Trouble Magnet (10 page)

And plan muggings, and who knew what else. Flinx had been there before. Other times, other worlds. All of them equally disheartening.

Taking the unknown by the know-nothing, Subar ignored his still-sobbing friends and rushed forward a couple of steps until he was standing in front of Flinx. “C’mon. Let me show you my place. You might find it interesting. It might make some things clearer to you.”

Flinx hesitated. “I told you—I can’t stay.”

Steeling himself in case whatever had touched him previously reached across the gap separating him from his visitor to touch him again, Subar entreated as earnestly as he could.

“I don’t know what it is that you want here, but if I can help, I will. Because you saved me from the police,” he lied.

Flinx knew the youth was lying. As long as his erratic Talent was functioning, he could always tell when someone was lying. But there was something else there, something more. A hunger that went beyond the simple simian emotions that had boiled blatantly within the minds of Chaloni and his companion hooligans. Was he right about the youth? Was there, after all, some hope for one who reminded him of himself, and by inference for the greater humankind whose final fate he might hold in the balance? If so, it behooved him to find out.

Besides, he could as easily take the measure of the melancholic inhabitants of Visaria in Subar’s company as he could by his dejected lonesome. What was calling him away so insistently? His nondescript hotel room? Why not spend a little downtime in the youth’s company? If he couldn’t please himself, Flinx mused, he could for a little while at least provide some small measure of gratification to this aimless, befuddled adolescent.

“Okay,” he heard himself saying. “I’ll stick around a little longer. So you can show me your place.”

“Tscheks!”
an obviously pleased Subar exclaimed. “You can save the galaxy, or whatever it is you have to do, later.”

“Sure,” Flinx replied agreeably and without elaboration. “No hurry.”

Subar took a step down the rooftop accessway, then hesitated, looking back at his bawling friends. “What about them?”

Flinx considered. “Do you really care?”

Subar’s gaze rose from his mysteriously afflicted companions to his enigmatic new one. Was this a trick question? The offworlder, he was by now convinced, was like a neutron star full of tricks—compressed down and packed tight and ready to explode in his face if he took one wrong step or said one wrong word. He could sense that by trying to think of the “right” reply, he was taking too long to say it.

“Yes,” he blurted. It must have been the right response. Or at least, not a wrong one.

“They’ll come out of it sometime tonight,” Flinx assured him, “and they’ll never know what happened to them.”

Subar was not the only youth present, he reflected as he followed the boy outside the rooftop hideaway and down the accessway, who could lie a little when it suited his purposes.

CHAPTER

6

It was surreptitious contacts that led to Shyvil Theodakris being given his original appointment, and the clandestine manipulation of bits and bytes of history that had allowed him to rise to his present position. That acknowledged, many of those whose participation in his advancement had been crucial were retired, and some were dead.

Everyone involved, not least Theodakris himself, was gratified by the outcome. Only peace and satisfaction had adhered to the analyst. His work had reflected well on all who had come in contact with him, and his role in advancing stability and progress in Malandere had been recognized by both his immediate superiors and the various city administrations that had come and gone during his successive terms of office. He and his supporters had every reason to be pleased with his contribution.

If Senior Situations Analyst Shyvil Theodakris had a fault, it was a predilection to personal vanity. The long hair that reached to his shoulders was both unnaturally lush and dark for a man of his advanced age—the result of multiple transplants and artificial enhancements. His attractively dyed eyes, one dark blue and the other bright yellow in the current style, were a consequence of astute chemical manipulation rather than an obscure genetic imbalance. Periodic melding of expensive skin appliqués hid naturally blooming liver spots and other signs of age.

For all his efforts, there was no mistaking his inherent maturity, though to the untrained eye and unknowing co-worker it was difficult to tell just by looking at him whether he was sixty or a hundred. The disparity was sufficiently great enough to justify his regular visits to an assortment of cosmetic manipulators who might as well have been on regular retainer.

