Starfire (7 page)

He hesitated. "I don't know."

"Well, do you know of a better one?"

"No." He seemed highly uncomfortable, refusing to meet her eye. It could mean that he was lying, but Maddy didn't think so. More likely, he was the kind of person made thoroughly uncomfortable by compliments. She found that rather sweet.

"What you say matches what we've heard," she said, "that you're the very best. That's why we want you."

It didn't answer his question, but he didn't ask again. Instead he scowled at her in a puzzled way and said, "If you think I'm the best, it seems strange to switch me from what I'm doing to the Aten asteroid work."

"You don't think you can handle that?"

"No! I know I can. It's more like—well, this is going to sound like boasting, and I hate boasting. But the Aten asteroid transfer and mining aren't all that difficult. I'd be willing to trust the job to any of my senior assistants. What I'm doing here is far harder, and far more urgent."

He was raising a question that Maddy was not equipped to handle. Was he right—was there more going on than she knew about? Gordy Rolfe might again be playing his own game.

Fortunately, John Hyslop didn't press the point. He went on, "You know, Dr. Colombo isn't the way you think he is."

It was an odd non sequitur. Maddy asked, "And what way do I think he is?"

"You think he's all empty talk. But he used to be an engineer, and a good one."

"He doesn't seem to care for that sort of thing now."

"No. But sometimes, when you think he's not been listening and has no idea what you are talking about, he comes up with a key insight for an engineering problem or he puts his finger on a fatal design flaw. It's a terrible waste, doing what he does all day long."

Maddy had the urge to tell him that it took a good man to defend a boss who would surely never defend him. She wanted to see if a compliment would again produce that boyish look of discomfort. However, before she could speak he put out a hand to steady himself against the wall of the corridor, grunted, and gave a prodigious yawn. Then he blinked at her and said, "I'm sorry, Ms. Wheatstone. We can't have our meeting now."

"Call me Maddy." She frowned. "Are you all right?"

"No." His words became breathless. "Not all right. I've been awake and at work for over forty hours. I either have to lie down or throw up. I'm approaching the end of a second Neirling boost, and I'm going to crash. Soon. Give me twelve hours. Then we can talk."

Maddy took his arm in hers. "You should have told me sooner. Of course you must have sleep. If you're on a second boost, you absolutely need sleep."
And not only you.
The prospect of twelve hours of rest rose ahead of her like a prospect of paradise. "Come on, let's get you to where you can lie down in peace. We'll have plenty of time for our meeting when you wake up."

The look in his weary gray eyes surprised her. It was gratitude. You didn't see much of that when you worked for the Argos Group.

She led him away along the corridor. John Hyslop promised to be intriguing to work with—even though he insisted that they didn't really need him for the Aten asteroid work.

And did they? What other reason could there be for his transfer? She could ask Gordy Rolfe, but he'd take that as a sign of weakness. Better to file the question away in Maddy's box of minor mysteries, and try to find the answer for herself.

5

From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

A peat fire is like no other: silent, sullen, and slow-burning, red in its hidden heart. Not unlike, to one of morbid imagination, the man seated in front of it.

Seth Parsigian fitted well into an ancient castle of western Ireland; better, perhaps, than I did. Burly, primitive, cross-legged by my broad stone hearth, he made a rather formidable leprechaun. His skimpy black singlet revealed long-healed scars on his chest and neck. His eyes, glittering in the light of fire and wall lamps, were like a snake's.

"A dozen of 'em, and countin'," he said. "We can do this any way you like. I have a ton of stuff with me, pictures, descriptions, video reconstructions, locations and murder method, plus ages and background for each girl. What foxes me—an' not only me, half the security forces an' probably all the amateur sleuths in the world—is the
pattern.
There isn't one. I mean, so far as normal people are concerned, there ain't. Mebbe you, with your special talent, can make sense of it."

Of course. Maybe you, Dr. Guest, with your perverse, sick, disgusting, psychotic mind, will realize at once who did it.

"Spare me the doubtful compliments," I said. "I will certainly read, and I will look, and I will think. I will do all these things—at my leisure. For the moment, I prefer to have your impressions. You were surely engaged on this effort for some time before you decided to seek me out. Tell me what you know, what you deem can be ignored, and what you conjecture. When I feel a need for information, I will interrupt. Surely you have observed some pattern, however faint."

