and Nohar shut the news feed off.
He had met an alien once—soft and blubbery, like half-formed, bad-smelling, white Jello. They didn’t think like humans, and they were inscrutably hostile. They’d been at war with Earth, on this planet, for years before anyone caught on. Nohar had been one of the first few to catch on, but it got him precious little.
Nohar suspected that the starships were military missions, whatever the U.N. said about exploration and the broadening of humanity’s horizons.
Probably some moreau infantry would have their horizons broadened, too—just like their ancestors had in Asia, getting their guts blown out in a war the humans were running.
• • •
Nohar followed Wilshire up to a point just a few blocks short of Santa Monica, then turned north. In a few blocks he came to Royd’s office, a new polished building set back from the street. The place was gated, but the gate hung open on a driveway that tried to look like gravel.
The Asian influence on the structure wasn’t subtle at all. The drive was flanked by statues of Oriental lions—or dragons, they were too stylized for Nohar to tell—and the small grounds were landscaped into stasis, as if every plant was as much inanimate sculpture as the lions.
The building itself was a set of green marble cubes, the roof turned up at the corners to suggest a pagoda. Nohar pulled the Maduro into the parking lot. It looked out of place between a BMW and a Mercedes. The cars were all late-model luxury cars, and all of them seemed to be pastel shades of red, green, or blue. Nohar felt the same way looking at the cars as he did when he looked at the clothing on the streets in Compton—here was the style for this year, and he felt it looked ridiculous.
The place even smells contrived, Nohar thought as he stepped out of the car.
He stood there a moment, looking at the building, noticing the too-heavy scent of flowers, and thought of security that was in place. There had to be cameras around here, and the garden smell could be covering the more subtle smells of the guards themselves.
No reason to make anyone more nervous than they had to be. Nohar leaned back into the Maduro, slipped the Vind out of its holster, and slid it under the passenger seat.
Nohar straightened his tie and walked up to the front of the building. He noticed a metal detector set into the door. It was well-hidden, but his natural paranoia was returning, helping him pick up details like that.
The door fed into a lobby that was wrapped in another Asian-themed mosaic. Nohar walked across a giant wheel filled with figures that appeared vaguely Tibetan. At the top of the wheel sat a round desk behind which sat a human who fulfilled all the connotations of the slang term “pink.” The moreys used the term referring to humans’ general hairlessness. This human was bald, soft, and white. He looked pink.
“Can I help you?” he said as Nohar walked up. The guard didn’t look up from the screen he was watching, and Nohar didn’t smell any nervousness on the man. In fact, he didn’t smell much of anything from him.
“Here to see Charles Royd,” Nohar prepared himself to do some convincing to get himself in to see Royd. He didn’t have any proof that Royd had even come to see him, and if Royd had anything to do with the attack he doubted that the lawyer’d admit to being there.
To his surprise, the guard punched a button, said, “Visitor for Royd,” hooked a thumb at one of the corridors out of the lobby, and told Nohar, “Down there, up the stairs, first door on your right.”
Nohar stared at the guard a moment.
The guard finally raised his head and looked at Nohar. “Anything else?”
The guard’s expression didn’t change. Nohar, however, was startled and hid it by shaking his head and heading for the corridor. The guard’s face remained etched in Nohar’s mind. The eyes had been gloss-black, the nose hadn’t existed except for two vertical slits that had flexed when the guard breathed.
The guard was a gene-engineered human, a frank.
Nohar didn’t know what to make of that. Whatever the pink world felt about moreaus, they were an order of magnitude more twitchy about people messing with the human genome. U.N. treaties had banned human genetic engineering for decades. Which was why the moreaus existed—since it was fine with the U.N. if you gene-engineered a soldier, as long as it wasn’t human.
Of course, there were a lot of leftovers when the wars were over.
Nohar walked into the outer office where Royd worked. He got another subtle shock. Royd had plastered the walls with etchings of newsfaxes and static holos that apparently showed high points of his career.
The first holo that grabbed Nohar’s attention was a picture of Charles Royd with Father Alvarez de Collor. The spotted Brazilian feline was half a head taller than Royd. Nohar knew the jaguar because he was the only ordained Catholic priest on the West Coast who also happened to be a moreau.
Letting the moreaus into the Church had caused a near schism back when Nohar was ten years old. Father Collor was one of the first morey priests in the States. What was Royd doing with him?
A newsfax nearby had the headline, “Beverly Hills Lawyer Aids Homesteaders,” and was all about a fight Royd had with the government to allow a number of nonhumans—franks, in fact, not moreaus—to take advantage of the homestead project.
There were other stories lining the walls—Royd defending moreys arrested during the explosive riots a decade ago. Royd bring class-action suits against a number of employers for awful working conditions. Royd fighting against the continued separation of hospital facilities between human and nonhuman. Royd had even once represented the aliens held at Alcatraz.
Royd was neither small-time, nor a typical pink lawyer. Looking at all the stories lining the walls, Nohar felt that he would have known who Royd was if he had watched anything on the comm in the past seven years.
