Greg Bear - Queen of Angels

A dim red light mounted on her shoulder pointed wherever she turned her eyes. Livid cold. The assayer tracked quietly overhead like a legless insect and passed into another room.

Finch the last killed lay on his back like a broken cross, face slashed throat cut jagged sideways from jaw to opposite clavicle open eyes rimed white.

It was spatch that pd didn’t sympathy a crime. Mary knew in brain and crawl of skin each frozen peeled back wound frightened dead glare of white eyes and cropped corpse grimace. This was her motivation for excellence.

She would know the murderer and organize for a full-therapy conviction, restructuring if called for—and the pd would call for it. If Goldsmith was the murderer as seemed most likely now so be it; the LitVids would have her and the pd all over the world. But she would smooth those waters when they rippled.

What she had officially come back for was a context search, a look at Goldsmith’s files. The room where Goldsmith kept his office had no bodies in it and had already been assayed. She could enter and make her search. Pd, metro and federal warrants allowed her to investigate most aspects of Goldsmith’s life as per the Raphkind amendments not yet removed by President Yale’s year old block appointed court. She did not personally agree with the Raphkind amendments but she was not in the least reluctant to take advantage of them. What could not be found here might be found in Citizen Oversight—a journey she hoped she would not have to make.

Goldsmith was not a tidy man. She inclined her head in the inflated tube helmet and surveyed his desk. Reasonable models of slate and keyboard—no gold plating or wood box. Cold crackers and half glass of frozen wine. Crumbs. Pens fiber-tip and what did they call them fountain. She wondered where he got them. A sweep of some hand or arm had fanned a short stack of printouts—not erasable cyclers old fashioned in themselves but actual papers written on by hand—across the black marble top. Cubes marched to the edge of the desk in tandem and lay below on the floor. Mind’s eye she saw a hand palm them two by two from a box—an empty cubefile lay nearby—and click them in pairs on the desk then pass aimless over the edge, dropping four. The gesture of a dramatically distracted man.

She bent to pick them up. Each cube projected a tiny label in cold green into her eyes. The Progress of Moses, The Way of the New, Debit/Asset, the cubes informed her artlessly not concerned with who she might be. Doubtless Goldsmith’s works in solid state. Not a man to crypto his data his work. One work per cube was surprising for pure word; perhaps they were LitVid adaptations for the half literate. LitVid sales would explain Goldsmith’s place high on the third foot.

She had heard of Emanuel Goldsmith before this case. An occasional guest on the allnight cable talkers celebrated more for his youthful output. Not currently productive. Mary Choy planned to remain productive well past a century but she allowed as her plans might be young and naive. A pd could not rest on laurels. Salary not royalties.

There were real books on his shelves. She did not pull them down but with an uninformed eye guessed their age at eighty to a hundred years. Expensive, a luxury both in money and space for this information dense age. The World Reserve Library could be stacked in space held by Goldsmith’s fifty or sixty paper volumes.

What she specked was unorganized uncontemporary inefficient, what one might presume of a poet; but the scatter of cubes on desktop and floor pointed to a greater disorganization, a careless personal moonstrike.

A closure.

She held up her slate to read the inprog. Sloughed cell and fiber analysis and assay of the office area showed no entry but for Goldsmith. Whatever socials he had conducted, none had entered this sanctum.

Goldsmith’s frame of mind had been disturbed before the murders, she posited. He had not entered his office after the murders. Another possibility as yet not eliminated by the total radio assay: that Goldsmith did not occupy the apartment during the murders. Unlikely.

Reaching out she shifted a skewed half inch pile of paper and saw an airline confirmation billet and a document of different color beneath. She picked out the billet. A roundtrip to Hispaniola dated two days before—the day after the murder. Had the ticket been used? She marked a memo on her slate to check the airline: NordAmericAir.

The other document was a letter real paper again beige stock gold stamping; stationery of the rich and eccentric as atavistic as real books. Mary’s eyes widened reading the engraved head and the signature. Colonel Sir John Yardley.

Authentic? The inprog reported nothing. The papers had been disturbed only for chemical and bio clues; it was her task to make a context beyond that. She lifted the letter, three gloved fingers on each hand vising perpendicular the opposite edges of the stiff thick sheet. She read it up close. Typed on an oldfashioned electric impact printer perhaps even a typewriter. Dated and stamped Hispaniola, Yardley’s name for his conquest, formerly Dominican Republic and Haiti.

28 November 2047

Dear Goldsmith,

Whatever the circumstances, we will be most pleased to receive you. Ermione charmed. It’s rare to meet unhypocritical agreement now. I’ve particularly enjoyed our letters in book form and Moses and appreciate your signature dedicatory. I can only hope what we do here helps this old world lift itself by its bootstraps into sanity.

Yours, as ever,

Colonel Sir John Yardley Hispaniola

Mary replaced the letter carefully as if it were a snake.

I do not aspire. I be.

Martin hadn’t eaten so well in six weeks, when he had seen the end of his savings. He refused to go on shade dole; his application for Municipal Assistance had not been processed perhaps because of official disfavor or ineptitude; civil service was the last well-paid refuge for the untherapied. Now in a cool dark booth with crushed velvet upholstery, holding a reservation card in one hand and a whiskey sour in the other, he felt less disdainful of civilization, closer to the human race. A note on the back of the card said, “Go ahead and eat. We’ll be half an hour late. Regrets. Lascal.”

They were precisely half an hour late. Martin had no doubt he was seeing his benefactors when a tall heavy shouldered man with wavy gray hair and a short hawk nosed fellow with a restrained pompadour stepped into the lounge. They knew him either by the table or on sight.

“Mr. Albigoni, this is Martin Burke,” hawk nosed Lascal introduced. They exchanged handshakes and nothing comments on the decor and weather. Albigoni’s heart and mind were clearly elsewhere. He seemed stricken. Lascal was either genuinely cheerful or able to mask his feelings.

“I’ve just had a fine lunch,” Martin said. “Now I’m worried I may not be able to help you.”

“No fear,” Lascal said.

Albigoni looked at him squarely but said nothing, his long gray mustache a negative hyperbola over firm pale lips. Lascal handed their menus to a waiter and ordered for both of them. He then spread out his hands for Martin’s benefit: concealing nothing.

“Do you know Emanuel Goldsmith?” he asked Martin.

“I know of him,” Martin said. “If we’re talking about the same man.”

“We are. The poet. He murdered Mr. Albigoni’s daughter three nights ago.”

Martin nodded as if he had just been informed of a minor peculation in book publishing. Albigoni continued to stare at but not see him.

“He’s a fugitive, a very sick man, mentally,” Lascal continued. “Would you be willing to help him?”

“How?” Martin avoided taking a sip from his drink though he fingered the glass.