Conscience of the Beagle (4 page)

I WATCH
Vanderslice
wend his way through the forest. Then Szabo blurts, “He lied.”

Dissapointment is painful, but I should have learned better by now. “What about?”

“I don’t know. But he’s lying to us.”

“A shame,” I say. And I mean it.

The sun through the skylight turns brassy. Day is dying in the lingering way of late spring. From the blue shadows of the lobby, peacocks call to each other in low oboe hoots.

“Still, though, I don’t think he’s dangerous.” Szabo runs a hand fussily over his bald head.

Beagle says, “Don’t let your personal feelings in the way.”

“I’m a psychic. My personal feelings are supposed to get in the way. I don’t have anything else to go on but personal feelings.”

“Okay. Okay. But doesn’t this seem too contrived? After all, the best way to keep an eye on us is to name a government insider as our liaison. Religion makes us uncomfortable, so to put us at ease, Vanderslice ridicules Marvin. He doesn’t know dick about us. He has no guarantee we won’t tattle on him. If he was that stupid, how long do you think he’s keep his job?”

The affable Szabo goes red-faced. Angry or pretending? “Don’t pull your M-8 status shit with me. I don’t care how famous you are. You may be a genius at statistics, but I’m the psychic. Don’t you try to tell me who to trust.”

Szabo’s overreaction is so incongruous that it had to be planned. I understand now. Beagle and Szabo have already joined forces against me.

I get to my feet. “Beagle? Find out all you can about Paulie Hendrix. Get it to me by morning.” The pair pretend to be startled wordless. “I’m tired. I’m still recovering from the Jump. Stay down here and fight this out if you want.”

I walk through the darkening lobby through the lonely cries of the peacocks. By the time the lift comes, the other three have caught up. Arne is yawning.

In the silence of my room, I turn the Wall to a scene of a summery meadow. The digitized flowers are so detailed they look real. Lila, sunshine person and warm-weather lover, would have liked it.

Still dressed, I stretch out on the bed. From the speakers comes a querulous tu-wit, tu-wit and a whistle, as clear as a piccolo.

* * *

I’m at a beach. To my left is a scimitar of flat, amber sand. To my right are mountains with dun-colored outcroppings and dense purple shadows. It’s a computer-generated paint-by-number place.

At the edge of the sand a young boy urinates into the #3 blue of the waves. Next to me, Lila says, “Oh look!” in a charmed touristy voice.

I’m embarrassed and uncomfortable. The beginnings of fear, like the start of a bad headache, pound at the base of my brain. “Don’t look.”

The boy pisses in an endless yellow stream. Lila, excited, is bouncing on her feet. “Look,” she says.

I can’t. Instead, I glance up the cliff and see, perched on the crumbling beige shale, a vast, decaying mansion. The building poises at the edge of doom like a deluded bird about to attempt disastrous flight. Its rococo facade is all curlicues and dark secret recesses, and there is something about the house that fills me with a hot, terrible dread; a cold, cramping pity.

“Look at me,” Lila says.

I start to turn, realizing that turning is a mistake. But my head continues left as though destiny has given me a push.

“Look.”

My head swivels notch by notch. I feel a scream burble up my throat. Anguish rushes into my mouth like a fountain.

I look
—I look—oh God, I look down.

There are two red daisies in her palm.

* * *

“
—
oway?”

Wake with a gasp. The meadow is gone. A young dark-haired man’s face fills the Wall. I can see every pore, every minute imperfection of his skin. That close, that huge, he’s grotesque.

“Major Holloway?”

He’s peering toward a spot past my left shoulder. I turn. Only blank wall to my back. The colonial has been polite enough to set the viewscreen to one-way.

My lips feel gummy. I slide them against each other . “Yes?”

The foot-wide eyes stare at the place where he assumes he’ll find me. “There’s been another explosion, sir. Minister Vanderslice wants to know if your team would like to come down. We have a programmed cab waiting at the front of the hotel for you.”

Swinging my legs out of bed, I sit, shoulders hunched, head in my hands.

“Major?”

“Yes. Yes. Right away.”

The man blinks out. The meadow returns. By the light of the Wall I dress, then walk down the corridor to Beagle’s room.

Beagle answers my first knock. When I enter, I see his workstation is up and running.

“What time is it?” I ask.

Without hesitation, he answers, “Ten thirty p.m., Hebron time.”

