Penumbra

14

Klien stood before the full-length mirror and dressed with care. Tonight was to be a killing night, when he would do his microscopic bit to make this corner of the Expansion a better place. As ever on these special occasions, he wore his sabline suit.

He moved to the lounge with its sunken sofa bunkers, its objets d’art, an aria by Verdi playing softly. He stood for a long time, staring at the room until he no longer saw it as a physical location, but as an abstract idea—the one locus of the universe where he was safe, his refuge from all the corruption and the evil out there. He steadied his breathing, tried to control the crazy thudding of his heart. He knew that he had to leave now, to walk off his nervous excitement. He ensured that he had his capillary net and laser pistol and then walked from the house and through the quiet streets.

The monsoon rain had refreshed the trees and shrubs in the gardens and parks. The rising moon and the lights of the high orbitals reflected in rain droplets on leaves and flowers. It was like, he thought, the garden of Eden. It was hard to believe that this idyllic corner of Calcutta, the meanest city on the meanest planet of all, was surrounded by so much evil. He thought back to his time on Homefall; it had been a period of innocence, or perhaps ignorance. He had been privileged to live on such a haven, without knowledge of what existed outside. And people like Quineau, they wanted to open up the planet, allow the evil of the Expansion to inundate paradise.

He walked quickly past the overblown residences of millionaires, many of the houses, like his own, styled upon the grand buildings of history. He was often sickened by the profligacy of wealth, and nowhere was such excess more evident than the country where abject poverty was still a fact of life for many. Oh, dear God, how he missed Homefall. He told himself to concentrate, to think only of the job ahead. If he were to allow his mind to stray, his thoughts to dwell on anything other than his mission, then disaster would befall him.

He stopped when he came to a com-screen kiosk, stepped inside and pulled on the capillary net. A silver-haired stranger regarded him in the blank screen. Satisfied, he left the kiosk, a new man.

He wondered, as he strode through the gathering darkness, if the officers of the Homicide Division had worked out the pattern of his killings yet. It had come about quite accidentally, eight years ago after his third killing. A newspaper report carried a map of the district, with stars to locate the positions of the murders; they happened, he noticed, to form a straight line running approximately north to south. Into his head came the sudden and blinding vision of a crucifix, and he was struck by the notion of how appropriate, how fitting, the symbol would be. The brand of God, eradicating evil, upon the face of the city.

With each execution, he realised, he ran the increased risk of the pattern being discovered. One day, he knew, some observant officer in Homicide would notice the partly formed crucifix, and stake out the areas where he had yet to commit a killing. He admitted to himself that the chance of being apprehended added a certain frisson of risk to his self-appointed mission of cleansing the city. He wondered if, on some subconscious level, his decision to commit the murders in the design of a great cross was a desire to be apprehended and punished? Perhaps, in lieu of returning to his planet of birth, to paradise, he would rather die the death of a martyr on Earth? Whatever, he hoped that his day of judgement would be suspended for a short while yet. He had three more killings to accomplish before the crucifix would be finished: one at the very end of the right crossbar, and one beneath each crossbar, to represent the moons of Phobos and Deimos.

Klien smiled to himself. They would be puzzled by the location of tonight’s killing, no doubt. This one would represent Phobos, for the crucifix he was carving across the city was the cross of the Church of Phobos and Deimos, formerly of Mars, but no longer existing anywhere but on his birthplace of Homefall.

He was safe for a while yet, at least.

And after that, when the crucifix was completed? What then? Then, he would sit back and consider his options.

He crossed a quiet residential street and cut down a tree-lined footpath. At last he came to a small square of grass, an area of parkland where during the day the children of the rich played, watched over by their nannies and bodyguards. Tonight the park was quiet.

He paused at the end of the pathway. He looked at his watch in the light of the moon. It was almost eight o’clock. He realised that his hands were shaking, his heartbeat thumping. At times like this, when he was about to end the life of another, he felt most alive himself.

He looked out for the arrival of Raja Khan. He scanned the area for any sign that Khan had disobeyed his instructions and brought along accomplices—but Khan knew that if he did so, Klien would cancel the deal. It was in Khan’s interests to follow Klien’s instructions to the letter.

Seconds later he saw a shadowy figure at the far end of the park. Khan, his great bulk eclipsing the coachlight of a house done in the style of an English Tudor mansion, moved across the park towards Klien. The man was alone.

“Where are we?” Khan asked. “Where’s your warehouse, Smith?”

Klien gestured in the half-light. “Down here. A hundred metres to the left.”

Khan sounded unsure. “In this neighbourhood? Are you sure?”

“What are you frightened of, my friend?” Klien said. “You want the money, don’t you?”

This shut him up. “Ah-cha,” he said at last. “We go.”

