Vigilant

STRAWBERRY SMOKE

I had goaded/charmed/blustered my family into leaving Sallysweet River when I was twenty-one. By then, I was bored with the boonies and stabilized enough after my years of wildness to get cringey over the way people looked at me on the street. Anyway, a bare-rock mining town had bugger-all opportunities compared to the big city of Bonaventure… where Winston got his scholarship to law school, Angie found she was a VR savant, Egerton bought his first cargo-hauler, and so on. The family thanked me eventually, each by each, for nagging and ragging till we moved.

Despite that, my spouses hadn’t totally cut their ties with the old hometown. They’d all returned time and again over the years, visiting parents and siblings, showing off their children and other successes.

Me, I’d never gone back. Dads was dead. Mother had left town the day I got married — either washing her hands of me, or just taking the opportunity to attend to her own sanity now that my spouses were in charge of mine. Whatever the reason, Ma had scarpered south to the jungles of Argentia and was now breeding Demothian orchids for their natural antivirals, living in a grass shack with a gentleman Oolom pharmer. So I had no family to visit in Sallysweet River. And nary a success to show off… not unless you counted mere survival. On top of which, how could you feel nostalgic for a slag heap of a town, filled with bad memories and folks who thought I was dirt?

Even so… even so. I found myself going dewy-eyed as the police skimmer soared over forest and tundra toward my birthplace. The darkness got to me; no lights below but the glint of stars reflecting off snow. I remembered nights as a girl, walking through that darkness — with Dads, with a boy, with friends, or by myself, each type of walk different and each one rare magical.

Funny how you forget about magic. Even when you say (as we all do) that you’ve never lost the spirit of childhood, you find that for years you haven’t felt the slightest magical shiver. And you don’t really acknowledge that till magic touches you again.

Darkness. Quiet.

Yes, the police skimmer had some dim interior lights. And there was the background mutter of a ScrambleTac sergeant outlining plans for contingencies. But that had nothing to do with me. I sat by the window and let my mind be swallowed by the night.

Unyielding tundra night: the same night that had hugged me as a child. The same night that had wrapped this land in silence for untold humanless millennia.

Deep roots. Continuity. Home.

Sallysweet River had grown. Our old family compound once stood on the edge of town; now it anchored a dandified second village, dotted with tourist shops and tourist chalets and tourist amusement plazas. All but the Henry Smallwood Guest Home were huddled down empty now, hibernating in the darkness. This was the lull season, too late for skiing, too early for hiking, too muddy for damned near anything. The skimmer settled down in the guest-home parking lot. Cheticamp, Tic and I waited while the ScrambleTac team fanned out to deploy themselves around the perimeter. The club-thumpers looked right chipper as they slunk into the darkness. I don’t know if that meant they were confident there’d be no trouble or happy at the possibility they might get into a firefight.

On the trip in, one of the detectives made a bet with all takers that Maya had nothing to do with the killings. At most, she might have babbled too freely in a public place, gossiping that her snuggle-time pal Chappalar was scheduled to lead a secret inspection of Pump Station 3. One of the real bad guys probably overheard her and seized the chance to scrag a proctor on the job.

The detective who proposed this theory was a man named Willis Bleak — a roly-poly Homo sap with a boyish unwrinkled face that surely doomed him to play Good Cop for his entire professional career. His partner, P.O. Fellburnie, was a female Divian of the TyeTye breed: a head taller than me, thick as a barrel, and spilling out of her clothes with muscle. TyeTyes were originally designed for life on a planet whose gravity topped 2.3 Earth G’s; Jupkur once joked they weren’t engineered genetically but geologically, like walking chunks of real estate that could bench-press nine hundred kilos. Among friends, Fellburnie came across as quite the amiable woman, a classic "genial giant"… but on the job, I could imagine her slipping into Bad Cop any old time she felt like it.

The detectives took the lead, with Cheticamp, Tic and me following them up the guest home’s front walk. My own dome had sat somewhere in this vicinity — hard to tell the exact spot, with so many landmarks hidden by darkness. Then again, who knew if the landmarks were even there? The rocks and trees of my childhood may have been cleared away to make room for the guest home’s croquet pitch.

The front door opened as we approached, and in we went to a relentlessly cozy lounge. Overstuffed chairs of leaner hide sat buff and bulgy around a circular flagstone hearth. The fire was burning bluebarrel logs; I could tell because their smoke had a stringy scent of strawberries, subtle but sweet enough to make my stomach growl. No one was seated near the fireplace, but an oldish Oolom woman wearing a wood-bead necklace stood behind a counter at the back of the room. She looked up, smiled, and said, "Good evening. May I help you?"

Fellburnie and Bleak produced ID cards. The woman (wearing a badge that said hostess) took Bleak’s card and pressed it against her wrist-implant for verification by the world-soul. We all nodded in approval — too many trusting civilians take a gold-embossed ID at face value. In less than a second, the world-soul triangulated on Bleak (or rather Bleak’s wrist-comm) and reported that yes, the real Detective Willis Bleak, officer in good standing of the Bonaventure Police, was no more than a step away from the card. The hostess handed back Bleak’s ID and asked, "What brings you to Sallysweet River, Officers?"

