Dim Carcosa
D.J. Butler
While in San Francisco, be sure to visit an out-of-the-way historic marker on Dashiell Hammett Street at an address formerly known as 20 Monroe Street, where the famous author once lived. Hammett, the writer of many great pulp fiction detective stories, including The Maltese Falcon, created one of the most famous private detectives in literary and film history, Sam Spade. Dave Butler takes on a mystery in the tradition of Hammett, one which Spade would have been pleased to help solve.
D.J. (Dave) Butler has been a lawyer, a consultant, an editor, a corporate trainer, a registered investment banking representative, and is now a consulting editor for Baen Books. His novels have won the Whitney Award, the Association for Mormon Letters Award for Novel, and the Dragon Award. He plays guitar and banjo whenever he can and likes to hang out in Utah with his wife, their children, and the family dog. Dave also organizes writing retreats and anarcho-libertarian writers’ events and travels the country to sell books. He tells many stories as a gamemaster with a gaming group that he has been playing with since sixth grade.
It’s time to wake up, Prashanth.
The tattered edges of a dream slipped from Prashanth’s fingers. He saw towers behind a moon, and a still lake, and although he dreaded the valley in which he stood, he resented being torn away.
“Towers behind the moon,” he murmured.
It’s time to wake up, Sally said again. The puter was an implant, and he had named it. It didn’t object to the name, because Sally wasn’t sentient.
Prashanth’s head throbbed, and he groaned. “I didn’t set an alarm.” He fumbled around in his cot until he found his second pillow, the one not heated by contact with his body. He pressed the cool fabric against his head. It helped, if only a little.
You have an event in your calendar.
“Cancel it.”
I can’t cancel it. Dr. Goldberg scheduled the event.
Prashanth rolled into a sitting position, still clutching the pillow to his head. “Your chronometer is off. That must be six or eight hours away still.” He checked his own wrist chronometer.
Your nap went long. Again.
She was right. His slot in the Observation Dome was imminent. Failure to show up would give his doctor grounds to report him to Space Patrol. Which would mean that his future medical appointments would be compelled by armed policemen. Former colleagues, if he was lucky, but armed men not famous for their senses of humor.
You also have a video message. It came in on your professional line.
He had no time to shower. Prashanth tactically deployed a few sani-wipes on his skin, then found a clean shirt and put on his least rumpled suit. “How did I sleep so long?”
When deprived of natural Sol-intensity daylight, non-Cerite humans suffer a range of negative effects. Oversleep is one, as are time distortion, chemical imbalances, irritability, depression, paranoia—
“Rhetorical question,” Prashanth said. “Play the message.”
A video window appeared in his field of vision. Both the screen’s images and the accompanying audio were perceptible only to Prashanth, part and parcel of the implant system that had come with Sally. He’d got the implants when he was a member of Space Patrol, along with the fully immersive VR implants. He’d died in VR over and over as part of his training, but had managed to avoid it as an actual member of Space Patrol, only to get a medical discharge. They’d removed his clearance and deactivated the immersive VR, but left him with Sally. In lieu of better retirement pay, he’d been told with a laugh. It wasn’t a very funny joke; his medical pension barely covered his miniscule apartment in the Primate Quarter, and forced him to put his Space Patrol skills to work in the private sector.
Well, he’d made good use of Sally.
A woman’s face appeared in the video window. East Asian descent, hair jet black and skin unblemished, very expensive earrings. She might be as young as forty, but Prashanth guessed she was much older than that, and a habitué of a rejuvenation clinic.
And therefore rich.
“Mr. Satyadeva, I’m Victoria Tan. I’ve been given this number by a friend who told me you undertook private investigations of a discreet and personal nature. You may reach me at this number, or may find me at my home.”
The message ended with a contact number and an address. The address was in the Village, aboard Copernicus. Prashanth whistled, though the sound split his head.
He tucked his small pistol into the waistband of his pants. He had no license for it, and if Cerite PD chose to give him grief over it, he might go to prison. On the other hand, if he went unarmed around the slums of the Primate Quarter where he lived, he ran a very high risk of having a sharpened screwdriver inserted into his belly. For that matter, he ran the same risk by leaving the Primate Quarter and wandering among Toe Hold’s Cerite population.