"Yeah. The pattern is, never the same thing twice. It started on December twenty-fifth, 2052. Myra Skelton went to a Christmas party at a friend's place on level eighty-eight."

"Level eighty-eight?"

"Locations on Sky City are named from the central axis. The axis is level zero. The outer edge of the cylinder is level one hundred. Myra Skelton lived with her parents on the eighty-second level, so she didn't have far to go to her friend's. Down six levels, and a hundred-meter walk around. She left there at nine at night. But she never made it home. They found her body the next mornin', stuck in an empty storage room on level eighty-seven."

"What was her age?" I sat back in my chair with my eyes closed. For the moment I was not attempting logical analysis. I sought only a sensation, a certain feeling, the stir of the small worms creeping up from the base of the brain.

"She was fourteen an' a half. Actually, more like fourteen years and eight months. She died from a blow to the back of her head. No murder weapon, no suspect, no motive. I got full medical reports. Want to see 'em?"

"Later. Continue."

"No rape, and no sexual molestation. Of course, I know that don't prove a thing. In your own case, from all I've heard, you never even touched them, before or after—"

I opened my eyes. "At your peril, Seth Parsigian. This truce is fragile enough, without unnecessary provocation."

"Yeah. Sorry." He did not look it. "Anyway, she hadn't been touched. Big mystery, an' no clues, even though her family's well connected an' pulled strings to get high-powered investigators on it. They come up from Earth an' talked a lot, but they found out zilch. They said, we got us an unknown killer—brilliant—and January seventh, they left.

"January tenth, Tanya Bishop played a game of three-ball on a court up near the axis, where it's close to zero gee. She pulled a muscle and had to drop out before the game was over. Instead of waiting for the others, she said she was goin' home to shower and rest her leg. Home was level sixty-six. She never made it. They found her in an airtight tank on level five. Thought at first it was an accidental death—gone in there, fallen asleep, asphyxiated. I know, that sounded like a bunch of crap to me, too. When they took a closer look at her body it turned out she was strangled. Fourteen years and one month old. This time she was naked. There was no intercourse, but there was mutilation after death. Sexual mutilation. Everybody said, we got us a crazy sex killer."

I nodded. Once again I sat with eyes closed. Fourteen years and eight months, fourteen years and one month; the ages were right.

"On January twenty-sixth," Seth went on, "Doris Wu disappeared. Age: fifteen years and four months. They never found a body, but everybody assumed she'd been murdered and dropped out into space. Wouldn't be hard to do—earlier that day she had been on level hundred, right at Sky City perimeter. Dump her outside, and centrifugal force would carry her out and away. Pretty risky if you left any evidence on her, because the outside of Sky City is packed with meteorite sensors and the body should have been seen. It wasn't. Soon as the disappearance was reported, people made the connection. Sixteen days between Myra Skelton and Tanya Bishop, sixteen days between Tanya Bishop and Doris Wu. Hey, we got us a killer who's regular as clockwork. We better watch real close come February tenth.

"Except that Cissy Muller was found stabbed to death on January twenty-ninth, only three days after Doris Wu. No sexual interference, though Cissy was more mature-looking than the others. Mature-acting, too. Only fourteen years and three months old, but a real hot number. Experienced. If the killer had just wanted sex, best guess on Sky City is all he'd've had to do was ask.

"April Jarrow was murdered February sixth, eight days later. No intercourse or sexual interference, but maybe that's not too surprising, because April was only eight." Seth paused. "What's up? You havin' ideas?"

One might say that Seth Parsigian was brutish, vicious, uncouth, and self-serving; I certainly approve all those descriptors. But he was not without observational powers. He had seen my eyes open.

I shook my head. "Far from it. I have nothing close to a productive notion."

