Starfire

5

From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

A peat fire is like no other: silent, sullen, and slow-burning, red in its hidden heart. Not unlike, to one of morbid imagination, the man seated in front of it.

Seth Parsigian fitted well into an ancient castle of western Ireland; better, perhaps, than I did. Burly, primitive, cross-legged by my broad stone hearth, he made a rather formidable leprechaun. His skimpy black singlet revealed long-healed scars on his chest and neck. His eyes, glittering in the light of fire and wall lamps, were like a snake’s.

“A dozen of ’em, and countin’,” he said. “We can do this any way you like. I have a ton of stuff with me, pictures, descriptions, video reconstructions, locations and murder method, plus ages and background for each girl. What foxes me-an’ not only me, half the security forces an’ probably all the amateur sleuths in the world-is the pattern. There isn’t one. I mean, so far as normal people are concerned, there ain’t. Mebbe you, with your special talent, can make sense of it.”

Of course. Maybe you, Dr. Guest, with your perverse, sick, disgusting, psychotic mind, will realize at once who did it.

“Spare me the doubtful compliments,” I said. “I will certainly read, and I will look, and I will think. I will do all these things-at my leisure. For the moment, I prefer to have your impressions. You were surely engaged on this effort for some time before you decided to seek me out. Tell me what you know, what you deem can be ignored, and what you conjecture. When I feel a need for information, I will interrupt. Surely you have observed some pattern, however faint.”

“Yeah. The pattern is, never the same thing twice. It started on December twenty-fifth, 2052. Myra Skelton went to a Christmas party at a friend’s place on level eighty-eight.”

“Level eighty-eight?”

“Locations on Sky City are named from the central axis. The axis is level zero. The outer edge of the cylinder is level one hundred. Myra Skelton lived with her parents on the eighty-second level, so she didn’t have far to go to her friend’s. Down six levels, and a hundred-meter walk around. She left there at nine at night. But she never made it home. They found her body the next mornin’, stuck in an empty storage room on level eighty-seven.”

“What was her age?” I sat back in my chair with my eyes closed. For the moment I was not attempting logical analysis. I sought only a sensation, a certain feeling, the stir of the small worms creeping up from the base of the brain.

“She was fourteen an’ a half. Actually, more like fourteen years and eight months. She died from a blow to the back of her head. No murder weapon, no suspect, no motive. I got full medical reports. Want to see ’em?”

“Later. Continue.”

“No rape, and no sexual molestation. Of course, I know that don’t prove a thing. In your own case, from all I’ve heard, you never even touched them, before or after—”

I opened my eyes. “At your peril, Seth Parsigian. This truce is fragile enough, without unnecessary provocation.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” He did not look it. “Anyway, she hadn’t been touched. Big mystery, an’ no clues, even though her family’s well connected an’ pulled strings to get high-powered investigators on it. They come up from Earth an’ talked a lot, but they found out zilch. They said, we got us an unknown killer — brilliant — and January seventh, they left.

“January tenth, Tanya Bishop played a game of three-ball on a court up near the axis, where it’s close to zero gee. She pulled a muscle and had to drop out before the game was over. Instead of waiting for the others, she said she was goin’ home to shower and rest her leg. Home was level sixty-six. She never made it. They found her in an airtight tank on level five. Thought at first it was an accidental death-gone in there, fallen asleep, asphyxiated. I know, that sounded like a bunch of crap to me, too. When they took a closer look at her body it turned out she was strangled. Fourteen years and one month old. This time she was naked. There was no intercourse, but there was mutilation after death. Sexual mutilation. Everybody said, we got us a crazy sex killer.”

I nodded. Once again I sat with eyes closed. Fourteen years and eight months, fourteen years and one month; the ages were right.

“On January twenty-sixth,” Seth went on, “Doris Wu disappeared. Age: fifteen years and four months. They never found a body, but everybody assumed she’d been murdered and dropped out into space. Wouldn’t be hard to do-earlier that day she had been on level hundred, right at Sky City perimeter. Dump her outside, and centrifugal force would carry her out and away. Pretty risky if you left any evidence on her, because the outside of Sky City is packed with meteorite sensors and the body should have been seen. It wasn’t. Soon as the disappearance was reported, people made the connection. Sixteen days between Myra Skelton and Tanya Bishop, sixteen days between Tanya Bishop and Doris Wu. Hey, we got us a killer who’s regular as clockwork. We better watch real close come February tenth.

“Except that Cissy Muller was found stabbed to death on January twenty-ninth, only three days after Doris Wu. No sexual interference, though Cissy was more mature-looking than the others. Mature-acting, too. Only fourteen years and three months old, but a real hot number. Experienced. If the killer had just wanted sex, best guess on Sky City is all he’d’ve had to do was ask.

