Jack McDevitt - The Devil's Eye

"I cleared out of here when I was twenty-two, Chase. Those were bad times. I didn't much like living under the Bandahr." He turned away for a moment. Spoke to someone else, then angled the link so I could see the people with him: a man and two women. We did a quick round of introductions. One of the women was his wife Mira. She was attractive, congenial, probably twenty years younger than he was. The other couple were friends. "Let me ask a quick question, Ivan," I said, "and I'll get out of your way. A couple of months ago, you had a passenger named Vicki Greene. Do you remember her?" "The company did," he said. "I didn't." "I assumed she'd gone out on the Goldman ." "As a matter of fact, she did. But it wasn't my ship then. Haley Khan was running her at the time."

"Would it be possible for me to talk to Haley? Can you give me his code?"

"He's gone, Chase. Disappeared."

"How do you mean?"

"He vanished. Right off the station."

"How could that happen?"

"Don't know. It happened several months ago. Right after Vicki Greene had been here. There's no record he took the shuttle down. But he didn't show up for work one day and we've never been able to find him."

"You called the police?" "The CSS. Yes. They couldn't find him either." He paused. Said something to the others at the table. Came back to me: "What's your connection with him, Chase?" I told him about Vicki. "Do you know where she went? On the Goldman ?" "Probably the standard tour route. I never got a chance to talk to him after the flight."

"Did anybody else?"

"I don't think so, Chase. That was the same question the Coalition guys were asking. Haley came off the flight and went back to the hotel. He usually did that. He wasn't much for hanging around. Anyway he had a couple days off coming to him, and we just never saw him again. Ride with Vicki Greene and walk out of the world. It's like one of her books."

"What about the AI?" "The CSS took it. Part of their investigation." He paused, lost in thought. "There was something else odd, too."

"What's that, Ivan?"

"She bought out the ship. Wanted to travel alone. No other passengers."

"Would you guys take her someplace special if she asked?"

"Oh, sure. We'll take you sightseeing anywhere you wanted to go. If nobody objects."

"Like if there's nobody else on board."

"Yes."

"Okay. So she wanted to go off the usual tour destinations. Where else might she have wanted to go?" "Chase, you got me. There is nowhere else. There's nothing out here for hundreds of light-years in all directions." "Do you know where she was coming from ?" "No. I can check the logs."

"Would you do that for me? And get back to me?"

"That kind of information's supposed to be private."

"I'd appreciate it, Ivan."

He called the next morning. "There's no record," he said. "What happened to it?"

"Officially, the flight never happened. That tells me the CSS took it."

Vicki, Ivan said, had signed on for the flight from a hotel in Moreska. Moreska was a small town in the middle of nowhere. It had no spectral claims, no demons, creatures from another age still haunting the roads. But it had once been home to Demery Manor, which, for reasons unknown, had been blown apart during the final year of the Bandahr's rule, just months before his assassination. Nobody knew why the incident had occurred, although everyone assumed Nicorps was involved. The manor's owner, Edward Demery, was not an enemy of the regime, as far as was known. I didn't think blowing up a house was enough to have interested Vicki Greene. Until I heard that seventeen other homes, throughout the region, had been destroyed the same night.

The Demery Manor site consisted of a few burned timbers and a couple of stone walls jutting out of the earth. The common wisdom held that Edward Demery had incurred the wrath of Aramy Cleev and paid the price. According to the flyers we'd gotten at the hotel in Moreska, "most experts" believed the Bandahr had been personally offended when Demery, during an interview, had described the compassion and basic decency of Dakar Cleev, Aramy's grandfather, without mentioning Aramy's own matchless compassion. The dictator had said nothing publicly, of course, and had in fact even praised Demery's perspicacity. But anyone who knew Aramy Cleev understood the failure to note his kindness would not have gone down well. The general destruction had come six days after those unfortunate remarks and had been spread over several hundred kilometers in all directions. Houses, villas, and manors had been leveled. There'd been no survivors anywhere. Nicorps, it was assumed by many, was closing its books on people who had incurred the Bandahr's displeasure. We were looking at the ruins, on a cold afternoon, while a wet wind blew in off the sea. We had an autoguide with us. "They killed him and his wife," said the autoguide. "Eighteen houses in one night?" said Alex. "That seems a bit extreme."

"There are always rumors when terrible things happen," the tour guide said. "If you want my personal opinion, I think Nicorps simply went rogue and decided to kill everybody they didn't like. But who really knows?"

"What did he do for a living?" I asked. "Demery?"

"He was born into wealth, ma'am. But he thought of himself as a mathematician though he never had any formal training."

"Was he a native of this area?" "Oh, no. No. He wasn't even from this world. Demery was born on Rimway." "Are there any theories about why all these people were killed the same night?" asked Alex. "Other than Nicorps running wild?"

"What other explanation could there be? I think they'd probably gotten backlogged. Decided to catch up on old work. Did it all the same night. It wouldn't be the first time they'd done something like that."

Alex stared at the ruins. "Did Demery leave an avatar?"

"It was purged. On the day of the explosions."

"By whose authority?"

"Nobody knows."

"It would," I said, "have had to come from high up." Alex nodded. Of course it would.

Edward Demery had not only lost his life. He had undergone an electronic subtraction as well. And not only the avatar. You went looking for data on him, and there was enough to prove he existed. You could find a birth certificate, you could find brief accounts of his impending wedding, and there was real-estate information. Demery buys office building in New Samarkand. You could find an account of his acquiring controlling interest in Blackmoor Financial, and his contributions to the Aquarius Fund, which was striving to rejuvenate oceans hampered by the absence of a moon. There was an award from the Ballinger Historical Society. But of his personal life, what he thought, what he believed in, what he cared about, that was all gone. Orrin Batavian was a banker who liked to be thought of as an historian. We sought him out because he'd organized a speaking engagement for Vicki and because he'd been a close friend of Demery's. We found him at his home, a large, landscaped property on the edge of town. "Ed and I shared a fascination for ancient history," he told us. "For the early years." Because of that friendship, he said, he'd held his breath for several days after the explosion, wondering whether they'd come after him, too. "You never knew what might irritate Nicorps," he said. "It was the way they operated." We were seated in his office in downtown Moreska. "Somebody got in trouble, everybody he knew got swept up with him. I had my fingers crossed." The walls were filled with framed certificates of outstanding accomplishments by Batavian's bank and pictures of the man himself with various people whose postures suggested they were VIPs. "Why did he get in trouble?" Alex asked. "Do you have any idea?" Batavian shook his head. "I honestly don't know. He didn't like the regime. But nobody did." His chair squeaked. "Almost nobody. Some people saw no problem with Cleev. You did what you were told and didn't make trouble, then you had nothing to worry about." "But you do think Cleev was behind the attack." "Well, Nicorps was. I doubt it was anything big enough to draw the Bandahr's attention. You have to understand that it was the guys further down the food chain who caused most of the trouble. They had thugs and psychopaths running everything. And the way they looked good to their bosses was to be able to show a body count every month. "Those were bad times. So people didn't make an electronic record of themselves. Ed was an exception. People still don't do it, for that matter. Not the older ones. Call it force of habit, but there's always a