G. Nordley: Final Review

Finally, Do Tor acted—apparently, the lack of a negative review was enough. With breathtaking quickness, his mouth was at Zo Kim’s offered throat. The latter shuddered, made one last reflexive flap of his mottled brown wings, and was still.

Mary reached the stage as someone belatedly told the curtains to close, and over her Monitor’s comset Drin heard Do Tor say, softly, “Tastes very sweet.”

“Richard Moon,” Mary called. Yes, of course, Drin thought as the fog of horror lifted from his brain, standard procedure called for an interview with whoever told a Kleth that their mate was dead, though obviously it had been the last thing Moon had seemed to want to do.

The shocked audience started, on its own, to leave its seats, pads and perches for the clean air outside, as silent as the dead themselves. Death was rare on Trimus, and when it happened it was almost always a fatal accident in some remote area, or the very private suicide of someone who had come to feel their time in the Universe was complete. This was unprecedented—the most private moment one could imagine of a sentient being turned into an awful public spectacle. An accident? Zo Kim was unloved, but this? Who would wish this on anyone?

“Richard Moon?” Mary repeated, somewhat louder.

Now Drin was fully alert and looking around the room. Their erstwhile master of ceremonies was nowhere to be seen. Drin’s award, if indeed he had won, was so many scraps of paper polluting the stage in front of the curtain and the first row of empty seats. Why? In the name of the Compact, why?

In an example of the theory of random evolutionary drift, the style of technology on all three worlds developed filigrees well beyond the requirements of survival, some being inexplicably weird to members of other races. To make Trimus work, to have common meeting grounds and shared cultural endeavors, we had to go back to basics. Also, what would be the point of having the three species cohabit a world if they were engineered and constrained by their technology to the point where they were no longer the three species? So, Trimus city was designed to be simple and almost ascetic. Use of robotics was strictly limited, transportation within city limits is by foot or wing, and buildings were designed to stand on their own, without requiring active support elements.

Drinnil’ib’s Trimus City office smelled of the sea, as well it should—a deep pool took up the western third of the hexagonal room and connected to the main canal. That, in turn, looped through the city from the North Sea from Miller’s Beach to Dori Bay, carefully arranged to let the Zom current, which impinged on the bay, flow through and keep it clean. Clean, neat, ordered.

Not ordered enough, Drin thought. He grabbed a crate of pollution effects samples from the misnamed protected regions of the south and moved it from under the main wall screen to the storage shelves and made a note to turn it over to Do Tor and Go Ton—he would have to delegate more, and the Kleth monitors were more naturally suited to monitor the pollution of these ad hoc human settlements in the protected region. He grunted. Some protection! The protected regions were crawling now with human primitivists and Do’utians playing old-time beachmaster.

Drin noted the mother of pearl century plaque with its silver 144 on the wall—a human decimal word for a Do’utian’s milestone rendered in Kleth base eight. It was, in itself, a symbol of the principles of Trimus he held sacred.

The office had been his for over a century, since he’d risen from Monitor to Monitor Lieutenant. He’d stayed there as he was promoted to Monitor Captain, and finally elected to the Trimusian Council and given the Monitor portfolio with the title of Monitor Commander. A human might have requested a larger office, or a Kleth a higher one. But for him, his length of tenancy on this artificial beach was a psychological reward. It would take a bomb to move him.

Unfinished business was stuck in the corners, some of which was probably as old as his occupation of the office. It would have to remain unfinished for a few more weeks, he realized. Pollution! That mess on the awards stage was contaminating everything in his life.

The ceilings were as high as he was long—almost a charter unit, and the arched windows in the southern three walls let in plenty of light during the day. But the surpassingly clever aspect of the office was that the southeast windows faced Ember directly, and its infrared glow fell on photovoltaic panels on the northwest wall, powering the office and the human offices above him. Those were much smaller, though still big enough to allow two Do’utians to visit in reasonable comfort.

Luxuriously spongy soft living carpet covered the entire room—no need for pads here—and it even ramped down into the sea door. Maybe he should go for a swim. Get some exercise. Write his reports with the currents cooling his brain, and download them later. He looked longingly at the sea water.

Someone was coming—he wasn’t sure how he knew. Perhaps his subconscious recognized a change in the pattern of ripples in the sea door. But such a small disturbance ... a child? No, a human woman broached the surface, and gracefully pushed herself up with her forelegs to the normal, for tailless humans, upright sitting posture. She opened her sea mask.

“Mary!” Of course. Doing things the Do’utian way as much as she could, to surprise and please him. Humans typically used the corridors, not the sea doors. But Mary loved being atypical. They’d been acquaintances for almost two centuries and partners for the last two-eights.

“Surprise! I just finished checking out a sub,” Mary said as she pulled off her flippers. “Mom says Gori’allolub is concerned about Zo Kim’s death.”

Drin dipped his beak in respect to the Council President. The fact that the case had the Long One’s attention made it all the more urgent. That Mary’s mother, Councilor Karen Olsen, was playing an active role in affairs again was also good news—she shared her daughter’s inclination toward his species, and, over decades, became too attached to one whose honor had come second to other loyalties. She had been devastated for years by the former long one’s belatedly honorable death. Did Mary, at her core, understand the difference between a useful partnership, and human mating, or the Do’utian beach, for that matter?

“Does that make sense?” Mary continued, “Surveillance will turn him up sooner or later.”

“A murder,” Drin rumbled, anguished, “may have been committed in plain view of eight cubed people, including you and the Councilman Commander of Monitors, and we just lay there like beached gluttons! Yes, the President’s interest makes sense! Besides,” he waved his tongue at the evidence boxes, “I don’t seem to be able to get anything else accomplished with this cow unbirthed!”

Mary giggled. One of the things that made her an easy partner was that she didn’t mind Do’utian beach language—there were a few human female monitors, that, once they understood it, felt offended. And the few Do’utian women in the monitor force... Drin shuddered and lowered his beak. Many of those already felt he was getting too familiar with Mary—to the point of compromising his position. So he kept quiet around them. And as long as he and Mary were discrete, most people didn’t object.

“So I’ve got the sub ready,” she said, back to business. “The connection with Richard Moon seems to be with the Do’utian writer, Gonikli’ibida. Which suggests we head north.”

Drin’s head came up at the name. She was a relative, and not all that distant.

“She’s a mutual friend of both Bi Tan and Richard Moon—to judge by the number of collaborations in the data base, and she was working on a second volume of a collaboration with Bi Tan on the weapons industry of primitivists.”