“There’s been another bombing.”

Beagle’s room lights are on, but his Wall is set to a night scene of a lake. The moon rides high over the water. From the far shore a loon chuckles.

That’s right. I was dreaming that Lila was with me. A boy was pissing in the ocean.

Pissing in the ocean, Lila said once. Fighting against Colonel Yi and the establishment is like pissing in the ocean. Can’t you just pretend to agree with him and then do what you want? It’s what I do with you.

“Don’t you think we should go?” Beagle asks.

I jerk my head up. “What?”

“To the crime scene. Don’t you think we should go?”

I nod. There was something in Lila’s hand. Something . . .

“Will you wake the others, or should I?”

I scrub my hands over my face. “Let’s both do it.”

We wake Szabo from a sound sleep. Arne has been sitting up staring at a sunlit ocean with white-crested rollers and a pale golden crescent of a beach.

FROM THE STREET
it
looks like any crime scene. A crowd, awed into quiet, clusters behind barricades. At the mouth of the subway tunnel God’s Warriors compare notes like cops anywhere. Only the bright green of their uniforms makes them unique.

They look up as we approach. Cautious. Not knowing what to expect. I pass without speaking, and just inside the tunnel I take a breath. Prickly dust. And
—
yes, of course. I recognize it. Nothing smells more gummy, more cloying than blood.

I turn to the Warriors. “Who’s in charge here?”

A cop with gold braid gives me a quick measuring look. “I am.” He has a huge Alpine slope of a nose never touched by MedAltering.

“Get everyone out.”

His eyes are an irate, molten brown. “We haven’t finished searching for survivors.”

“If we see any survivors we’ll tell you. Now order your men to leave.”

The team at my heels, I continue down the stairs, into a dingy fog of dust. Under the mobile floods Permacrete lies in chunks like the vertebrae of a huge Jurassic animal. Optic fiber nerves splay from the man-made bones.

A scattering of God’s Warriors pick up their equipment and begin filing out. Arne doesn’t wait for my orders. When I stop, he shoulders his analysis pack and continues down the stairs, Szabo behind him.

Beagle says, “Helluva deal. You’re going to the store, maybe out to eat. Everything’s fine, everything’s safe. And the world ends.”

The cavernous room below is the littered monochrome of disaster. This isn’t the way murder is. Homicide is close-up and dirty. It leaves blood on the hands. It happens in dark, deserted alleys.

The subway had been a crowded, well-lighted place.

I tell him, “It isn’t important if a bomb was used as the weapon. It’s still murder.” What happened doesn’t look like murder. It looks like an upheaval of nature. “You feel sorrier for these people because they weren’t killed by a knife? A garrote? Or doesn’t that sort of thing happen up on M-8 level?”

Ceiling tiles don’t fail on M-8. By day M-8s live deluged by sunlight. I wonder if it bothers Beagle that the subway riders of Hebron felt safe once, too.

“Don’t lecture me, Major. I know crime.”

“Oh, sorry. I forgot you wrote the fucking book on it.”

Two passing Warriors eye me. One whispers something to the other. Too young for rank, so it doesn’t matter. A backward glance, and they walk on.

When they’re out of earshot, Beagle asks, “Do you want me down there? Or should I come with you?”

I don’t want him with me. He’ll listen to every question. Every word. “You’ve got infrared. I want you to double-check Arne’s work.” I turn and push my way up the stairs, past the Tennyson police.

At least thirty God’s Warriors have gathered around the subway entrance. I find the cop with the nose and gold braid.

“I need to interview witnesses.”

“Anyone left alive in there?”

“Now would be convenient.”

He starts to say something, thinks better of it, and walks away. I follow him.

They’ve taken the witnesses to a building across the street. Seated, they line the halls. Their clothes are gray with dust. Their heads are lowered, their eyes empty. Catastrophe has made Earthers of them all.

I kneel beside a woman. “Ma’ am?”

Unfocused eyes stray past the patch on my shoulder. “I lost my daughter,” she says.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I need to
—”

“She was right beside me.”

“I’d like to ask you some questions . . . Ma’am? This is important, or I wouldn’t bother you. I’m Major Holloway from the Home Force . . .”

The gaze sharpens. “You talk funny. Your uniform . . .”

Dull brown. But she’s been dulled, too. A patina of dust coats her hair. “I’m from Earth.”