“April Jarrow was murdered February sixth, eight days later. No intercourse or sexual interference, but maybe that’s not too surprising, because April was only eight.” Seth paused. “What’s up? You havin’ ideas?”

One might say that Seth Parsigian was brutish, vicious, uncouth, and self-serving; I certainly approve all those descriptors. But he was not without observational powers. He had seen my eyes open.

I shook my head. “Far from it. I have nothing close to a productive notion.”

That was the exact truth. I had been sitting, absorbing and sifting the information flow, and waiting. For what? It is hard to describe, although I am normally blessed with an adequate vocabulary. Let us say that I awaited the burgeoning within me of a strange desire, the joy of an old wound waking. The methods of murder described by Seth Parsigian were barbaric, and those I could not relate to. But the hunger, gusting through the cold arches of the mind, unpredictable and variable and irresistible-that should have resonated between the murderer’s brain and my own. April Jar-row’s death provided a jarring sense of dislocation. “Eight years old? You are sure she was so young?”

“Eight years and six months and one day. She looked a lot older, big and mature for her age. Might have passed for eleven or even twelve.” He waited, and when I closed my eyes again he went on. “Death was from a single wound, the severing of the jugular vein. It was up on level nine, only a twentieth of a gee environment. Must have been a devil of a mess, blood everywhere. Don’t see how the murderer didn’t get covered with it.”

If Seth were distressed at the picture that he was painting, it did not show in his voice.

“Suppose that the murderer had worn a space suit.” I opened my eyes again. “Would any blood boil away if he went-” I paused, then forced myself to continue, “-if he went outside? Into space?”

“Dunno. I can check that. Think it’s important?”

“I suspect that it is not. Continue.”

“Right. Myra Skelton, Tanya Bishop, Doris Wu, Cissy Muller, April Jarrow.” Seth counted them off on his fingers. If he had notes, I did not see him referring to them. “All right, we’re up to number six. There was a gap here, an’ people must have wondered for a while if the killer was done or died or shipped away from Sky City. Until March second, more than three weeks later, when they found Brenda Cleve with her throat cut.”

“Her age?” I wondered if the eight-year-old had been an anomaly.

“Thirteen years and three months. No signs of mutilation, but in her case there had been recent sexual intercourse. They found a semen sample, an’ over the next few days they did a DNA match for every blessed male on Sky City. They thought for a while they had the killer, a fourteen-year-old by the name of Donovan Summers. But it turned out that he and Brenda had been humpin¹ for months, and they’d had sex early the evening she died. He’d been home with his family on the other side of Sky City at the time when Brenda was murdered, and he had alibis for most of the others. The reason he didn’t come forward as soon as he heard about Brenda was because he didn’t want his parents to know he’d been having sex.” Seth shook his head. “Boy, can I relate to that. If my old dad had known what I was up to when I was fourteen, he’d have tanned my ass.”

The thought of a fourteen-year-old Seth Parsigian was too incongruous to sanction. And yet such a person had existed, just as there had once been a fourteen-year-old Oliver Guest. Unlike Seth, I had been a paragon of pious virtue, then, and for many years after, my father’s greatest source of pride. He never contacted me after my arrest. I suspect that my filial image at that point became somewhat tarnished.

“Number seven was another disappearance,” Seth continued. “An’ this was different for a lot of reasons. First off, the girl who was killed wasn’t a Sky City kid at all. Her name was Lucille DeNorville, an’ she was up from Earth for a sight-seein’ vacation. You may have heard about it because the media made a bigger noise over her than all the others put together.”

He glanced at me expectantly, and I shook my head. “I have little time to spare for the worries of others. My own problems are quite sufficient.”

“That right?” Seth’s face showed not the slightest hint of interest or sympathy. “Well, Lucille vanished on March tenth, one week shy of her thirteenth birthday. Her granny an’ granpappy back on Earth-she was an orphan-made a gigantic fuss about it. The DeNorvilles are loaded, so they could pay whatever it took to explore every last avenue. Not only that, they’re from a really old and well-connected family-claim their line goes back over a thousand years-an’ they have political and social clout. They had investigators talkin’ to every single human on Sky City, an’ as many robots and rolfes as could answer. The family offered a big reward, too — still waitin’ for a taker-an’ they made it pretty clear they didn’t care if they saw the murderer dead or alive. So there were bounty hunters all over, clogging up the works. Didn’t do a bit of good, because they all come up blank. Never found a body, never had a suspect.

“But the DeNorville family paid for reconstructions of all the murders, takin’ everything anyone knew or could guess about what happened.” Seth glanced around the long, stone-walled room, filled with smoky shadows cast by the dying peat fire. “Got a playback unit here, or did you go caveman all the way?”

