Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“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 humpin 1for 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.