Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“So I’ll be on my way,” Mrs. O’Keefe was saying. “And I’ll see you in two weeks. Oh, but I was asked to give a message to you. It was sent in to the Dunglow center and I said I was on the way here and could save them a delivery.”

Her tone was a little chiding. It said, Come on, Mr. Baxter, why don’t you put a communication center here in the castle and get in line with the rest of the world? It wouldn’t be as much trouble as you seem to think.

She had no idea that in the basement I had access to all the global nets and services. Passive receive-only, of course, because I would do nothing to draw outside attention.

I held out my hand for the message, but she shook her head. “It’s too simple to be worth writing. Just a man who says he’s figured out how to do it without you going anywhere. He didn’t leave a name.”

Any more than I would. I wondered about Seth’s penchant for secrecy. Was it natural, or did he have good reason? It would be nice to know, and maybe have another lever to use on him.

Mrs. O’Keefe was leaving. On the way out she stared again into the long dining hall, where my darlings were now squabbling as they compared their purchases from Londonderry.

“Look at them,” she said as she headed for the front door. “Like a bunch of magpies they are, chattering and chuntering away. You never complain, but running an orphanage like this has to be harder than anyone knows. I’ll say it again, Mr. Baxter. You’re a saint.”

A saint. Indeed.

Given the suspect hagiography of Ireland, which includes such stalwarts as Saint Terence the Wastrel and Saint Brendan the Fornicator, her statement was not as improbable as it sounded.

Before I went through to coerce the girls to evening studies, I sat for a moment reviewing my efforts of the day. What had I learned, in my attempt to summon up remembrance of things past?

One thing, but an important one. The Sky City murderer and I had no commonality of motive or feeling. The deaths of my darlings had been clean and painless, leaving them as beautiful in death as in life. The notion of stabbing, bludgeoning, and sexual mutilation sickened me.

But that left a mystery. If serial killings represent consequence rather than cause, what driving need was compelling the murderer on Sky City?

It was not, I felt sure, passion as I knew it. Was it, indeed, passion of any kind? And yet there had been mutilation-evidence, surely, of a killing frenzy.

I thought once more of the dates of death, from number one, Myra Skelton, to number twelve, Kate Ulrey.

Almost three weeks had passed since Kate had died, her brains bashed out on a well-traveled and well-lit corridor close to the central axis of Sky City. Another murder was overdue. Would it happen?

If it did not, that would be a clue. A clue as to what, I could not say. But murder, especially murder of this type, keeps its own schedule and imposes on the killer its own imperatives.

Celine had been half right. Nick Lopez’s staff on the World Protection Federation did not know where he was, but they could certainly exchange messages. Celine’s request for an “urgent and highly sensitive” meeting had been forwarded to Nick as soon as it came in. Normally he would have answered at once, but for the moment something more urgent was on his mind.

What was happening to the aircraft?

He was on his way from Washington to a private meeting with Gordy Rolfe, and all their previous sessions had taken place either at the World Protection Federation offices in New Rio or at The Flaunt, the corporate headquarters of the Argos Group. The steel-and-glass splinter of The Flaunt towered four thousand feet above the Palladian architecture of Houston, and Gordy’s summit suite overlooked the rebuilt city. Nick had assumed that they would use the same rendezvous site today. That would give him a comfortable and productive flight of at least an hour and a half, during which he could attend to other business. But his craft was beginning its descent less than twenty minutes after takeoff.

He glanced at the telltales and saw that all mechanical and electronic conditions were normal. The weather was clear and fine. Still the vehicle went on descending. He checked the Automatic Vehicle Control. The AVC’s destination coordinates had been provided from Gordy Rolfe’s office, and Nick had never thought to question them. But instead of the glitter of The Flaunt ahead there was only a peaceful landscape of rural Virginia.

The craft went into a gentle bank, and as it leveled off Nick caught sight of a runway. The black strip was short, and it was narrow, but from the way that the vehicle was behaving, a full electronic landing system was in operation.

Nick could see no sign of any other aircraft. He waited through the gentle touchdown and taxi to the end of the runway. Then he slid open the hatch and allowed the glide stair to carry him from plane to ground.

He found himself standing in a shallow valley, with low grassy hills to the east and more substantial wooded mountains to the west. A solitary building hugged the ground two hundred yards past the end of the runway. Beside it rose strange shapes, red and green and yellow, oddly angular and complex in the late afternoon light. He began to walk toward them.

At the moment when he recognized both the building and its neighboring structures — it was an old school-house, its playground still filled with brightly painted seesaws and monkey bars — a figure emerged from the schoolhouse door.

Gordy Rolfe was easy to identify. He was diminutive, with a head too big for the slender body. A great sculptured upsweep of snow-white hair exaggerated the disproportion. It was styled for effect, as were the big steel-rimmed glasses. A black jumpsuit, Rolfe’s standard attire, emphasized rather than disguised the crooked back and uneven shoulders.

Rolfe did not walk toward Nick. He waited, leaning against the schoolhouse wall. When the two were within earshot, he said, “Don’t judge this place by appearances, Senator. I learned to read and write in there.”

“I guessed as much.” Lopez peered in through one of the windows. “Been a while since the school was used, though.”

“You knew where we were going to meet?”

“Not until we landed. I thought I was headed for Houston. But I’ve seen pictures of this place before. I was Senate Majority Leader in Washington when the headquarters of the Legion of Argos was raided and the Eye of God was taken prisoner. The old headquarters is directly beneath us, isn’t it? We had pictures of the whole attack plastered all over the place.”

“So did we.” Rolfe grimaced, increasing his likeness to a sinister elf. “Of course, the Legion members had a rather different view of events.”

Nick Lopez nodded. He was round-faced and brown-complexioned, and the hair above his broad brow was set in a high, old-fashioned pompadour. Despite Rolfe’s extravagant coiffure, Lopez towered a foot and a half above the other man. “Did you know her well?”

“Pearl Lazenby — the Eye of God?” The gray eyes behind their big lenses glittered, and Gordy laughed harshly. “Fucking right I knew her. From the time I was six until I was seventeen she was more important than my own parents. Of course, for a lot of that time she was serving a sentence in judicial sleep. But there was morning-noon-and-night talk of her, and I was raised with her rules.”

Raised by the members of the Legion of Argos, Nick thought, with their rigid attitudes. Lots of prayer, lots of dogma, lots of discipline and harsh punishment. But no medical treatment to make Gordy Rolfe of normal height, even though that had been a standard procedure long before the supernova. No simple corrective changes to his vision, to make those anachronistic eyeglasses unnecessary. No protocol to adjust the spinal curvature that threw the right shoulder a little lower than the left. It was no wonder that the head of the Argos Group now had his own rigidity and strangeness.