Klien led the way back down the footpath. He judged that the nearest residence was perhaps fifty metres away. The crack of a laser charge would go unnoticed. He reached into the jacket of his sabline suit and caressed the butt of his laser pistol.

He paused in the silver illumination of a streetlight, and half turned. He wanted to look upon the face of the criminal as Khan realised that he was about to die, see the surprise in his eyes.

“What?” Khan said. “I don’t see—”

Klien withdrew his pistol, took aim and fired. By some fluke, Khan anticipated the shot and ducked to one side. The charge missed the man’s head by a fraction and, screaming in panic and pain, he turned and staggered off along the footpath. Klien gave chase, his stomach churning. Khan fell to his knees, then slumped on to his side. Klien stood over him, kicked the giant on to his back. Khan stared up at him with terrified eyes, the flesh of his forehead and a great chunk of hair burned away.

“Why?” Khan managed in a whisper.

Klien knelt, aware of the overwhelming feeling of exultation coursing through him. He was being presented, on this occasion, with the opportunity always denied him: to inform his victims why they were about to die, to make them face the ultimate consequence of their ways.

“Do you repent?” Klien almost spat, his face inches from the dying man’s. “Do you recognise your sins and are you truly sorry?”

“I…”

“What? Say it! Say you repent!”

“You’re… you are mad.”

“Verily I am angry, Khan. I am angry on behalf of God. You’—he pointed the pistol, almost firing then—‘and people like you deserve no more than summary execution. Criminals, drug dealers, pimps and murderers, you bring misery to the innocent, the blight of evil into the lives of those who have done you no harm! Do you repent?”

“I…” Khan spluttered, a mere gasp of pain. “I was doing what I had to do to survive.”

Klien almost wept with rage. “You brought pain and misery to the innocent,” he said, “and for this you must die!”

“No!”

Klien fired, the charge frying the right side of Khan’s face, causing instant death by massive neural dysfunction. Kneeling over the body, crying quietly to himself, Klien reached out with his razor and sliced the sign of the cross into the ample flesh of Raja Khan’s left cheek.

He stood and hurried from the body, enraged still by Khan’s defiance in the face of death. Perhaps, he thought, as great an evil as one’s original crime was the inability to see it as such and admit to one’s sins.

He heard a noise to his right, movement in the garden beyond the hedge. He stopped and listened intently, but no further sounds came. Perhaps it had been an animal, or in his anger he was becoming paranoid. He hurried on, almost running in his haste to gain the sanctuary of his home.

Ten minutes later he locked his front door on the world. He put his pistol and capillary net in the safe behind the Vermeer print, moved to the bathroom and showered. As the hot water massaged his tired skin, he felt the tension drain from him. It was a mistake, he realised, to have tried to extract some admission of sin from Khan. Evil men would never admit to the errors of their ways. He would not make the same mistake in future. He would merely carry out the killing and rest assured in the knowledge that the world was then a little safer.

He moved to the lounge, poured himself a large brandy and lay in one of the sunken bunkers. For the next hour he closed his eyes and concentrated on the taste of the brandy, riding the wave of exhilaration surging through him. It was at times like this, when he seemed to be most alive, before, during and immediately after a killing, that he was reminded of why he came to Earth.

From a drawer in the table in the middle of the sunken bunker he withdrew a stack of pix. He spread them on the cushion beside him and sipped his brandy.

On arriving on Earth almost fourteen years ago, Calcutta had struck him as a hellish congestion of humanity, traffic and constant noise. He had literally stopped in his tracks on stepping from the spaceport at midnight. He had never before seen so many people. They flowed down the streets in never-ending waves, thousands of people of all types: Indians in strange clothes, more familiar Europeans in suits and dresses, tall jet-black Africans in robes and djellabas. He’d thought that perhaps this area was so congested for being so close to the spaceport, but when he caught a taxi to the city centre he’d stared out in horror: the entire city was a madhouse of crowds and deafening traffic and strobing lights and vast nightmarish screens that hovered over everything and exhorted the populace to buy. He had booked a room in a hotel and did not venture out for two days.

Then, the urgency of his mission spurring him on, he’d emerged on to the crowded streets. The city was a curious mixture of the ultra-modern and the old, with the soaring polycarbon structures of the city centre overlooking a sea of slums patched together from scavenged carbon-fibre scraps and polythene, the rich commingling with the poor. His first experience of beggars, their tenacity some measure of their desperation, had shocked him profoundly. He’d wondered how a rich citizen of the city could exist without being tortured by guilt and shame.