Twenty-seven years had done nothing to improve his manners. “Over in the corner,” I said, “you will find the best playback equipment in Ireland. I will show you how to use it should your mechanical aptitude match your tact and diplomacy.”

It was wasted on him. He grinned, stood up, and headed for the far corner of the room. It was past midnight and the wall lights were already dimmed.

“You’ll be gettin’ full sensories,” Seth called from over in the corner. “I’ll do an override when I think I ought to. Tell me when you’re ready.”

“You may proceed.”

“All right. This one is for Lucille DeNorville. Hold your hat.”

Darkness dropped around me like a shroud. The air that filled my nostrils had an unfamiliar smell of machine oil and some kind of disinfectant. I heard a soft, steady pumping, so regular and soothing that after a few moments it began to fade into the background.

Light bled in slowly, building a scene around me. Ahead lay a long corridor, maybe four meters wide and three high. Occasional branching passages ran off it, and every few meters a white overhead strip provided lighting. I saw a couple of rolfes carrying a curved wall section between them. The little eight-legged machines scuttled along efficiently in the low gravity and were soon out of sight in a side passage. It was the interior of Sky City, as that space habitat had been portrayed a thousand hackneyed times in every visual medium.

The corridor ahead stood empty for half a minute. At last, from one of the side passages, appeared a woman dressed in yellow. Her hair was held back from her face by a matching yellow headband. She floated more than walked, and when she came to one of the overhead strips I could see that she was not a full-grown woman but a girl in the first bloom of youth. She advanced easily and gracefully, with all the dawning beauty of a thirteen-year-old.

For the first time in many years I felt the spider’s touch inside my head. It was ruined by Seth’s voice, hissing in my ear, “That’s Lucille DeNorville.”

Did the man think I was an imbecile? “I know who she is. Shut up.”

A second figure had appeared from another side passage. He was holding some kind of long bar and he moved fast, silently closing in on Lucille from behind. She apparently had no idea he was there, even at the final moment when he raised the bar and brought it around with sickening force to the left side of her head. I heard a crunch as the metal smashed the bone of the cranium.

She fell forward without a sound. Her attacker pulled a black square from inside his coat, opened it up to form a bag, and slid it around her. The metal bar went in next. Then he was lifting her-easy in the light gravity-and hurrying away with the bag in his arms. He did not enter a side passage, but traveled along the corridor until he was finally hidden from sight by its curve. The whole thing, from the appearance of Lucille DeNorville to the vanishing of her attacker, had occupied perhaps thirty seconds.

“Replay?” Seth asked, and reality came drifting back.

“Perhaps later. That’s it, the whole thing?”

“That’s it, squire. I agree, not much for three million bucks. Think we should ask for our money back?”

“How much of this was derived from established fact, and how much was conjecture?”

“We’re sure of a few things. How she was dressed, the fact that she died at that particular place. Like her, the weapon was never found. But that’s gotta be the way he killed her.”

“Got to be? Why?”

“Splashes of blood and scraps of brain tissue on the wall. The DNA tests confirm that they came from Lucille DeNorville. And they were splashes, not smears. No blood or body tissue anywhere else in that corridor, and I mean anywhere. The people DeNorville hired went over the corridor with every gadget ever made. The body must have gone into a bag or a box and been carted away.”

“Carried away by the murderer?”

“I guess so. Are you suggesting that there could have been two of ’em?”

“No. I merely wish to emphasize the boundary between knowledge and conjecture. Do you assume that she never saw or heard her murderer?”

Seth stared at me dubiously. He was, perhaps, wondering if his transatlantic journey was worthwhile. “Well, she couldn’t have, could she? The brain tissue came from the occipital lobe, they reckon from the left rear of her head. If she’d’ve heard him, she’d have turned and tried to defend herself.”

“That is plausible conjecture, but it is not fact. Suppose that she knew the murderer and was walking with him?” I was perhaps being deliberately perverse, since I could in truth see no reason to disagree with Seth’s conclusion.

He snorted. “What about the others, then? Did he know all of ’em?”

“That seems improbable.”

“Damn right it does. Even if he did know her, after six deaths wouldn’t you think that a young girl would get pretty damn careful who she’d walk with alone on Sky City?”

That thought had already occurred to me. I nodded, and Seth stared at me intently. “We’re up to number seven. Want to. hear about the other five, or do you need to take a break?”

He was observant. He looked as fresh as when we had started, but I doubt that was true of me. Even though I felt no kinship with the murderer, too many sea wraiths had been swirling up from the subterranean ocean of my past.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I am tired, but let us briefly review the other cases. Then I have to rest. I must inform you, however, that to this point I am utterly without ideas.”

