Penumbra

She shook her head. Was he calling her bluff?

Commissioner Singh gave an indulgent laugh. “I’ve heard a lot about your unconventional spirit, Lieutenant. My predecessor called you a wild cat. I think he was understating the case.”

Rana felt tears prickle her eyes as she realised what she had to do. Ah-cha, so she might not be able to work officially with the kids any more, but she could still see them in her own time. She would continue helping them, try to counter the mess Khosla would make of his posting.

“When do I start, sir?” she asked at last.

“Good. I’m glad you’ve seen sense. You can go and clear your desk immediately. Vishwanath’s department is on the eighth floor. You’ll find him a good man and a hardworking boss. I hope you do as well in Homicide as you have done in Child Welfare, Lieutenant. Well done.”

She stood, saluted, wheeled around and left the room. In a daze she made her way back to her office on the second floor.

An efficient fan turned on the ceiling, disturbing what little paperwork sat on her desk. Her com-screen glowed with a dozen files she could no longer call her own. She stared at the windowless walls. One was filled entirely with the pix of young boys and girls, gazing out at her with eyes made tired by experience.

Her screen flashed. It was Singh. “Oh, Lieutenant. I forgot to mention a couple of things. Firstly, you’ll be moving into a new apartment near the river. Also, you’ll be receiving a pay rise. I’ll download the information right away.”

Seconds later Rana was staring at her new contract. She read the clause detailing her yearly salary. Either her pay as the Child Welfare officer had truly represented the law enforcement agency’s contempt of the post, or the officers at Homicide were grossly overpaid. She would be earning three times the amount she’d been paid in Welfare.

She considered all she would have been able to achieve if the money had been directed at her office, and not at the fat cats upstairs. Then again, she supposed, someone had to catch the killers.

She read through the details of her new apartment overlooking Nehru park. It sounded fantastic: three air- conditioned rooms, fully furnished, the building patrolled by security guards. It was a far cry from the sultry, one- room apartment she had now in a poor district of the city prone to burglary. She considered the luxury of a three- room apartment, and then felt a sudden pang of guilt.

She began the quick job of clearing her effects from the desk. They filled a small plastic bag: a stylus and an antique biro pen, an old softscreen recording from her childhood and an effigy of Ganesh, the elephant god, which her mother had given her years ago. She no longer believed in anything like that, but it was her only reminder of her mother. She decided to keep these things at her new apartment, now that she could be assured of security.

She stood and looked around the room. One thing caught her eye. She walked over to the wall and knelt to examine the pix. A small girl with jet-black bangs and frightened eyes stared out at her. On the tag-line beneath the pix was the computer code and a name: Sita Mackendrick.

Rana slipped the pix into her pocket and took the elevator to the eighth floor.

3

After ten days in space, enduring cramped living conditions and consuming recycled food and drink, a leave period on Earth was like parole in paradise.

Bennett drove from the spaceport on the perimeter of Los Angeles and took the highway into the desert. The shuttle had touched down in the early hours, and it was still a couple of hours until dawn. The road stretched away beneath the swollen lantern of the full moon, the tarmac laced with luminescents so that it glowed green in the night. In an age of draconian energy conservation, luminous road surfaces were a means of doing away with the expensive street-lighting of old. Seen from space, as the terminator swept across the Americas, the rising sun illuminated the roads that crossed the western seaboard like the veins on the brow of an old but healthy patriarch.

Bennett accelerated, enjoying the cool air on his face. He sipped occasionally from a carton of fresh orange juice and thought about the near miss in orbit. All things considered, his extended leave would compensate for the carpeting and/or fine he could expect on his return to the station in ten days. As he drove, he considered renegotiating his contract in favour of more leave on Earth. He even entertained the fantasy of changing jobs, looking for something a little more varied.

Two hours later he passed Mojave Town, where his father was hospitalised and Julia worked as a landscape designer. Constructed piecemeal at the end of the last century by eco-freaks dreaming of an environmentally friendly society, its population had been augmented over the years by an exodus of well-to-do home-workers, artists, computer specialists and on-line business people. In the light of the moon, multi-level domes glistened like agglomerated soap bubbles, interspersed with oasis gardens, trees and lakes, and tall masts bearing solar arrays.

Bennett’s habitat dome was situated twenty kilometres further along the highway. From the veranda of his dome, Mojave Town was a blur in the distance, and his nearest neighbour was ten kays away. He was surrounded by the soothing silence of the desert, his only company the occasional patrolling condor or scavenging jackal.

He pulled off the highway, trundled the final three kilometres along the rough track, and parked in the tropical garden that shaded his dome, patio and swimming pool.

The habitat came to life as he climbed the interior steps to the main lounge. Lights turned themselves on; he was greeted by a selection of his favourite music—mood-jazz from one of the colony worlds. Beside the sliding door to the veranda, his com-screen flared into life.

He took a beer from the cooler and sat in the swivel chair before the screen. One quarter of the screen displayed a head-and-shoulders shot of Julia, frozen mid-smile, another quarter someone Bennett had never seen before, a silver-haired man in his seventies. The upper half of the screen listed e-mail shots that had come in during his absence.

He regarded the pix of Julia, short dark hair parenthesising a calm, oval ballerina’s face. She was attractive and intelligent, and he never ceased to be amazed that their relationship had lasted so long—coming up to a year, now. They had met when he’d hired her to redesign his garden, began talking and never stopped. He’d been attracted to her sophistication—an attribute rarely found among the women on Redwood Station—and he assumed that she had found appealing the fact that he was a pilot and well off.

Their first rift, a couple of months later, had come about because Bennett had been fool enough to tell her this. She had been hectoring him for some declaration of commitment, a vow of his love for her. “Why?” he had responded. “You don’t love me. I’m just a rich high-orbit pilot to show off to your friends.” She had just stared at him, shocked. “You bastard, Josh. If that’s what you think I see in you…” and, unable to go on, she had hurried from the dome. A day later she had downloaded a vis-link to his com-screen. She had cried and told him that she loved himdespite the fact that he was a privileged, arrogant bastard and a pilot.

Shame, mixed with something akin to fear that she might be telling the truth, had stopped him contacting her for a few days. Then he had left a message to say that he was sorry, he knew what a shallow fool he was, and could they meet for dinner somewhere?

From then on things had never been the same. It seemed that his admission of blame gave Julia carte blanche to snipe away at his faults, psychologically reduce him to nothing more than a textbook example of adverse childhood conditioning. He wondered if it was the thought of being without her companionship that made him endure her hostility. Having someone, even someone who seemed to dislike him so much of the time, was preferable to being alone.

He brushed the back of his hand against Julia’s face, and instantly the smile unfroze. “Josh. I’m calling Sunday—you’re due back Tuesday, aren’t you?”

She moved away from the screen, touching her throat in the gesture he knew meant she was considering what to say next. She paused in the middle of her lounge, surrounded by baskets of hanging flowers. From there she looked back at the screen, as if to distance herself from what she had to say next.

“Josh… I’ve been giving things serious consideration lately. I’ve been considering my life, where I am…” This was typical of Julia, her tortured verbal circumlocutions and pained analysis. “I’ve been thinking about us, Josh. I