"We’re looking for a woman named Maya Cuttack," Bleak said. "She’s staying here?"

"Dr. Cuttack has a room with us, yes," the hostess replied. "She’s been here since autumn — she rents by the month. But I haven’t seen her in several days."

Beside me, Cheticamp stiffened. You’d expect cops to have a better poker face.

"Do you know where she might have gone?" Fellburnie asked.

The hostess whispered into her wrist-implant, then turned to a desk screen to read the result. "Dr. Cuttack didn’t tell us where she went," the hostess said. "She’s made several trips down to Bonaventure recently… and she has all-weather camping equipment too. You know she’s an archaeologist? It’s not unusual for her to spend several nights away now and then, examining various sites in the neighborhood."

Even though she never got a license, I thought to myself. Looks like our Maya doesn’t stand on legal niceties.

"Do you know where these sites might be?" Bleak asked.

"She was interested in abandoned mines. There are a number near here, dating back some three thousand human years. I can lend you an excellent survey map that shows the known sites… although I doubt if you’ll find Dr. Cuttack at any of them. Rumor has it she’s found a promising new site. But then, I never heard the doctor say that herself; someone on staff may have just been spreading speculations."

There were plenty more questions. When exactly was Maya last seen at the guest home? Two days before Chappalar died. Did Maya have friends who might know her current whereabouts? Dr. Cuttack kept to herself. Had Maya ever had any visitors? None that the hostess could recall.

In other words, nothing. Maya could have been a bona fide archaeologist, innocently pursuing her studies; or a killer biding her time in the back of beyond, occasionally disappearing on "expeditions" as a cover for more sinister activities.

When Bleak and Fellburnie ran out of questions, they turned to Cheticamp to see if he had anything to ask. He shrugged… and Tic immediately stepped forward, as if he’d only been waiting for the police to finish.

"Turiff" Tic said. Dear madam. "How much did Dr. Cuttack actually stay in her room here? Three or four nights a week? More? Less?"

The hostess thought for a moment. "A day here, a day there… perhaps it added up to a week every month. The rest of the time, she was visiting Bonaventure or camping on the land."

"Just one week," Tic said. "My, my. Wouldn’t it be less expensive paying by the night, rather than booking a month at a time?"

"That’s true," the hostess admitted. "Our monthly rate is an excellent value… but if Dr. Cuttack had only paid for the nights she was here, she could have saved a good deal of money. And for such a frequent guest, we’d gladly store her luggage between times if she didn’t want to take everything camping. Our manager once mentioned that to her — we don’t want our guests thinking we take advantage of them. But Dr. Cuttack said money was less important to her than convenience: being able to come and go without always signing in."

Tic tossed me a meaningful glance; I didn’t need it. In her letter to Chappalar, Maya claimed to be underfunded. So why was she blithely forking out cash for a hotel room she hardly ever used? Even in the off-season, the HSGH had to be a pricey place to stay.

Captain Cheticamp picked up on the implications too. "How did Dr. Cuttack pay for her room?" he asked.

The hostess hesitated a moment, probably weighing a guest’s personal privacy against whatever pressure the cops could bring to bear. Then she whispered into her wrist-comm and turned to the desk screen. "Charged to a numbered account, in the Free Republican Bank."

Tic beamed an angelic smile. I could practically read his mind. Maya. Murderer. Bankrolled by the Freeps.

Rattlesnake, Cheticamp mouthed to me.

Of course, the detectives asked to search Maya’s room. Of course, the hostess said they’d have to discuss that with the manager. Of course, the manager took a long time to find and a longer time to convince that he should let the police barge in without a warrant. Everyone accepted this as routine — a well-practiced waltz that the cops and hotel had to dance before Maya’s door would open.

When we finally got to the room, it was empty… by which I mean Maya’d left nothing incriminating. Yes, there were clothes in the closet — expensive-looking things, with labels from fashion houses in the Free Republic — and the loo contained the usual toiletries… again top-of-the-line stuff, and thanks to my darling Peter, I knew something about the cost of cologne. (The man loved perfume and loved all the women in his life to be wearing it. Unlike my other husbands, who didn’t notice, or wrinkled their noses and made little cat-sneezes.)

If you’re interested, Maya’s room contained a huge wood-frame bed made of paper-peel branches still covered with bark… a state-of-the-art comm console discreetly hidden in a wall niche… a small cleaning servo that followed Fellburnie around, fussily fluffing up the carpet wherever the detective’s TyeTye weight squashed down the pile… but nothing you couldn’t find in any other "woodsy-decor" hotel room on the planet. No jacking equipment that would allow Maya to program killer androids. No scribbled manifestos explaining why the Vigil should be eradicated. No crumpled purchase order for three dozen jelly guns. Nor did we find clues to where Maya had gone.