Now it made sense that Royd was hiring someone to find a lost morey. The guy made a living out of morey cases. He was high-profile enough that any nonhuman with a problem would come to him.
The question wasn’t why Royd was looking for a morey named Manuel—the question was why Royd had sought Nohar out to look for him.
“Can I help you?” came a voice from behind him.
From the husky overtone of the voice, and from the scent, Nohar knew that it was a vulpine moreau before he turned around.
He turned around and looked down on the upturned muzzle of a short female fox.
“My name’s Nohar Rajasthan, I’m here to see Charles Royd.”
“Of course you are,” she said. She extended a black-furred arm. “My name’s Sara Henderson, I’m one of Mr. Royd’s assistants. Maybe I can help you?”
It was odd hearing a Southern California accent coming from a vulpine mouth. This was the first fox he’d ever met who bore no trace of the ancestral English accent. It was also odd seeing a moreau in a dress. Female moreaus weren’t built like human women, and human-designed clothing would hang wrong. All the females Nohar knew had worn male clothing, and as little as possible.
Sara wore a dress, though, and one that seemed to be designed for her frame. It was black, businesslike, and most of all, it fit—even around the problem areas for human clothing on a moreau, the chest, where a moreau didn’t have breasts to speak of, and the rear where the large human ass was replaced by a tail.
While he’d been gone, someone had started manufacturing moreau clothing.
“Mr. Rajasthan?” Sara Henderson repeated.
Nohar shook the offered hand and said, “I’m afraid I really need to see Mr. Royd himself.”
The corners of Sara’s mouth turned in a frown. A lot of moreaus couldn’t do facial expressions very well, but this one carried just the right amount of annoyance.
“He is very busy. Do you have an appointment?”
You know damn well I don’t. Nohar shook his head. “I don’t think so. Mr. Royd visited me and made a business proposition. I want to talk to him about it.”
Sara stared at him, her black nose pointing at the knot of his tie.
“I was—am—a private investigator.”
The fur fluffed out a little on her face when she smiled. Nohar saw a brief flash of a canine tooth. “That’s where I’ve heard that name before.” She shook her head. “You were, like, the only mo—” she caught herself as Southern California was on the verge of completely taking over her voice, “—Nonhuman detective in LA for the longest time. Weren’t you?”
“A dubious distinction.”
“Didn’t you retire?”
“Apparently not.”
Sara nodded, as if everything made perfect sense now. “Well, I’m sorry but Mr. Royd was called out of town on an emergency.”
You have to be kidding. “Do you know how to get a hold of him?”
Sara shook her head, “I wish I did.” She looked back toward the office. “All we received was a short memo from his comm saying he’d be gone for a week. We have to shuffle his caseload onto an already overworked staff—In fact, I really should get back to work myself.”
“How do I get hold of Royd?”
“Wait till he comes back,” Sara said, taking his arm and gently maneuvering him toward the door.
As the door shut behind him, Nohar couldn’t help thinking, What kind of lawyer leaves town without telling the firm how to contact him?
Nohar answered himself, Maybe a very scared lawyer.
Chapter 6
Against his better judgment, Nohar found himself driving farther west, across Santa Monica, into the residential area of Beverly Hills. He drove the green Maduro past twenty-million-dollar homes, feeling as if a signal flare followed him down the street.
Pedestri
ans, joggers, dogwalkers—all turned to look. Nohar couldn’t tell if the stares were for him, or for the car. He passed a number of walled estates that didn’t even have access to the street, aircars were the only way in or out.
Royd wasn’t in a mansion, for which Nohar was thankful. He lived in a more subdued neo-Tudor building whose most ostentatious feature was the oval driveway and the multicar garage.
Even so, the location probably cost him five mil.
Nohar pulled straight into the driveway. He had thought about this on the way here and had decided he was going to go through with it, despite the fact that this was probably the pinkest neighborhood on the planet. Nohar was gambling that with Royd’s association with moreaus, the neighbors wouldn’t have the automatic reflex reaction and call the cops because a morey was in the driveway.
If anyone was watching him—and he was certain they were—the suit probably bought him some slack. Since he had no hope of going unnoticed, his only possible tack was to be unashamedly blatant and look as if he knew exactly what he was doing here.
He killed the engine and felt a sudden unease that was more than just the neighborhood. He tried to shake it, but he had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Nohar felt the urge to gun the engine and head for Mexico.
Instead, he quietly took the Vind from under the seat and slipped it back into his holster. Then he stepped out of the car and strode up to the front door.
Nohar could feel all the houses watching him.
His first thought was to try the call button, and if that failed, do a survey of the security on the door and try forcing it as quickly and quietly as possible.
He didn’t have to.
The call button was on the door, and when Nohar reached up to press it, the door swung open. The bad feeling came back, magnified.
Beyond the door was a small foyer. A draft came past Nohar carrying the scent of blood. Human blood.
Nohar stepped in, drawing his gun, letting the door swing shut behind him.