THIRTY-SEVEN
‘Could it have been Voronoff?’ I asked as we approached Grand Central Station. We had left him at the station before going down to see Gideon, but killing Dominika didn’t seem to fit in with what I knew about the man. Killing himself, perhaps, in an interesting and boredom-offsetting manner, but not a well-known figure like Dominika. ‘It doesn’t seem like his style to me.’
‘Not him, and not Reivich either,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Though only you can know that for sure.’
‘Reivich’s no indiscriminate killer,’ I said.
‘Don’t forget Dominika made enemies easily,’ Zebra said. ‘She wasn’t exactly the best person in the city at keeping her mouth shut. Reivich could have killed her for talking about him.’
‘Except we already know he isn’t in the city,’ I said. ‘Reivich is in an orbital habitat called Refuge. That was true, wasn’t it?’
‘To the best of my knowledge, Tanner, yes,’ Quirrenbach said.
There was no sign of Voronoff, but that was hardly to be expected: when we’d let him go, I’d never seriously expected him to stay there. Nor had it mattered. Voronoff’s role in the whole affair was incidental at best, and if I ever did need to speak to him again, his celebrity would make it easy enough to track him down.
Dominika’s tent looked exactly as I remembered it, squatting in the middle of the bazaar. The flaps were drawn, and there were no customers in the vicinity, but there was nothing to suggest that a murder had taken place here. There was no sign of her helper trying to drag anyone into the tent, but even that absence was not especially noticeable, since the bazaar itself was remarkably subdued today. There must not have been any arriving flights; no influx of willing customers for her neural excisions.
Pransky was waiting just beyond the door, peering through a tiny gap in the material.
‘You took your time getting here.’ Then his funereal gaze assimilated Chanterelle, myself and Quirrenbach, and his eyes widened momentarily. ‘Well, well. A veritable hunting party.’
‘Just let us in,’ Zebra said.
Pransky held the door open and admitted us into the reception chamber where I had waited while Quirrenbach was on the slab.
‘I must warn you,’ he said softly. ‘Everything is exactly as I found it. You won’t like what you’re about to see.’
‘Where’s her kid?’ I asked.
‘Her kid?’ he said, as if I had used some piece of obscure street argot.
‘Tom. Her helper. He can’t be far away. He might have seen something. He might also be in danger.’
Pransky clicked his tongue. ‘I didn’t see any “kid”. There was more than enough to occupy my mind. Whoever did this was…’ He trailed off, but I could imagine what his mind was dealing with.
‘It can’t be local talent,’ Zebra said, in the silence which followed. ‘No one local would waste a resource like Dominika.’
‘You said the people after me weren’t local.’
‘What people?’ Chanterelle said.
‘A man and a woman,’ Zebra answered. ‘They paid a visit to Dominika, trying to trace Tanner. They definitely weren’t from the city. An odd couple, as far as I can tell.’
I said, ‘You think they came back and killed Dominika?’
‘I’d say they’re fairly near the top of possible suspects, Tanner. And you still have no idea who they might be?’
I shrugged. ‘I’m a popular man, evidently.’
Pransky coughed. ‘Maybe we should, um…’ He gestured with one grey hand towards the inner chamber of the tent.
We stepped through, into the part of the tent where Dominika performed her operations.
Dominika was floating on her back, half a metre above her surgical couch, suspended in that position by the steam-powered, articulated-boom suspended harness which encased her lower half. The harness’s pneumatics were still hissing, gentle fingers of vapour rising towards the ceiling. Top-heavy, she had canted back to an angle where her hips floated higher than her shoulders. The head of someone thinner than Dominika would probably have lolled to one side, but the rolls of fat around her neck kept her face pointed at the ceiling, and her eyes were wide open, glazed white, her jaw hanging slackly open.
Snakes covered her body.
The largest of them were dead, draped across her girth like patterned scarves, their inanimate bodies reaching to the bed. There was no doubting that they were dead; they’d been slit along the belly with a knife, and their blood had painted ribbons on the couch. Smaller snakes were still alive, coiled across her belly, or the couch, although they hardly moved even when I approached them, which I did with exquisite caution.
I thought of the snake sellers I had seen in the Mulch. That was where these animals had come from, purchased solely to provide detail to this tableau.
‘I told you you wouldn’t like it,’ Pransky said, his voice cutting through the stunned silence of our party. ‘I’ve seen some sick things in my time, believe me, but this must be…’
‘There’s a method to it,’ I said, softly. ‘It’s not as sick as it seems.’
‘You must be insane.’ Pransky had said it, but I had no doubt that the sentiment was felt by the others present. It was hard to blame them for that, but I knew what I was saying was right.
‘What do you mean?’ Zebra asked. ‘A method—’
‘It’s meant as a message,’ I said, moving around the levitating corpse so that I could get a better look at her face. ‘A kind of calling-card. A message to me, actually.’
I touched Dominika’s face, the slight pressure of my hand making her head turn to one side, so that the others could see the neat wound bored into the middle of her forehead.
‘Because,’ I said, voicing what I knew to be the truth for the first time, ‘Tanner Mirabel did it.’
Somewhere near my sixtieth birthday — though I had long since ceased to mark the passage of time (what was the point, when you were immortal?) and had doctored ship’s records to obscure the details of my own past — I knew that the time had come to make my move. The choice of time was not really mine, forced upon me by the mechanics of our crossing, but I could still let the moment pass if I wished, forgetting about the plans which had occupied my mind so thoroughly for half my life. My preparations had been meticulous, and had I chosen to abandon them, my plans would never have come to light. For a moment I allowed myself the bittersweet pleasure of balancing vastly opposed futures: one in which I was triumphant; one in which I submitted meekly to the greater good of the Flotilla, even if that meant hardship for my own people. And for the tiniest of moments I hesitated.
‘On my mark,’ said Old Man Armesto of the Brazilia.
‘Deceleration burn ignition in, twenty seconds.’
‘Agreed,’ I said, from the vantage point of my command seat, poised high in the bridge. Two other voices echoed me with tiny timelags; the Captains of the Baghdad and the Palestine.
Journey’s End lay close ahead, its star the brighter of the 61 Cygni pair, a bloodshot lantern in the night. Against all the odds, against all the predictions, the Flotilla had crossed interstellar space successfully. The fact that one ship had been destroyed did not taint that victory in the slightest degree. The planners who had launched the fleet had always known that there would be losses. And those losses, of course, had not been confined solely to that ship. Many of the momio sleepers would never see their destination. But that, too, had not been unexpected.
It was, in short, a triumph, however one looked at it.
But the crossing was not yet finished; the Flotilla still at cruise velocity. Though only the tiniest of distances remained to be crossed, it was the most significant part of the journey. That, at least, was not something the planners had ever guessed. They had never predicted the depth of disharmony that would creep into the enterprise over time.
‘Ten seconds,’ said Armesto. ‘Good luck to all of us. Good luck and Godspeed. It’ll be a damned close race now.’
Not as close as you think, I thought.
