R. MacAvoy - Tea with the Black Dragon

In sleep, Mr. Long’s strange hands and features asked no explanations. They merely were: facts of nature like tangled tree roots, like the face of a tiger, like the odd, water-washed stones on the cold beach visible from his high window.

The edge of bright light finished with the bookshelf and crawled across the carpet to the chair. It touched his face and hands, and the sleeping man relaxed into it. His head slipped against the fabric and his eyes cracked open to receive the dazzle of sunlight. He blinked. Yawned. Twisted left and right in the chair. Finally he peered behind him at the still, uncluttered room, as though it could tell him why he found himself in the sitting room, fully dressed.

Then he remembered, and with the arrival of memory his hands groped for the chair arms. The padded wood protested with small creaks.

Yesterday evening had been the phone call to the San Francisco police. The polite, endlessly repeated explanation of who he was, who Martha Macnamara was, and why he believed she had met foul play. He had not told them all he knew, because it had been necessary to balance his concern—no, give it its true name—his fear for Martha against the woman’s own determination not to involve her daughter with the police. He could only repeat that Mrs. Macnamara had been walking along Van Ness with him, and had vanished at the corner of Fell Street. That she had not yet returned to her room, though she was still registered at the James Herald Hotel, that the desk clerk had not seen her.

That she had been worried about something.

It was hardly a compelling story. It -carried the implication that Mrs. Macnamara had dropped out of sight to avoid him, and his call to the authorities further intimated that he was the sort of importunate busybody a person might well want to avoid.

The officer had told him that they would have to wait at least a day before they could regard the woman as missing. The policeman had taken down name and address.

He had realized the uselessness of the attempt then, and had tried no further to interest the police. He knew the disparity between his voice and person; if his words could not convince, then his face and form would be of no help.

Besides, if Martha Macnamara had been killed by whoever it was who snatched her up—no one in the bus, surely. The black Lincoln?—then she was dead, and neither police nor power could bring her back.

And if she was alive, spirited away somewhere, then she was kept alive for a purpose, and would doubtless remain that way until the purpose was fulfilled. In that case, the police were still not much help, but another power might be. Without conscious arrogance Mayland Long applied that title to himself. Another power.

And he was sure with a granite certainty that Martha Macnamara was not dead. He would know if she were.

For if she were dead, then hope was dead, and his own existence turned to ashes.

And, looking at the gray, waking city, the quiet mirror of the bay, the jangled mirror of the sea, he did not feel dead nor burnt out. He felt—he turned the unfamiliar emotion over in his mind with intellectual curiosity, trying to identify it—he felt angry.

He rose from the chair and brushed at the crumpled jacket without seeing it. He was trying to remember the last time he had felt anger. Three years in San Francisco. One in Kyoto. Before that, Taipei—two years. There came grief and loss. Even fear. Anger? No. No one to be angry at, that evening in Taipei. Not even himself.

And before Taipei there had been no need at all for anger.

He stopped this raking of memory No need. He knew what anger was. It was hot.

Like Carlo Peccolo, Floyd Rasmussen was a fair, stocky man, but there the resemblance ended. Peccolo kept his credentials under glass, while Rasmussen had a wall stuck full of clippings from the Sunday funnies, along with three Kliban cats. Peccolo was sober, but Rasmussen laughed. He rattled the windows with his laughter. He laughed when Long introduced himself. He chuckled at the name of Dr. Peccolo. He let loose gales of laughter when Mr. Long brought forward the subject of Liz Macnamara, and with his wiry yellow beard and wiry yellow hair spreading out from his face, Floyd Rasmussen was the image of some Aztec sun god, graved in gold.

“Liz? She’s done work for me. I hope she will again, though the money she’s asking now… Oh Lord, yes, I know Liz Macnamara. That’s like asking me how well I know Blanco, my cat. Liz is a warrior, bright, spunky, ambitious. She brought life to RasTech…”

Coolly Mayland Long wondered how much more life the company called RasTech could bear. Floyd Rasmussen seemed to fill all available comers with his own vital substance. Mr. Long pulled at the tiller of the conversation.

“Bright? Then you would say her level of technical ability was above average?”

“Average? You can hardly use that word in the same breath as Liz Macnamara. She’s original; Sound. Big systems, little systems, software, firmware, pc layout… Just give her a handful of bipolar visi chips and stand back. She can even, occasionally, meet a deadline. And I don’t say that for most of my friends!”

This last admission dissolved into dull rumbles. Floyd Rasmussen beamed at Mr. Long.

The office did not contain a desk. Rasmussen worked from a drafting table set against one wall. There was thus no barrier between the booming geniality of the president of RasTech and the fastidious composure of his guest. Mayland Long did not feel that the advantage was his.

“Then, it was not out of line for her to set herself up as a consultant—to go freelance?”

The big man snorted. “What else should she do? Give half her salary for a benefits package and insurance, and the other half to Uncle Sugar? She’s gone the smart way. consulting.”

Long prodded patiently. “Even at her age, without contacts? Dr. Peccolo believed…”

“… in Santa Claus. He doesn’t like knowing a young whippersnapper he was supposed to be teaching actually had more on the ball than he did.” Rasmussen’s furry eyebrows pulled together and his mouth pursed.

“Carlo’s a friend of mine. Hurts me to say it, but he’s not that good, technically.” His voice expressed no great pain.

Mayland Long digested this—both the words and the manner. “Tell me, Mr. Rasmussen. Just what did Elizabeth Macnamara do for you at FSS which convinced you to hire her services here, in your own company?”

“Eh?” Rasmussen stopped to think. A few moments of silence leaked into the office.

“She did lots of things. An interface board for teller’s terminals: Z80 based. An accounts receivable package in 6502 assembler. Half a bank security system…”

“Half a bank security system?”

Rasmussen grunted and shrugged. “We only got the contract for half. Works that way a lot. Maybe their guy quits in the middle of the job and they don’t want to train a programmer from scratch, or… Well, lots of things. Then, let’s see—she wrote a disk controller for our own use.” Rasmussen stopped. He crinkled little eyes behind sandy lashes. It was difficult to tell what color those eyes were.

“ ’Zat the kind of thing you want to know?”

Mayland Long detached his gaze from the man and swept it once around the square, unsubtle room. One wall was orange; that was the one dotted with comic clippings. One wall was stenciled with a single, diagonal black stripe, dipping left. Against that wall stood a model of a sailing boat, white, gleaming, intricate, its spiky rigging echoed in the tines of a set of deer antlers hung above. The carpet was looped in orange and green. The plastic chair he sat on was yellow.

Mayland Long, in his quiet gray suit, felt like a quote taken out of context.

“Yes, Mr. Rasmussen, that is part of it. And, since you do not have a current address or phone number for the lady, I shall have to be satisfied with that much.” He rose to his feet.