He pushed the bed up into the wall and exited his apartment, three meters by four, into a crowded corridor. The only light came from the emergency strips in the wall, at ankle level. He pushed his way through the stream of traffic toward the street. His vision shuddered, and the people brushing past him looked like hulking shadows with leering, distorted faces. “Do Cerites not suffer from light deprivation? Not a rhetorical question.”
None of the people he passed turned to answer him. Half of them were also muttering, either on some comms link, or to their own implant, or simply to the voices in their heads.
Cerite physiology and psychology are much more resistant to low light, even for long periods of time, than those of non-Cerite humans.
“Any news on the restoration of the Day Lights?”
Lord Wimsey issued a statement ninety minutes ago that Day Lights will be operational tomorrow, for several hours. Would you like to review the statement?
Lord Wimsey was an AI. He had been built as a kind of security administrator or gatekeeper for Toe Hold, in the days of the gang fights six years earlier, but had gradually taken on more roles. Wimsey tended to act through humans for menial tasks, but from time to time would make an appearance in person, if the occasion was dramatic enough to warrant it.
The Day Lights looked fine, their spherical bulbs spaced every ten meters along the ceiling of the corridor. But they were dead, and Lord Wimsey said it was because the insulation on the power cables was degrading. Apparently, those cables were among the first manufactured at Toe Hold and they hadn’t gotten the formula right, or hadn’t worried about it too much because the cables were destined for the Primate Quarter. They were being replaced, and the Day Lights should be back online soon.
Lord Wimsey had been saying that for months.
“No,” Prashanth muttered.
The Day Lights were necessary because all of Toe Hold was underground, to protect it from radiation. When they worked, they were set to standard hours, meaning they simulated a twenty-four-hour Sol day for Primate Quarter residents.
Splotches of graffiti marred the walls and ceiling of the corridor for a twenty-meter stretch. Monkeys belong on Earth! and Ghosts Belong in the Grave! were repeated competing slogans, and told the passersby that the youths of Toe Hold still fought turf wars, organized in their race-gangs. Dim Carcosa meant…he didn’t know what. It probably marked a boundary, or memorialized the exploit of some gangbanger graffiti artist in slipping behind enemy lines.
Only now, they had to break through Lord Wimsey’s security gate to do so. That gate separated the Primate Quarter from the Cerite section of Toe Hold and had greatly reduced the gang violence.
Prashanth walked in the shuffling gait that any non-Cerite had to adopt, to avoid flinging himself against the walls and the ceiling. Toe Hold was located on the moon Liber, whose gravity was 0.08 that of Earth’s.
A scuffle broke out ahead. Prashanth couldn’t make out the words, but two men screamed at each other, clawing and punching until the crowd pulled them apart. A uniformed Security officer waded toward the fracas with a raised stun rod.
Prashanth took a turn that led him down stairs to pass beneath the Ring. A distant hum overhead marked his transit beneath the unstopping maglev train, the second part of Goldberg’s prescription for him. Two hours daily on the train so that its constant circular motion could provide 1 g of gravity for his bones and muscles to work against. Apparently, that hadn’t been added into his calendar. Beyond the Ring, he came to the gate.
Off to one side, broad corridors led to Newton and the agricultural boroughs. They were less covered with graffiti, but their Day Lights were also off. Two Security officers stood in the entrances. They only held stun rods, but the unwashed rabble of the rest of the Primate Quarter stayed away.
Beside the gate was a small coffee kiosk. The kiosk had no name, just a gap-toothed Cerite and a sign saying: ONE CREDIT NO CREDIT.
Prashanth paid his one credit. The coffee was bitter and sandy-tasting and it was merely warm, but he took grim satisfaction in the inferiority of the brew. He might have been tempted to enjoy a good, dirt-grown coffee; this brown squirt, unpalatable and oily, was a pure vehicle for the injection of caffeine into his system.
He gulped the coffee and threw the printed cup into the vendor’s dispenser. The Cerite bobbled his head, his rapid blinking only making the red and yellow of his eyes look all the more unnatural.
Prashanth presented his ID card to the three gangsters at the gate.
Their colors marked them as the Terra Gang, a swarm of thugs so successful during the troubles that Lord Wimsey contracted out some security functions to them. Their presence kept the PD and the occasional Space Patrol officer honest by making sure they had competition, Prashanth supposed. And the pistols and knives strapped to their bodies were effective at keeping the peace. But the Terra Gang’s fighters’ faces were scarred and they leered at him with gaps in their teeth, and Prashanth knew that when they weren’t working for Wimsey, the Terra Gang were bootleggers and extortionists and worse.