She holds a piece of bloodied dress. Squeezing it, she looks away.

“Did you see anything, Ma’am? Before it happened? Did you see someone running away? Anything like that?”

The woman kneads the bit of dress with the mindless absorption of a cat. “I tried to run away. I grabbed at her. She was right beside me.”

“I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this, but it would help if you could tell us anything out of the ordinary you might have seen.”

The woman lifts her head. A groan comes from her throat, one so protracted that I think she’ll run out of air and die there in the hall. In the dust. Among all those empty-eyed people.

Suddenly she gasps and makes the sound again. I scrabble to my feet. Is that how grief sounds? It’s like a dumb animal, not human at all.

On the floor. There. By my feet. Right there. Two round drops of blood. An inch apart.

I catch my breath before the groan escapes. Held it so long it’s part of me.

“Really, Major . . .”

The Warriors’ senior officer. I look up quickly. My expression must be fierce.

He backs away. “Ah, well. So. I think we have the situation under control. You can see we’re interviewing the witnesses. No sense in going over the same ground twice.”

God’s Warriors are talking to the dazed. Death poisons the air. Every place I look I feel the pull of the scab over my own grief. I could tear my heart’s wound open. Could bleed to death.

“Also we need to get some people down in the tunnel to take EPAT readings. Even if there aren’t survivors, there are lots of dead still there. Relatives are waiting for news.”

My dream. Lila holding horror in the palm of her hand.

“Major?”

Don’t look down. The red drops at my feet whisper,
Look. Look.

“Major? Are you all right?”

“What?”

“If your stomach’s queasy, we have some Nausease around here somewhere . . .”

“No.” I clear my throat. “You can talk to these people better than I can. I’ll want everything, you understand?”

“Of cour
—”

“Everything. And I want it downloaded to my net tonight.”

Before he can reply, I turn away. Head high, I walk past the survivors. By the time I reach the street, I’m nearly running. I shove through the Warriors at the entrance. Stumble down the stairs. The smell of blood glues itself to my nostrils. Dust makes me sneeze. When I reach Arne, I’m coughing.

“Have you found anything?”

Arne doesn’t look up from his laser.

“I said, have you found anything?”

The demolitions man is so pale and insubstantial, he could have been assembled from the floating dust. Finally he turns. Unlike me, he remembered to bring all his equipment. The eyes over his mask are colorless. “Goddamn it, Major! Get off my back! I won’t know anything until I have the trajectory of the parakeet!”

Parakeet. He said “parakeet.”

Across the cathedral-sized room Beagle stands near a chunk of metal, broad back to me. I can’t tell whether he’s frozen in horror or in thought.

As I pick my way through the rubble, I pass a slab of wall that has come down intact. A trickle of blood leads from one flat side. That body. I’ve seen jumpers, corpses turned to strawberry jam. But that body. Under there. Skin expanded with pressure, stretched to the breaking point. I look away.

When I walk up behind Beagle, he doesn’t bother to turn. What seems inattention isn’t. He recognized the sound of my steps long before I reached his side. A bit of robotic one-upmanship.

“Ground zero,” Beagle says.

A boulder of ruddy metal sits on a marble base. A gold-leafed inscription reads: HAROLD AND MIMI TENNYSON AND TINKERBELL. GOD PROVIDED A WAY.

I recognize the remains of what once was a statue. On the lee side is a fold of bronze fabric, the sketchy outlines of an arm. A clawed avian foot rings an intact human forefinger. The bird is no place in sight.

“Tinkerbell. Was that a parakeet?”

Beagle’s smile is whimsical. “Ah, you see, when Harold arrived, their good air/bad air counter was on the fritz. Couldn’t tolerate the idea of turning around and going home. Didn’t have the balls to try the air themselves. So over Mimi’s squeaks of alarm, we must assume, Harold threw the parakeet out the ship’s door, cage and all. Tinkerbell continued breathing. I like to imagine that it continued to squawk, ‘I’m a pretty bird,’ in its brainless parakeet way. Thus Tennyson colony.”

I laugh. A wad of dust lodges in my throat. I sit on a broken piece of Permacrete to catch my breath. A whitish-blue hand is sticking out from under the rock. I get to my feet quickly.

“Why don’t you call me by my name?” Beagle asks.