(Tic had me distract the others while he talked to the cleaning servo. The things I do for the Vigil. And according to Tic, the devil-be-damned machine didn’t have a word to say except, "Muddy boots. Muddy boots. Muddy boots.")

Bleak and Fellburnie slogged off for more legwork — questioning the staff and finding guests who’d spoken with Maya last time she was here. Cheticamp ordered half the ScrambleTacs back to the skimmer for a tour of the area, checking the known mines to see if Maya was camped in the neighborhood. At first he thought it would be enough to do an IR scan from the air… but I told him they should peek into the mine tunnels themselves. "If I were camping this time of year, I’d tell my tent to set itself up a little ways down the mine. Best to be out of the wind in case a blizzard blows up."

"If these mines are three thousand years old," Cheticamp said, "isn’t it risky to go inside? They must be ready to cave in."

"We kids sneaked into the mines all the time," I replied. "Never went very deep, but the upper tunnels are still holding up with nary a crack. Whoever dug them cared more about permanence than Homo saps do; and it helps that Great St. Caspian isn’t an earthquake zone." I pointed to a dot on Cheticamp’s map. "This is the only one that’s dangerous, and the government sealed it off years ago."

"What’s special about that mine?" the captain asked.

"It had some explosions. Made it unsafe."

Tic’s ear-sheaths flicked opened with interest. "Explosions? What kind of explosions?"

"Uhh… gas."

"Tell us more, dear Faye." Tic composed his face into a wait-forever look of pleased interest. I could see he wouldn’t budge till he’d heard the whole story.

"Fine," I growled, "we used that mine to hold corpses, all right? During the plague. The soil around here is only a few centimeters of dirt over hard bedrock — no room for burials, and besides, we thought that when the epidemic ended, we’d need to return bodies to next of kin." I lowered my eyes, avoiding everyone’s gaze. "We slapped the dead into body bags, but there was still some leakage. Gas leakage. Eventually there were explosions."

"And the bodies got sealed in?" Tic asked, horrified. Nothing gives an Oolom the willies like the thought of being buried under tonnes of stone. Even if the corpses were already dead.

"The tunnel didn’t collapse," I told him, "but Rustico Nickel refused to let people go down to check the damage. Since the company owned the land, they’d be liable if anyone got hurt. After the plague, the Mines Commission decided it wasn’t safe for anyone to remove the bodies; so some charitable group named Dignity Memorials paid to send in…"

I stopped, thinking back to the afternoon the bodies were removed. It’d been almost a year after the plague, when Ooloms were taking to the skies once more: people starting their new lives by closing off the old. No one had imagined Sallysweet River could acquire a tourism industry… but day after day, Ooloms glided silently overhead, circling above the Big Top’s trampled mud, landing by my father’s grave and touching their foreheads to the green quartz monument.

Dozens of them stood outside the old mine tunnel to see the Big Top’s dead brought out. The wind was snapping-brisk, and the Ooloms all anchored themselves by holding on to trees in the nearby forest, hugging the trunks as if they were shyly trying to stay out of sight.

I was the only Homo sap there — come to watch mostly because everyone else stayed away. The humans of Sallysweet River didn’t want to be reminded of the corpses, or the way we’d giggled as we lit off the vapors of rot. Who could stand seeing what the bodies looked like? Browned by the explosions. Nibbled by insects. Cracked and dried by the previous winter’s cold. Ugly. I couldn’t stay away.

I planned to tell my neighbors the details. Make them lose their lunches when I described what had come out of the ground. And maybe I was trying to sicken myself, the way I sickened myself with everything else I did in those days.

Not to mention that I wanted to see what it looked like to be dead. Not the limp-in-a-bed death we’d gloomed over daily in the Circus, but skin-off-the-bones death, lying fallow in the ground, really and truly finished. What Dads would look like in his grave. What I might look like if I couldn’t find something to care about.

As the Ooloms clung to their trees, I stood smack in the middle of the clearing by the old mine’s mouth. Waiting to see the corpses. To see the truth.

The Ooloms behind me started whispering to each other — they heard the approach of footsteps ten seconds before I did. Clop, clop, clop coming up the mine’s stone floor.

Then a human figure stepped out of the tunnel’s gloom, cradling a body bag like a child. The bag’s plastic had melted through in several spots; Oolom skin, burnt to caramel, showed through the gaps.

The figure carrying the corpse came straight to me and laid the body bag at my feet, like an offering. I don’t know why — some quirk of its programming. Since the mine was unsafe for people, the bodies were being hauled out by robots: lifelike human androids dressed in mourning clothes. The organization that paid the bill called this a gesture of respect toward the dead… better to use robots that looked like solemn people, rather than forklifts, ore-carriers, steel on wheels. (It would have been even more respectful to get robots that looked like Ooloms; but Homo sap models cost less off the shelf.)

Two dozen androids worked to exhume the bodies that long-ago afternoon. Now, I couldn’t help wondering what happened to those robots once the job was done.