All in all, he would have preferred to be presenting his card to someone else.
“Ratskull,” he said.
Ratskull had orange hair and split nostrils. “I don’t need to see your identification, Pr’shanth Sach’deva.” His voice was halfway between a growl and a giggle. Would Wimsey permit his private security agents to be actually high on duty? “I know you. You’re the most famous private investigator on Toe Hold.”
“I’m complying with regulations.” Prashanth’s head throbbed. He continued to hold forward his card.
“As is right and just.” Ratskull eyeballed the card briefly. “But I want you to know that I’m not just saying that because you’re the only private investigator on Toe Hold. All in order, more’s the pity. Business?”
“Scheduled time in the Observation Dome,” Prashanth said. “And then I have to see a client on Copernicus.”
The other two gangbangers snarled at the mention of the ship.
“That all sounds forgivable,” Ratskull said. “Behave yourself.”
The gangster handed back Prashanth’s ID card, and Prashanth passed through the gate.
Beyond lay the Cerite borough of Promise. Walking down the tunnel, Prashanth saw the entrance to the Space Patrol Embassy, where he’d once had an office bigger than his current apartment. Next, he came to a plaza lined with Cerite shops. The customers, mostly Cerites, moving in and out of those buildings walked with an ordinary motion, because they were the low-gravity wraiths who had evolved to live in an environment like this. The lights here all seemed to work, but they weren’t as bright as the Day Lights, when the Day Lights worked. Instead, artificial white light streamed from bulbs atop tall aluminum poles.
To his right, Prashanth saw a knot of pale, elongated youths. They wore shawls of knotted, colorful rags, their hair stood straight up on their heads, and they had small animal bones in their ear and nose piercings. One of them, a young Cerite woman with a bird tattooed on her cheek, flipped a folding knife open and shut.
“Bow down your head, you son of dust,” the young woman said.
“Excuse me?” Prashanth wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.
“Lay down ambition, hope, and lust,” she continued, “and pray alone for lost Carcosa.”
Only her lips hadn’t moved. They were parted, to reveal her teeth, fashionably sharpened to spikes. But they hadn’t moved. Had she really spoken at all?
Prashanth shook his head and walked away. He needed more sleep. Or perhaps less. He definitely needed the headaches to stop.
In the center of the borough, a thick column rose to the ceiling. The elevator in the center of the column climbed to the surface and the Observation Dome. Stairs climbed alongside the lift, but he had no interest in dragging himself up all those steps today. Prashanth touched the panel to summon down one of the lift cars.
The bottom three floors of the column were occupied by a restaurant called the Purple Parrot. A blinking LED advertisement urged Prashanth to come into the Parrot and try some FISH CHOWDER, HOT AND FRESH.
His stomach rumbled, but he needed to take his prescribed sun or he’d get in trouble. He could think about food later.
You could climb the stairs.
“You’re not supposed to have an opinion.”
I don’t. Dr. Goldberg programmed me to make this suggestion.
“He shouldn’t be allowed to override my commands to you.”
He’s your doctor.
Prashanth realized that he was standing next to a woman and that she was staring at him. He directed a ginger smile at her; contracting the muscles of his face into a smile made his headache lance through the caffeine poultice and stab him in the brain.
She might have been in her fifties, a dark-skinned woman with short hair. Normal, not Cerite. “Going up to enjoy the view?”
“The doctor says I need light,” Prashanth told her.
She took two slow steps away from him.
He sighed and took the stairs.
“What is a Carcosa?”
Nineteenth and twentieth century popular culture reference. A fictitious mysterious planet invented by Robert W. Chambers. Connected with a fictitious play titled The King in Yellow and a never-explained being named Hastur. Motifs invented by Chambers were repeated by later writers—
“Stop,” Prashanth said. “Any contemporary references?”
None.
“Writers,” he grumbled.
The Observation Dome door opened to his ID card, admitting Prashanth into a wooded amphitheater. Trees stretched out in ordered groves punctuating the green sward. A pond lay at the center, ruffled only slightly by the artificial breeze that blew across the park. The ceiling was a single transparent dome; to one side, he saw the planet known as Alexa’s World. Liber and its city of Toe Hold orbited Alexa’s World, but the tidally-locked orbit meant that Alexa’s World appeared as a static presence through the dome, an unblinking red eye filling one side of the sky.