Klien had located the headquarters of the Mackendrick Foundation, and Mackendrick’s private residence to the west of the city, and considered how he might go about obtaining the softscreen. To his surprise he’d discovered, over a period of days of surreptitious surveillance, that Mackendrick’s mansion was not only inadequately guarded, but lacked security cameras. He’d considered the possibility of breaking in and locating the softscreen by chance, but dismissed the idea. He would stand a better chance of finding the softscreen if he could by some means gain legitimate admittance. He’d been considering this when he heard on a news report that the house had indeed been broken into. A safe was robbed and Mackendrick’s daughter had been kidnapped.

Klien saw his opportunity and had moved quickly to set up his own security and investigative company. He sent com-messages to Mackendrick’s business headquarters and private mansion, detailing his spurious expertise in the field of security and private investigations.

About ten days later he’d received a summons to an exclusive city centre restaurant, not to meet Charles Mackendrick, as he’d expected, but his Indian wife, Naheed. She had explained that Mackendrick’s own security firm was handling the investigation into the theft and the kidnapping of their daughter, and that Mackendrick did not want outside concerns working on the case. Naheed had argued that surely two sets of people working on the same case would be an advantage, but Mackendrick had been adamant. Therefore, for the sake of her daughter, Naheed was willing to pay him a considerable sum to track down the kidnappers and return Sita. He’d asked if he might be able to visit the mansion at some point, but Naheed Mackendrick had been unsure.

“Is it absolutely necessary? I mean, if my husband found out…”

“It would help in my investigations, madam,” he’d said.

“What do you need to know? I have pictures of Sita’—she’d given him half a dozen pix of a shy-looking girl in a blue knee-length dress—‘and if you need to know what was stolen…”

Klien had frowned, wondering how he might gain admittance to the mansion. “It might help.”

“All that was in the safe at the time was a small sum of money, and something belonging to my husband—an old softscreen entertainment.”

Klien remembered feeling the bottom drop from his stomach. He’d looked up at Naheed to see if she had noticed his reaction.

“A softscreen entertainment?” he’d said. “What exactly… ?”

Naheed Mackendrick had waved dismissively. “Oh, it was some old screen thing that Charles brought back from one of the colonies. He seemed to think it was valuable.”

“What did the… the screen show? What kind of entertainment?”

“I only glanced at the thing. It was some adventure story, set on a mountainous planet. Three explorers were looking for alien artefacts or some such.”

“I see,” he’d said, at first elated that he had made the breakthrough, and then immediately daunted at the prospect of having to find the kidnappers and the soft-screen in a city as populous as Calcutta.

“Do you think you’ll be able to find my daughter, Mr Klien?”

He had reached across the table and touched her hand. “You have my word that I will do my very best.”

From that day he had devoted his time to finding Sita Mackendrick. If he could locate the girl, and find out from her the identity of her kidnappers, then he would be that much closer to finding the softscreen. If, of course, she was still alive. For the first few weeks he had told Naheed Mackendrick to expect a ransom demand, but when no demand was made and Naheed came to him distraught at the thought that her daughter was dead, he had comforted her with the idea that perhaps she might have escaped.

“In that case, why hasn’t she returned home?” she’d asked him.

He had wondered how to phrase it diplomatically. “Was your daughter happy at home?”

Her silence, her avoidance of his gaze, had told Klien more than enough.

Klien had taken to the streets then, making enquiries, talking to people who had contact with street-kids, befriending the kids himself. At the same time he had scoured second-hand electrical stores and auction houses. In itself, the screen was not that valuable; perhaps the kidnappers had sold the softscreen, or even discarded it. All the while he had kept himself alert for news that an exploration company was heading for a hitherto uncharted planet out on the Rim, prompted by the discovery of an intriguing softscreen recording. No news had been forthcoming, and as the months progressed he convinced himself that the screen had been discarded or lost.

A year after the kidnapping of her daughter, Naheed Mackendrick had succumbed to leukaemia, so Klien’s monthly stipend was curtailed. To earn a living and to keep abreast of developments in space, he had applied for a job as a security guard at the spaceport. His rise since then had been, as they say, meteoric. He had even accustomed himself to the squalor and poverty of Calcutta. He had become, without really realising it, one of the rich who deigned not to notice the poor.

But all the time, down all those years, he had not relented in his search for Sita Mackendrick. It had occurred to him, as he considered the many possibilities that surrounded the case, that she had not been kidnapped at all. He knew it was a wish-fulfilment fantasy, but what if it had been Sita Mackendrick herself who had stolen the contents of her father’s safe and run away from home? What if she had the screen in her possession, after all these years?

He stared at the pix of the pretty young woman, wondering where she was now, wondering if the truth might ever be known.

He realised that his search had become an obsession, and he wondered what his reaction might be when, if, he finally did locate the girl. If she did indeed possess the screen, or knew of its whereabouts, and his search came to an end, then perhaps he would be unable to stop himself, and he would kill her as he had killed all his other victims over the years.

He reached out and drew, over the image of her face, the sign of the cross.