Necropath (4 page)

He turned and stared through the door at Tiger’s small body laid out on the bed. He wanted to run, to get as far away from here as possible, but something, some absurd notion that do so would be to show Tiger disrespect, forced him to step into the room and sit down beside the dead girl.

He took her hand, tried to find the words to express what he was feeling. His throat was constricted; words would not form—not that any expression of sentiment would mean anything now. Images of Tiger in life came back to him, and he saw in his mind’s-eye brief flashes of Holly.

At last, in silence, he released the cooling hand and stepped from the room.

Rao was nowhere to be seen. Vaughan retraced his steps through the ship and found his guide squatting in the entrance. The boy jumped to his feet. “Dr. Rao told me show you out.”

“Take me to the nearest inhabited level.”

Thirty minutes later he was riding a crowded upchute to the surface, packed between dozens of Indians on their way to work, the unintelligible noise of their minds loud in his head. He left the upchute station and walked into a warm dawn, the wash of brightening sunlight dazzling after the gloom of the lower levels. He felt as if he had just awoken from a nightmare, that if he went to Nazruddin’s and sat in his booth then sooner or later Tiger would turn up.

He boarded a mono-train heading west and alighted at the edge. There was a quiet park above his apartment where he sometimes went to be alone.

He sat on a bench overlooking a greensward that sloped towards the edge of the Station. The sky was still dark out over India; the sun was rising behind him, streaking the shadow of his head and shoulders far out across the sloping grass.

When the morning became too hot he would make his way home and go to bed, first taking a good dose of chora to help him sleep. Later, when he awoke, he would attend to the arrangements of Tiger’s funeral.

A voidship rumbled overhead, a great freighter in the orange and green livery of the Chandrasakar Line. Its shadow took minutes to slide over the greensward; Vaughan looked up and regarded the passage of its great curving underbelly. Through long viewscreens he made out the tiny figures of the ship’s crew, going about their work, oblivious of his presence, of Tiger’s death.

The ship moved out over the sea and circled south. Minutes later it was a kilometre from the Station and could begin its phase-shift manoeuvre.

The ship shimmered like a mirage, gained solidity, became faint again—and then transferred into the void and did not return. There was something spectacular in the disappearance of so colossal an object; it was as if the laws of physics had been disobeyed, as if magic had occurred.

A year ago, when Tiger had tried to get closer to Vaughan, she had followed him to the park and sat quietly beside him, her unsure silence suggesting that she knew she was invading his privacy. They had watched the ships for hours, and every time one gave itself to the void Tiger would gasp with delight.

It came to him that there would be many things now that she could no longer witness.

In his mind’s eye he saw again the image of her tiny body lying on the bed. Like a persistent phrase of remembered music, he recalled the failing, fading music of her mind.

He told himself that it was over now, that Tiger had confronted the fact of her oblivion and passed on. But he could not banish from his mind the terror Tiger would have experienced upon apprehending the oblivion which awaited her.

His handset chimed. He pushed up his sleeve and accepted the call. Jimmy Chandra’s smiling face stared up at him. “Jeff. When can we meet?”

Vaughan said, “You’ve got something?”

“Something?” the cop said. “I have discovered enough about your Director to cause him severe distress.” Vaughan smiled at Chandra’s quaint use of English.

“I just got off shift. I need to sleep. How about tonight, around nine? Meet me at Nazruddin’s?”

“I’ll be there, Jeff.”

Vaughan contemplated what Chandra had said. Then his thoughts were replaced by the image of Tiger on her deathbed, the feel of her in his arms.

Then, against his will, his thoughts slipped back down the years, and he tried in vain to recall the special signature of Holly’s mind.

* * * *

DEATH OF A VIP

Jimmy Chandra hunched over a glowing com-screen in his office at the Law Enforcement Headquarters. The room was darkened and insufferably hot, the ceiling fan doing nothing but stirring old air into a slightly more breathable mix.

What Jeff Vaughan had asked him to do was not, strictly speaking, legal—but he owed the telepath a favour and had, a little reluctantly, hacked into the police file core.

And he’d discovered some interesting things about Director Weiss.

He sat back and considered Vaughan. He’d met the telepath four years ago, when he’d worked briefly with the security team at the ‘port. Their friendship, such as it had been, had soon dissolved in the acid of Vaughan’s caustic world-view. He’d tried to come to some understanding of Vaughan’s cynicism, discover the incidents and events in his past that had made him who and what he was. But
Vaughan
had blocked all his questions, reluctant to let anyone into the locked room that was his earlier life.

