Charles Sheffield - Starfire

It was already ten-forty. The time for the meeting with John had come and gone; still he had not answered her telcom message. Was there a place where he would be sure to go at some time in the next twenty-four hours?

Well, even if John were on a Neirling boost, he would crash by late tonight. And no matter where he passed out, he would be trundled back to his own quarters to sleep it off.

Maddy knew where John lived — a good thing Seth wasn’t here, or she’d have received his knowing wink. She ascended twenty levels, moved halfway around the cylinder of the city, and arrived at John’s apartment. She tried the door, and it was not locked.

Her glance both ways along the curved corridor seemed ridiculous — maybe she had no right to enter, but after all she was not planning to steal anything. She only wanted to leave a message.

She slipped inside and gently closed the door. Once in, she stared around with curiosity. This was the place, in her imagination, they had returned to last night. The living room was small, decorated much the way she would have imagined it: simple but comfortable furniture; a dozen nonprofessional color photographs on the walls, with John against a background of vast suspension bridges; a 3-D hologram of Sky City’s interior structure; and, a little more surprising, half a dozen of Escher’s gravity-defying lithographs and wood engravings. She recognized “Relativity,” “Waterfall,” “Ascending and Descending,” and “Other World,” but the strange lithograph “Print Gallery,” with its bizarre curved cityscape whose geometry somehow suggested the interior of Sky City itself, was new to her.

The bedroom was on the right. Maddy went into it, telling herself that John’s bed was the one place he was sure to find a message when he came home. The room was much too functional for her taste, and noticeably short on furniture. Bed, dresser, closet, a door that presumably led through to the bathroom — there was not even a comfortable chair. Maddy perched on the small bedside table. She was all set to write a note when her eye caught another detail. The dresser was bare except for a single picture.

It was a portrait of Maddy, as she appeared in one of the Argos Group’s rare promotional materials. She was smiling out of the frame in well-groomed and confident splendor, assuring the world that no job was too difficult or complex for the management skills of Maddy Wheat-stone. The spoken blurb, as Maddy remembered it, said much the same thing.

The brochure was almost a year old. John must have found it somewhere in the records of Sky City, and cut out and framed the picture. That knowledge, much more than anything she was doing, made Maddy feel like an absolute intruder.

She stood up. Forget the note; she would find some other way to reach John. She headed for the bedroom door, and at that moment heard a sound behind her.

She gasped and the skin of her forearms prickled into goose bumps. Someone else was in the apartment. She could hear them, just a few feet away.

She swung around and saw nothing. Imagination? No. The bathroom. The door was open a few inches.

Maddy tiptoed that way and peered through the crack. She saw John, sitting on a radiator cover and slumped back in the angle of the walls. He was naked, his eyes were closed, and his hair was tousled and damp. A towel lay on the floor in front of him. It looked as if he had taken a shower and fallen asleep in the middle of drying himself. No surprise, if he had been up all night.

The right thing to do was tiptoe away. John would never know that she had been here. But he was sitting in an unstable position. If he fell forward in his sleep, a sharp corner of the sink was waiting for his head.

Make a noise to wake him up, then run?

Stupid. That was even more likely to make him fall over.

Maddy opened the door all the way. In the quarter-gee field it was easy to place one arm under his legs and the other behind his back and lift him clear of the radiator cover. Harder was the move through the narrow door, but she managed it without banging on either side. She carried him over to the bed and gently laid him down. He was on top of the covers, but it was not cold.

Time to leave.

Maddy moved to the foot of the bed and stood there, staring down at him. He had spoken of mountain climbing in his youth, and now that he was unclothed she could see the corded tendons of his legs and arms. His skin was fair and unnaturally pale — or maybe, for someone who lived on Sky City, it was naturally pale. Direct sunlight out here was a killer, rich in the hard ultraviolet radiation that never made it through the Earth’s atmosphere to the surface.

But John was overworked, too. It was not ultraviolet, or its absence, that had placed the dark smudges below his eyes. Maddy moved her glance back along his body. She was startled to see that those eyes were no longer closed. John was staring — not at her, but straight up at the ceiling.

Was he still asleep, with his eyes open? Maddy backed away, through into the living room.

Time to leave. This time, definitely. She could hear sounds from the bedroom.

Again she hesitated. She was here; John was here. When would there be another chance of a meeting? Not until the present crisis was over, and maybe not for a long time afterward.

She went quietly across to the outer door and opened it. She knocked and called, “Anyone here? May I come in?”

How bogus could you get? But he was answering, “I’m through here. Just a minute.”

It was more like twenty seconds before he appeared in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. His hair still fell damp over his forehead, and he was barefoot.

“We were supposed to have a meeting this morning.” Maddy tried to look him in the eye, and failed. “You weren’t where I thought you would be. So I tried here. I guess you forgot we had a meeting.”

“No.” He smiled at her. “I’d never forget a meeting with you.”

Something about him had changed. Maddy had an idea what. As long as the crisis lasted he would be the focus for all the engineering work on Sky City, and he drew power from that. Just as she felt more and more useless, he was increasingly in control.

He went on, “I came here because I’d been up all night. I wanted to look my best when I met you, and I thought a shower and a change of clothes would do the trick. It did the trick, all right. The last thing I remember is sitting down in the bathroom to dry myself off. Then I was on my bed, staring at the ceiling. You know all about the particle burst?”

“The blip storm? That’s what they’re calling it. Yes, nobody’s talking of anything else.”

“Then you know I don’t have much time to talk. What’s on your mind?”

Did he realize who had moved him from the bathroom? Had he seen her standing at the foot of the bed, inspecting him?

No time to worry about that. John had his shoes on, and he was already leading them out of his quarters.

Maddy said, “It’s about the Sky City murders. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

That stopped him. The corners of his mouth turned down, and he looked ten years older. “What about them?”

“Seth Parsigian and I know who did it. But we don’t have hard evidence, so we need to set up a trap. It would work like this.”

Maddy kept the story short and simple. At the end John seemed older than ever.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked.

“The hell of it is, I do. But I hardly have a spare moment, and it’s going to get worse. I can’t see any way to help.”

“We don’t need help. We just want you to make an announcement.”

“What about Doris Wu’s family? They’ll want details.”

“They’ll not hear of it. Only a few people will. Before word spreads, we’ll have the murderer.”