Robert Sawyer: The Hand You're Dealt

“Got a new case for you,” said my boss, Raymond Chen. “Homicide.”

My heart started pounding. Mendelia habitat is supposed to be a utopia. Murder is almost unheard of here.

Chen was fat—never exercised, loved rich foods. He knew his lifestyle would take decades off his life, but, hey, that was his choice. “Somebody offed a soothsayer, over in Wheel Four,” he said, wheezing slightly. “Baranski’s on the scene now.”

My eyebrows went up. A dead soothsayer? This could be very interesting indeed.

I took my pocket forensic scanner and exited The Cop Shop. That was its real name—no taxes in Mendelia, after all. You needed a cop, you hired one. In this case, Chen had said, we were being paid by the Soothsayers’ Guild. That meant we could run up as big a bill as necessary—the SG was stinking rich. One of the few laws in Mendelia was that everyone had to use soothsayers.

Mendelia consisted of five modules, each looking like a wagon wheel with spokes leading in to a central hub. The hubs were all joined together by a long axle, and separate travel tubes connected the outer edges of the wheels. The whole thing spun to simulate gravity out at the rims, and the travel tubes saved you having to go down to the zero-g of the axle to move from one wheel to the next.

The Cop Shop was in Wheel Two. All the wheel rims were hollow, with buildings growing up toward the axle from the outer interior wall. Plenty of open spaces in Mendelia—it wouldn’t be much of a utopia without those. But our sky was a hologram, projected on the convex inner wall of the rim, above our heads. The Cop Shop’s entrance was right by Wheel Two’s transit loop, a series of maglev tracks along which robocabs ran. I hailed one, flashed my debit card at an unblinking eye, and the cab headed out. The Carling family, who owned the taxi concession, was one of the oldest and richest families in Mendelia.

The ride took fifteen minutes. Suzanne Baranski was waiting outside for me. She was a good cop, but too green to handle a homicide alone. Still, she’d get a big cut of the fee for being the original responding officer—after all, the cop who responds to a call never knows who, if anyone, is going to pick up the tab. When there is money to be had, first-responders get a disproportionate share.

I’d worked with Suze a couple of times before, and had even gone to see her play cello with the symphony once. Perfect example of what Mendelia’s all about, that. Suze Baranski had blue-collar parents. They’d worked as welders on the building of Wheel Five; not the kind who’d normally send a daughter for music lessons. But just after she’d been born, their soothsayer had said that Suze had musical talent. Not enough to make a living at it—that’s why she’s a cop by day—but still sufficient that it would be a shame not to let her develop it.

“Hi, Toby,” Suze said to me. She had short red hair and big green eyes, and, of course, was in plain clothes—you wanted a uniformed cop, you called our competitors, Spitpolish, Inc.

“Howdy, Suze,” I said, walking toward her. She led me over to the door, which had been locked off in the open position. A holographic sign next to it proclaimed:

Skye Hissock

Soothsayer

Let Me Reveal Your Future!

Fully Qualified for Infant and Adult Readings

We stepped into a well-appointed lobby. The art was unusual for such an office—it was all original pen-and-ink political cartoons. There was Republic CEO Da Silva, her big nose exaggerated out of all proportion, and next to it, Axel Durmont, Earth’s current president, half buried in legislation printouts and tape that doubtless would have been red had this been a color rendering. The artist’s signature caught my eye, the name Skye with curving lines behind it that I realized were meant to represent clouds. Just like Suze, our decedent had had varied talents.

“The body is in the inner private office,” said Suze, leading the way. That door, too, was already open. She stepped in first, and I followed.

Skye Hissock’s body sat in a chair behind his desk. His head had been blown clean off. A great carnation bloom of blood covered most of the wall behind him, and chunks of brain were plastered to the wall and the credenza behind the desk.

“Christ,” I said. Some utopia.

Suze nodded. “Blaster, obviously,” she said, sounding much more experienced in such matters than she really was. “Probably a gigawatt charge.”

I began looking around the room. It was opulent; old Skye had obviously done well for himself. Suze was poking around, too. “Hey,” she said, after a moment. I turned to look at her. She was climbing up on the credenza. The blast had knocked a small piece of sculpture off the wall—it lay in two pieces on the floor—and she was examining where it had been affixed. “Thought that’s what it was,” she said, nodding. “There’s a hidden camera here.”

My heart skipped a beat. “You don’t suppose he got the whole thing on disk, do you?” I said, moving over to where she was. I gave her a hand getting down off the credenza, and we opened it up—a slightly difficult task; crusted blood had sealed its sliding doors. Inside was a dusty recorder unit. I turned to Skye’s desk, and pushed the release switch to pop up his monitor plate. Suze pushed the recorder’s playback button. As we’d suspected, the unit was designed to feed into the desk monitor.

The picture showed the reverse angle from behind Skye’s desk. The door to the private office opened and in came a young man. He looked to be eighteen, meaning he was just the right age for the mandatory adult soothsaying. He had shoulder length dirty-blond hair, and was wearing a t-shirt imprinted with the logo of a popular meed. I shook my head. There hadn’t been a good multimedia band since The Cassies, if you ask me.

“Hello, Dale,” said what must have been Skye’s voice. He spoke with deep, slightly nasal tones. “Thank you for coming in.”

Okay, we had the guy’s picture, and his first name, and the name of his favorite meed. Even if Dale’s last name didn’t turn up in Skye’s appointment computer, we should have no trouble tracking him down.

“As you know,” said Skye’s recorded voice, “the law requires two soothsayings in each person’s life. The first is done just after you’re born, with one or both of your parents in attendance. At that time, the soothsayer only tells them things they’ll need to know to get you through childhood. But when you turn eighteen, you, not your parents, become legally responsible for all your actions, and so it’s time you heard everything. Now, do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

Here it comes, I thought. He told Dale something he didn’t want to hear, the guy flipped, pulled out a blaster, and blew him away.

Dale swallowed. “The—the good, I guess.”

“All right,” said Skye. “First, you’re a bright young man—not a genius, you understand, but brighter than average. Your IQ should run between 126 and 132. You are gifted musically—did your parents tell you that? Good. I hope they encouraged you.”

“They did,” said Dale, nodding. “I’ve had piano lessons since I was four.”

“Good, good. A crime to waste such raw talent. You also have a particular aptitude for mathematics. That’s often paired with musical ability, of course, so no surprises there. Your visual memory is slightly better than average, although your ability to do rote memorization is slightly worse. You would make a good long-distance runner, but…”