The red sun—the only sun Prashanth had ever known—was visible as well. Goldberg had assigned him time in the dome precisely to get exposure to the light of the star. Red star, red planet. Red, red, red. And Cerite white. Red and white were the colors of Toe Hold.
The benefits of exposure to the star’s light were principally psychological, Goldberg had explained. A quirky by-product of human evolution was that, deprived of light, humans tended to break down psychologically. Lights atop lampposts supplemented the star’s illumination with blue and UV light, to keep the trees healthy and give people vitamin D.
But what was the point, if the light of Ross 248 is too dim? Prashanth had asked. Primates—that is to say, humans—had evolved under a bright yellow star.
The human body is amazing, Goldberg had answered. So is the human psyche. It’s like prayers—sometimes they seem to work. And placebos. You never know.
Once the Day Lights were working again, he should spend his time under their glow.
Prashanth checked his suit, glad that it was a mild taupe. The jacket was reversible, its other side being gray.
“You’re blocking the door,” a man said.
Prashanth excused himself and moved aside. Two men exited the lift and staggered down the grass, one carrying a blanket and the other a printed basket.
Prashanth had no blanket, but there was a printer beside the door. He scanned his ID card; the machine hummed and printed a blanket, two meters long and one wide, gray. He found a patch of unoccupied grass near the pond and laid the blanket out. Around him, the people sitting or lying to take in the various streams of light were torpid. Their movements were sluggish, they said little.
He heard a woman crying, but couldn’t see where the sound came from.
Dr. Goldberg suggested you might sunbathe. I am reminding you that nude bathing is permitted.
“I can see that nude sunbathing is permitted,” Prashanth murmured. He took off his jacket and folded it, tucking it beneath his head as a pillow as he lay down. He unbuttoned the top five buttons of his shirt and rolled the sleeves up. “Are you going to report to him that I’m not nude?”
Yes.
“Please also report that my headache is gone. I think it was the coffee.”
Did you have a headache?
Prashanth sighed.
I am now reporting that you had a headache. On a scale from one to ten, how severe was the pain?
“Shh, I’m taking my medicine now.”
* * *
“You seek a never-dying boon,” someone said. A woman’s voice.
Prashanth had fallen asleep. He struggled now to bring himself to wakefulness.
“From towers that rise behind the moon,” the voice continued, “the towers look down on dim Carcosa.”
Prashanth forced himself into a sitting position, shattering the last chains of sleep that held him down. The printed blanket beneath him was rumpled, his jacket a wrinkled mess. He cast about, looking for the woman he had heard chanting in his sleep, but saw none. The sunbathers and picnickers about him were men, or children.
Victoria Tan called again.
“You didn’t wake me.”
I was following Dr. Goldberg’s instructions. If you are wondering, you have now spent the required time in the Observation Dome.
Prashanth shook grass from his jacket and put it on, rebuttoning his shirt. He gathered up the blanket and tossed it into a disposal unit near the lift before descending.
There was no one else in the lift with him.
“Tell me about the Tans. The name sounds familiar.”
Access restricted.
Prashanth considered. “There’s a product. A coffee called ‘Tan Arabica.’ Is that owned by a Tan family?”
Access restricted.
“You could be a more useful assistant, Sally.”
No, I cannot. I am unable to access the information you seek.
“That was rhetorical. Contact the spaceport and get me on the next shuttle to Copernicus.”
Am I authorized to purchase a ticket?
“Unless they’ll give me a lift for free, yes.”
As the lift doors opened on the bottom level, Sally said, You might consider having the chowder. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting a while at the spaceport.
“Doctor’s orders?” Prashanth asked.
No.
“Doctor’s strongly-worded suggestion?”
There was a short delay. No.
“Okay, then.”
Prashanth asked for chowder from a Cerite waitress who grinned, revealing her sharpened teeth. When the chowder came, he sucked it carefully from the lip of the bowl. He knew that on Earth, people sometimes ate fish they caught wild in streams and lakes, or at least they had done so in the past. In what sense the Purple Parrot’s chowder could be fresh on Toe Hold, he wasn’t certain, but it was definitely hot.