“If you were cursed with the ability to read minds,” Vaughan had once said in a drunken outburst, “then you wouldn’t be blessed with that damned Hindi optimism that I find so sickening.”

Chandra had said, “Hindu.”

“What?” 

“Hindu
optimism,” Chandra replied. “Hindi is our language.” He had been dodging the issue. He’d found Vaughan’s bitterness so disturbing and difficult to understand that he often refused to be baited, and instead sidetracked the argument or ignored Vaughan altogether.

Perhaps, of course, he feared that Vaughan was right, that humankind was evil and self-seeking. Perhaps he feared that Vaughan’s ability had given him an insight that he, Chandra, could not possess.

His handset chimed.

“Chandra.” Commander Sinton peered up from Chandra’s wrist-screen, his ruddy Caucasian features and oiled silver hair bright in the gloom. “Get yourself on to the flier lot right away. Take Lieutenant Vishwanath with you.”

“What is it?”

“A respected citizen was reported dead less than twenty minutes ago. Tread carefully, understand? Extend my sympathies to his widow.”

“Murdered?”

Sinton glared at him. “No, he passed away peacefully in his sleep. What the hell do you think, Chandra? Of course he was murdered. I want a report in my files by dawn.”

Sinton cut the connection.

Chandra downloaded the relevant files on Weiss into his handset and left the basement room.

* * * *

As Vishwanath climbed into the flier beside him, Chandra went through the familiar process of readying himself for what was likely to be a gruesome business. He cleared his mind and slowed his breathing as the flier rose, banked, and burned away from the Station, inserting itself into a red fast-lane. He told himself that the deceased was no longer suffering, had passed on to another existence, and that the corpse that would greet him at the scene of the crime, no matter how bloody, was merely the exhausted remains of an incarnation that had reached the end of its tenure in the here and now.

The preparation helped, he knew. But, no matter how well prepared intellectually, he could not prevent his body’s visceral reaction to what he was about to experience.

“Details, Vishi.”

The young lieutenant relayed the facts from a screader, his face washed crimson from the light of the fast-lane. “Victim is Rabindranath Bhindra, aged seventy-five, resident of the Sapphire complex, Wellington district, mid-eastside.”

“Exclusive.” Chandra whistled. “Sinton said he was a VIP.”

Vishi looked up from the screader, glanced across at him. “You’ve never heard of Bhindra?”

“I must work too hard. No time to spend noting celebrities. Screen star?”

Vishi shook his head, smiling. “Politician. But that’s not what he was famous for. He was one of the first voidship explorers, fifty years ago.”

“Ah,
that
Bhindra. Didn’t he write a book about his days in space?”

“It was made into a film, theatre drama, virtual-tape, holo-movie.”

“I’ll remember it the next time I play charades. What was its title?”

“Pass. Had ‘stars’ in there somewhere, I recall.”

Chandra nodded. He gazed down at the lights of the Station’s upper-deck as they streamed by below. “How was he killed?”

“Shot through the head with a high velocity projectile.”

“Oh, lovely, Vishi. I hope you haven’t just eaten.”

“No, sir,” Vishi said. “Bhindra was in his apartment at the time. One theory is that the assassin was in a flier.”

“So someone just flew by, sighted him, and blew him away?”

“Something like that, sir.”

They came to the eastward edge of the Station and Chandra exited the fast-lane, slipped into a blue slow-lane, and turned the flier in a tight, downward loop. The fa
ç
ades of the upper-deck buildings flashed by. The open-ended third level came into view: a spacious, floodlit plaza surrounded by multi-level gardens and pyramidal apartment buildings. Chandra brought them past the Sapphire complex, reducing airspeed.

“The killer probably came in this close,” Vishi said. “All the assassin had to do was lean out of the window, aim and fire.” He pointed to the lighted square of a French window, open to a trim lawn on the shoulder of the pyramid. The room was full of officials going about the business of investigation, the efficient machine of law enforcement at work.

“Any witness reports of fliers passing at the time?”

“There was a constant progression of traffic going through this way just before midnight, when the killing occurred. We’re tracing them on surveillance cams.”