It was rather worse than that. I could find no mental point of contact with the murderer, despite the fact that his victims interested me greatly.

Seth was not at all put out. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ve worked this for weeks, an’ still got nowhere. I’ll go quick with number eight. Denise Braidley was twelve and a half years old. We think she was killed March twenty-second; at least that’s when she disappeared. But she’s another case where the body was never found, an’ it’s even possible it wasn’t a murder at all. Denise had a bit of a screw loose-three or four times in the past she’d grabbed a suit an’ took off into space by herself. Once she was gone for three days an’ rode way out past Cusp Station. Said when she got back she’d have liked to keep going all the way to Alpha Centauri. Fat chance. She couldn’t have gone farther than she did in the suit she had, an’ she was lucky one of the big scopes spotted her. If no one had seen her an’ stopped her, she’d not have made it home. She’d never bothered to make sure her suit was fully charged or the com unit was workin’. Maybe that’s what happened this time, she drifted off an’ died in open space.”

I shuddered, for reasons that Seth was unlikely to comprehend. He was continuing. “Number nine is more interesting. Julia Vansittart was killed April third, an’ her case is the closest anybody’s ever come to gettin’ a peek at the murderer. In fact, except for a bit of bad luck we’d have at least a low-definition picture of him. It’s pretty certain-l know what you’re thinkin’: facts, not conjectures-that Julia was murdered outside Sky City, an’ we know to within ten minutes when it happened.

“She an’ a bunch of other students had gone off in a science class to take a look at the power-generating equipment, out along the axis beyond the main structure. Routine hop in suits, some class does the same sort of thing every few weeks. There were ten kids in the bunch, an’ when they were done at the power-generation plant they were allowed to go back by themselves to a city entry port on level zero. Julia was in her suit when they left the power plant. All the others swear that. A quarter of an hour later, the rest of ’em were inside an’ ready to get out of their suits. One of her friends, Walt Christie, noticed that Julia wasn’t with ’em, so he popped back outside to see what was keepin’ her. He found her body floating in space, communication unit smashed and suit ruptured.

Somebody had skewered a line extender right through the suit, through her heart, an’ out the other side. Normally, the meteor detection systems would have caught a picture of what happened, but they were out of action for scheduled maintenance. A bit of luck for the killer.

“We have a reconstruction of what happened, but it come out lousy. I don’t think you should bother with it. You’ll get a much better idea when you see everythin’ for yourself.”

I had to concentrate hard to keep my self-control. My mind had filled with an image of the body of Julia Vansittart. It floated in the great void, lost in a cavernous emptiness without end.

You’ll get a much better idea when you see everythin’ for yourself.

Those words raised the level of my discomfort to the point where my record of the next five minutes is based on despised conjecture, rather than the hard evidence of accurate recall.

“What do you mean, see for myself?” I croaked, terrified by the implications of his statement.

“Up on Sky City.” Seth stared at me. “We gotta go there. Even the best reconstructions are nothin’ like the real thing. I was thinkin’, you get your head around the facts, then in a day or two the pair of us make a little trip.”

“No! Absolutely not.” The room was spinning around me. “A visit on my part to Sky City is totally impossible.”

“It is? Look, if you’re worried about gettin’ caught, you don’t have to. I got the system greased. I can make sure that nobody even suspects—”

“Did you not hear me?” I cried. “I cannot go to Sky City-or anywhere else in space.” And, when he stared at me, “Did you not check my background before you came here? Since childhood I have suffered from extreme forms of acrophobia and agoraphobia. I cannot, to save my life, tolerate heights or open spaces.” I pointed toward the invisible cliffs, half a mile to our west. “I can go no closer to the sea than we are now. As for outer space” — the very words caught in my throat — “in that intolerable environment I would be unable to think, to work, even to breathe.”

He did not, to his credit, argue or rage or deny the reality of the problem. Instead he stood up and went to stare into the dying fire. “I didn’t know that,” he said at last. “I should have. There’s nothin’ you can do about it? I mean, like with drugs and fizzes?”

“Nothing. I have tried. Anything that damps my reaction sufficiently to tolerate an open environment leaves me unable to think.”

“Which ain’t too good, since your brain is what I need an’ it’s no use when it’s mush.” Seth turned to me, and to my astonishment he had a little smile on his face. “Dumb of me not to check everythin’, wasn’t it? But I guess I was in too much of a hurry to get here.”

He went to sit once more by the fireside. “Well, now we got us a problem. You can’t go to Sky City, an’ Sky City sure as hell can’t come to you. But it’s real important for me to catch our murderer, an’ I still think you’re my best bet for that. So let’s you an’ me sit down, talk slow and easy, an’ see what we come up with as a solution.”

The man, mirabile dictu, was humoring me. For possibly the first time in my life I did not object.