That was the exact truth. I had been sitting, absorbing and sifting the information flow, and
waiting.
For what? It is hard to describe, although I am normally blessed with an adequate vocabulary. Let us say that I awaited the burgeoning within me of a strange desire, the joy of an old wound waking. The methods of murder described by Seth Parsigian were barbaric, and those I could not relate to. But the hunger, gusting through the cold arches of the mind, unpredictable and variable and irresistible—that should have resonated between the murderer's brain and my own. April Jarrow's death provided a jarring sense of dislocation. "Eight years old? You are sure she was so young?"

"Eight years and six months and one day. She looked a lot older, big and mature for her age. Might have passed for eleven or even twelve." He waited, and when I closed my eyes again he went on. "Death was from a single wound, the severing of the jugular vein. It was up on level nine, only a twentieth of a gee environment. Must have been a devil of a mess, blood everywhere. Don't see how the murderer didn't get covered with it."

If Seth were distressed at the picture that he was painting, it did not show in his voice.

"Suppose that the murderer had worn a space suit." I opened my eyes again. "Would any blood boil away if he went—" I paused, then forced myself to continue, "—if he went outside? Into space?"

"Dunno. I can check that. Think it's important?"

"I suspect that it is not. Continue."

"Right. Myra Skelton, Tanya Bishop, Doris Wu, Cissy Muller, April Jarrow." Seth counted them off on his fingers. If he had notes, I did not see him referring to them. "All right, we're up to number six. There was a gap here, an' people must have wondered for a while if the killer was done or died or shipped away from Sky City. Until March second, more than three weeks later, when they found Brenda Cleve with her throat cut."

"Her age?" I wondered if the eight-year-old had been an anomaly.

"Thirteen years and three months. No signs of mutilation, but in her case there had been recent sexual intercourse. They found a semen sample, an' over the next few days they did a DNA match for every blessed male on Sky City. They thought for a while they had the killer, a fourteen-year-old by the name of Donovan Summers. But it turned out that he and Brenda had been humpin' for months, and they'd had sex early the evening she died. He'd been home with his family on the other side of Sky City at the time when Brenda was murdered, and he had alibis for most of the others. The reason he didn't come forward as soon as he heard about Brenda was because he didn't want his parents to know he'd been having sex." Seth shook his head. "Boy, can I relate to that. If my old dad had known what I was up to when I was fourteen, he'd have tanned my ass."

The thought of a fourteen-year-old Seth Parsigian was too incongruous to sanction. And yet such a person had existed, just as there had once been a fourteen-year-old Oliver Guest. Unlike Seth, I had been a paragon of pious virtue, then, and for many years after, my father's greatest source of pride. He never contacted me after my arrest. I suspect that my filial image at that point became somewhat tarnished.

"Number seven was another disappearance," Seth continued. "An' this was different for a lot of reasons. First off, the girl who was killed wasn't a Sky City kid at all. Her name was Lucille DeNorville, an' she was up from Earth for a sight-seein' vacation. You may have heard about it because the media made a bigger noise over her than all the others put together."

He glanced at me expectantly, and I shook my head. "I have little time to spare for the worries of others. My own problems are quite sufficient."

"That right?" Seth's face showed not the slightest hint of interest or sympathy. "Well, Lucille vanished on March tenth, one week shy of her thirteenth birthday. Her granny an' granpappy back on Earth—she was an orphan—made a gigantic fuss about it. The DeNorvilles are loaded, so they could pay whatever it took to explore every last avenue. Not only that, they're from a really old and well-connected family—claim their line goes back over a thousand years—an' they have political and social clout. They had investigators talkin' to every single human on Sky City, an' as many robots and rolfes as could answer. The family offered a big reward, too—still waitin' for a taker—an' they made it pretty clear they didn't care if they saw the murderer dead or alive. So there were bounty hunters all over, clogging up the works. Didn't do a bit of good, because they all come up blank. Never found a body, never had a suspect.

"But the DeNorville family paid for reconstructions of all the murders, takin' everything anyone knew or could guess about what happened." Seth glanced around the long, stone-walled room, filled with smoky shadows cast by the dying peat fire. "Got a playback unit here, or did you go caveman all the way?"

Twenty-seven years had done nothing to improve his manners. "Over in the corner," I said, "you will find the best playback equipment in Ireland. I will show you how to use it should your mechanical aptitude match your tact and diplomacy."