Chandra nodded. They landed in the plaza below the Sapphire building. Already reporters and vid-film crews were encamped on the sidewalk beneath the blue and white striped awning. Chandra pushed his way past the melee, ignoring questions. They crossed the foyer to the central elevators and rode to the penthouse level.

“Do you know if Bhindra had any enemies in politics, Vishi? Opponents who wanted him out of the way? Vested interest groups he might have been opposing?”

Vishi shook his head. “He was a well-liked and respected member of the centre-left opposition. One of those politicians whose celebrity got them into power, but who then worked hard to justify his position. I think the phrase is that he was a ‘man of the people.’“ Vishi paused. “Of course, we’ve yet to conduct a thorough investigation of his affairs. Something might turn up, then. We usually find dirt if we dig deep enough.”

“You remind me of an old acquaintance of mine.”

The elevator doors swept open and Chandra stepped into the corridor. Bhindra’s apartment suite was cordoned off by officers. A small crowd of residents, shocked but nevertheless curious, blocked the corridor. Chandra eased his way through, nodded to the salutes of the attending officers, and entered the apartment.

The suite consisted of half a dozen spacious rooms, any two of which would have contained Chandra’s own humble dwelling. The lounge beyond the hall was the focus of attention: the troupe of forensic officials, ballistic experts, and photographers engaged in a careful post-mortem choreography around the corpse.

“Go in there and collate whatever information’s to hand, Vishi. I’ll join you later. I’ll just wander about.”

Chandra moved from room to room, more to kill the time before the experts packed up and left than to look for crime-related evidence.

The first three rooms were what he expected to find in a residence this exclusive: two tastefully decorated bedrooms and a bathroom the size of an average lounge. The rooms spoke of wealth without too much ostentation, giving no clues at all to the character of the owner. The fourth room, a study, was more personal. The walls were lined with racks of science and space-exploration discs, and photographs and graphics occupied the few remaining spaces. The visuals showed landscapes of a dozen planets, most with a uniformed figure in the foreground: Bhindra, presumably, in his exploration days. From the ceiling, in a touch at once juvenile and affecting, hung half a dozen model voidships, everything from small three-man exploration vessels of fifty years ago to modern superliners.

The desk was loaded with the mementoes of a lifetime: alien rocks, exotic insects encased in solidified resin, holos of extraterrestrial landscapes— and the glove of a spacesuit, mounted on a plinth, like a forlorn wave.

The treasured objects of the dead, collected over years, always spoke to Chandra of their owners’ too fond attachment to the physical, which they were now without. The sheer redundancy of the objects themselves made a mockery of man’s materialism.

Chandra had long ago learnt to attach no importance to material possessions. He owned nothing other than the necessities of life. Unburdened by objects, unbeguiled by the physical, he told himself that he was closer to the next life—and therefore more accepting of the fact that this life was only temporary.

He was about to leave the study when he saw, on the desk, a solid-looking rectangular object—that increasingly rare artefact, a book. He picked it up, turned the weighty object in his hands. No wonder they had fallen out of favour over the years, superseded by the screaders. Books were heavy, awkward objects—yet at the same time they had a certain... authority.

Chandra read the title:
The Stars Beyond,
by Rabindranath Bhindra. The cover showed three explorers in some exotic jungle landscape. On the back, Bhindra’s jovial smiling face stared out at the world, a face of wisdom and experience.

Chandra replaced the book and left the study.

The various experts had packed up their equipment and were filing from the lounge. Chandra waited until the last of them had left before venturing a glance at the scene of the murder. He might have prepared himself mentally for the sight, told himself that the body in there was just a vacated shell, but he wished he could have communicated the same logic to his stomach.

The scene was particularly messy.

Chandra joined Vishi in the centre of the room, cast a quick glance at the corpse, then looked away and kept his gaze resolutely averted. Bhindra had been sitting in an armchair by the open French window when the assassin struck. The body had retained in death the position it had last adopted in life: seated upright, feet crossed at the ankles, hands placed on lap. What made a mockery of the body’s posture was the absence of its head. The dark orifice of the windpipe and a notched stub of backbone showed in cross section. The impact of the projectile had blasted the skull and its contents in a liquidised spray across the room and against the far wall.

“Where’s his widow?”

“She was taken to hospital suffering from shock.”

“So she was here when it happened?”

Vishi nodded to a vacant armchair. “Right there.”