This morning promised to be a good one. Chaos had reigned less than usual the previous night, resulting in a marked reduction in the number of cases he would be expected to peruse. Unless the details of one struck his fancy, he would give them the usual once-over before passing them on to subordinates for deeper analysis. Underlings would deal with the scutwork of breaking down each antisocial act into its relevant components. Other operatives at Authority Central would take these and employ them in an attempt to locate the perpetrators. Armed with these rapidly compiled individual dossiers, active forces would scan the municipality’s various districts in the never-ending search for criminals and other antisocial elements.

The system was inherently organic in nature, Theodakris reflected as he settled into the chair facing the familiar blank wall. His body processed air and food. Authority Central processed clues and crimes. Both generated energy and waste products. At AC, these took the form of safer surroundings for law-abiding citizens and incarceration for society’s transgressors.

It was his task, one at which he had grown extremely proficient over the years, to speed through the history of an entire crime and single out suggestive individual elements that subordinates might usefully pursue. Thanks to his early training as a genonaturalist, he had a talent for predicting how collaborators in crime were likely to act subsequent to the perpetration. This was an invaluable aid to police in the field. On more than one occasion, for example, he had been able to envisage how certain lawbreakers would respond in the aftermath of their actions, thus enabling the police to find them almost immediately. His modest privacy-screened cubicle boasted a wall crowded with awards while his personal civic sybfile was full of official commendations as well as heartfelt expressions of gratitude from ordinary citizens who had been the victims of crime, and whose assailants had been caught and successfully prosecuted thanks to Theodakris’s efforts.

A few murmured codewords, a quick eyescan, and a pair of tridimensional images formed in front of him. The one on the left would unspool those events of the previous day that were deemed significant enough to justify his attention. The projection on the right would provide supplementary analysis, suggestions, opinions, the official reports of the officers involved in the relevant offense, and anything else department researchers thought might be pertinent to the particular case.

It was not a bad life, he mused as both projections filled the air before him. Leaning back in his lounge, he reflected on his unique good fortune as he absently studied the first images. He was a respected contributor to the success of a rapidly developing culture and an honored pillar of the community. Appreciably different from the fate that had been suffered by the rest of his colleagues, whose brave, youthful enthusiasms had been so violently rejected by an ignorant and immature galactic culture.

Within his department, a few hyperenergetic juniors had been pushing for him to retire. He saw no reason to do so. Ever active, his mind would only vegetate and wither in retirement. As long as he could contribute to the health of the Visarian culture that had accepted him, he would continue to do so.

It would help, though, he reflected as the coordinated projections flickered in front of him and he methodically scrutinized one case after another, if more than one wrongdoing every couple of days was of other than passing interest. So many of them replicated little more than the basest impulses of humankind, and were invariably perpetrated with less imagination and inventiveness than might be exhibited by a coterie of trained apes.

Store break-ins were accomplished with blunt objects and blunter minds. These affronts in search of merchandise invariably left behind cascades of clues, so many that his involvement seemed more a bureaucratic afterthought than an appropriate use of department resources. The solving of crimes of property tended to be as dull and business-like as their execution.

Of more interest were transgressions that involved emotion. A lover’s spat turned to battery. Murders that evolved out of passion. Crimes of accident and opportunity rather than careful planning. These were where his knowledge of human cogitation and neural pathways were put to better use. Why did that woman kill her best friend? What prompted a good upstanding family man to suddenly abscond with his employer’s cred and throw away his entire life? To what lengths would supposedly sophisticated people go to satisfy an urge as primitive and easily sated as simple lust?

Such musings and meldings as he scrolled patiently through the morning’s offerings almost caused him to run matter-of-factly past the mugging incident in Ballora Park. What caused him to devote slightly more attention and interest to it was the involvement of the thranx. Though Visaria was as much a part of the Commonwealth as planets with more extensive histories, the involvement of nonhumans in antisocial confrontations on a human-settled world was still something of a novelty.

He scanned the report. Nothing remarkable about the methodology involved. Typical youth gang ambush, demand for goods (standard), resistance (apparently quite effective) on the part of the intended victims, injuries suffered only by the assailants (good for the thranx, he nodded in silent approval), reasonably prompt arrival by police in area (not his place to criticize or applaud), expedient intervention by a passing citizen (good Samaritans were rare in a challenging urban setting such as Malandere). Combination of Samaritan’s intercession and arrival of police causes assailants to flee, hauling their wounded with them (a lesson Theodakris doubted would be taken to heart, given the apparent ages of the attackers). No loss of property, no injury to intended victims beyond loss of dignity and slightly lowered opinion of humankind.