I step away from the rock. I’m careful not to look back. Murder should be intimate. Up close and personal. Victims should leave a mark on their killers.

“My name’s Hoad. You may call me Dr. Taylor.”

“Hoad Taylor’s dead.”

He fastidiously straightens the cuffs of his uniform. Like a murderer, there are smears of blood on his sleeve. A cautious man, but not careful where he puts his hands. “Did Colonel Yi tell you to call me that?”

The question brings me up short.

“Being named as your subordinate is obviously a demotion. An insult. A way to keep me in line. Was it Colonel Yi who asked you to call me ‘Beagle’? Or did your instructions go higher?”

What happened between him and HF? “No. I thought of it.”

He laughs. “I see. Is that your way of dehumanizing me? Do I intimidate you that much?”

“It’s
—
that sad-eyed face. A hound’s face.” I can’t really explain. What he reminds me most of is Toby, the dog in the Sherlock Holmes stories, even though that dog, as I remember, was a mixed breed. The first time I looked into Beagle’s eyes I knew that he was a single-minded, predatorial thing. Yes, he intimidates me that much. Beagle is a mixed-breed Hound of Heaven.

He cocks an eyebrow. “You’ve just described a damned basset.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve decided to play along for now. But I can outsmart you. Remember that.”

“You don’t have to remind me. I know,” I say.

I’ve surprised him. But why? “Well. You don’t like the team very much. Is it because I’m not human and Szabo and Arne are gay?”

Impossible. They can’t be gay. They would have never been allowed on the Tennyson team. Yi was so worried about sexual impropriety that he even excluded women.

“They were lovers once. Didn’t you know?”

Absolutely impossible. Why is Beagle lying about this? “That wasn’t in their files.”

“Of course it was.”

But I read the files carefully. There’s no way I could have missed something like that.

A clatter. I look around. Sound in the huge hall is deceptive. From nearly fifty yards away I can hear the clicks of falling stones as Arne works his way through the rubble. The demolitions expert is whispering breathily to himself.

“Look what I found.” Beagle takes a piece of bubbled black plastic from his pocket. “The bomb was in this, I think. Go ahead, Major. Arne’s got all his measurements. Take it. There aren’t any fingerprints to ruin.”

From my right, a series of small taps. Arne has started a minor avalanche. Through the dark of the tunnel Szabo emerges. The psychic’s bald head is streaked with dirt. He’s remembered to bring his mask, but the dust must be bothering him. He wipes his eyes. The two meet in the ruins and converse in low tones.

I take the plastic. Turn it over and over in my hands. There’s a sliver of copper wire embedded in it.

“We need to get Szabo out of here,” Beagle says.

I look up. Szabo’s crying. Arne has his arm around him.

I quickly give Beagle the bomb casing and pick my way through the debris. “Let’s go. Right now. Get your hands off him, Arne.”

Arne whirls. “Goddamn you! Can’t you just leave him alone, you bureaucratic shit!”

I take a step backward, trip over a woman’s gutted purse.

“What’s the matter, Tommy?” Arne croons. “You can tell me.”

Szabo can’t speak for sobbing. Desperate to get air, he claws off his mask.

“Take him over to the side,” I order. “It’s the deaths. The deaths are bothering him, can’t you see that?”

Arne doesn’t move. Grabbing Szabo’s sleeve, I lead him away. At a bench, I sit him down.

“You’ll be all right in a minute.” I look up at the others. “He’ll be okay. I’ve seen this sort of thing before.”

Szabo’s sobs turn to exhausted gasps. “I’m sorry.”

I tell him, “It’s all right.”

“It gets to me sometimes.”

“Endwrapping.”

He nods.

“Didn’t HF know?”

A shrug. “I was getting better. I thought I had a handle on it. I thought
—”

His voice rises. Gains a note of panic. Before he breaks down again, I shove the piece of plastic at him. “See what you can get.”

He squeezes the burned bomb casing a moment. He kneads it the way the woman kneaded her daughter’s dress. “Maybe I’m afraid to open up.” Szabo looks at the bubbled black surface as if accusing it of treason.

“Nobody can blame you for that, Tommy,” Arne murmurs. “Just put it down. It’s okay.”

“Butt out,” I tell him. “And stay away from him from now on. Homosexuality is a crime here, or haven’t you read your briefing report? Besides, there’s no death on that bomb casing. Only murder. Let him do his job.”