Some question as to intent of Samaritan seen leaving in company of single assailant, though distance and lack of contact could also indicate Samaritan was possibly still chasing younger attacker (perhaps in hopes of catching him and giving him a good hiding, Theodakris mused hopefully).

Certainly there was nothing much here for him to do. Considerable postcontact enhancement had been required to obtain any useful visuals, since the only recording made by the onboard monitor on the first of the responding police transports had been acquired from a distance and while the transport itself had been in motion. Despite the substandard quality, the visual was clear enough to enable him to sex the assailants and make out something of individual characteristics. He ran through a few quick stabilized reruns, ruminated, then verbally filed suggestions as to where he thought the Authority might look for the perpetrators, what action they might take next, and—if cornered—which ones might surrender peacefully and which might resist with force.

He was about to move on to the next case when a few final images caused him to pause. Being secondary to the actual assault, there was really no obvious reason why he should spend any time with them. Murmuring verbal commands, he caused the projection to isolate the last visible assailant. No, not the assailant. There was nothing distinctive about the short, skinny scrawn. It was the young man leaving with him—or chasing him. It was not so much that the good Samaritan was taller than average, or even that he had red hair. And green eyes. There was something else about him. Something about his aspect, about the way he carried himself. There was also his distinctive personal adornment, which took the form of an unusual, brightly colored, lopsided necklace. It looked almost like…

A venomous Alaspinian minidrag.

Could the imagery be enhanced any further? Sitting up in his lounge and leaning forward was pure reflex; he could just as easily have directed the projection to move closer to him. The departmental processor did its best, but there were limits to the number and size of blank spaces in reality that its programming could fill in. The image of the good Samaritan sharpened only slightly.

Sitting alone in his office, the picture of vigor for his age, as healthy as departmental facilities and the best city doctors could make him, Shyvil Theodakris nearly had a heart attack.

It could not be. It was manifestly impossible. There were dozens, likely hundreds of documented reasons and verified testimonies why what he was seeing could not be so. Probably more than anyone else in the Commonwealth, he was palpably as well as furtively aware of them. Yet he knew, if he knew nothing else, his own history. And the history of his many lost, forgotten friends. Just as he knew what he was seeing with his own eyes.

So long ago. So many exciting, harsh, fervid, desperate, deliberately locked and filed-away memories. So much potential, thrown away. So many deaths. So much rage and rampant mindwiping on the part of the authorities and the general public. All gone now. All lost to time and fury. A hidden episode of Commonwealth scientific history.

Yet there it was, transparently represented not by edicted records or some scrap of accidentally dredged-up information, but by a real, living person. He knew who it was because despite the danger, he was unable to keep himself from occasionally, just occasionally, using the department’s excellent search facilities to scan otherwise restricted references. Using appropriate cover and misdirection while doing so, of course, so that such searches could not be traced back to him. For years there had been hints, suggestions, whispers—and nothing more. Nothing concrete, nothing real.

Until now.

He jerked around sharply, but it was only his imagination. The chamber was still empty. No armed and armored figures were bursting through the door to arrest him. To cart him away for summary justice, pronouncement of sentence, and immediate full and complete mindwipe.

What to do?

Clearly, the next step was to make certain he was neither dreaming nor hallucinating. To positively ascertain the identity and history of the Samaritan. There was, however, one alternative. A sensible alternative.

Move on. Pretend that what he had seen, what he was staring at this very moment, meant nothing in the scheme of things. Go on with his life, continue with his work. Doing otherwise meant risking everything he had labored so long and hard to raise up from a virtually nonexistent foundation.

Old memories came flooding back; memories he thought he had managed to suppress forever. Had they been able to view them, they would have shocked the good citizens of Malandere. Shyvil Theodakris was an esteemed member of their society: one might even say cherished.