When he’d finished and paid, he shuffled two kilometers north through and beyond Promise, to the train station. The station also served as the spaceport’s lobby, and frequent travelers had lockers here, where they stashed their own personal envirosuits or other gear. Prashanth took a loaner from the station’s dispenser.
Bored Security agents patted him down, asked about his intentions, and let him through.
Your shuttle is being prepped on Pad 7.
The narrow platform only held one other passenger as Prashanth arrived, but it colored another dozen or so over the fifteen minutes that he waited. He stood, leaning against the back wall. He dozed off momentarily, then awoke to find that his head hurt again, and the train was arriving.
The train whispered to a stop alongside the platform, settling down onto its magnetic track. Prashanth and the others boarded, and he found a seat in the corner of the car. The only other passenger was a Cerite man with a tattoo of an anchor on his cheek. Disconcertingly, he sat opposite Prashanth and looked at him as if he intended to engage in conversation.
When the Cerite opened his mouth, Prashanth saw that he had no teeth.
Prashanth smiled and looked away.
The train rose as its magnets were activated and then slid smoothly forward. The view out the windows of tunnel walls was quickly replaced with a view of the rocky surface of Liber. Prashanth looked at the Cerite and smiled again; the other man worked his jaws, opening and closing his toothless mouth, but said nothing. Then the train entered another tunnel, and slowed.
At the 4–5 station, more passengers got on the train. The Cerite turned his toothless attention to a young woman in a bright blue envirosuit, and left Prashanth alone. At the 6–7 station, Prashanth disembarked, and the Cerite didn’t follow. Along with the dozen other passengers, Prashanth took the left ramp up toward the surface and Pad 7.
I’ve taken the liberty of updating the shuttle’s AI with your current mass.
“Are you saying I’m fat?”
A narrow-faced woman walking in front of Prashanth turned and frowned at him. He smiled.
You’re losing weight. You should eat more chowder.
Pad 7 was just a painted circle on a flat stone shelf. Eight circles of similar size were arrayed in a loose ring around the mesa top that served as the spaceport, and in the center lay the larger circle that was Pad 9. The walk from the top of the ramp to Pad 7 took about five minutes, which gave Prashanth the opportunity to observe the other pads. One held a shuttle that was swarmed by a maintenance crew in envirosuits; a second was spitting out a stream of passengers and cargo; a third stood silent.
The shuttle steward was a blue-eyed Primate who pointed Prashanth to the next vacant acceleration couch, and then wordlessly helped him locate a strap that had fallen between two cushions.
“Thanks.” Prashanth smiled.
Prashanth felt the subtle vibrations of cargo being loaded and then hatches closed. The hatch by which he’d entered shut last, and the steward strapped himself into his own acceleration couch.
“Everyone ready?” the shuttle’s AI asked cheerfully over the intercom.
Prashanth barely had time to turn his head to look out the window before 0.75g of acceleration pressed him into the cushions. The shuttle leaped into the sky and raced straight forward for two minutes. Then, abruptly, the ascent stopped, the acceleration vanished, and the shuttle seemed to fall. Prashanth tried to find Copernicus out his window, but all he could see was the vast face of Alexa’s World, the rocky fields below, and the staring dim sun of Carcosa.
Not Carcosa. Ross 248.
The shuttle lurched one way and then the other, and then spun, all apparently random, but then suddenly the craft touched down, and out his window, Prashanth saw the Hold of Copernicus.
He felt the arrival in his bones, as gravity climbed to 0.62g.
He resolved to take his prescription to visit the Ring seriously. Dr. Goldberg—a tall, thin man almost pale enough to be a Cerite himself, but with dark eyes and a long bushy beard—had enthused at length about the importance of gravity to the bone and muscle health of a primate.
Prashanth had been to Copernicus before, but not recently. He’d been born on the ship, shortly after arrival in the Ross 248 system, and had memories of early childhood with his parents and his sister, digging in the dirt carefully husbanded on the Garden Deck.
They were all dead now. Not of any of the tragedies that had befallen Toe Hold or Ross 248 generally since arrival.
Just the ordinary tragedy of time.
Prashanth stepped down from the shuttle onto the deck of Copernicus’s enormous Hold, then descended further, through an airlock and into a locker room. He stripped off the envirosuit, attaching it to a charging unit to refill its power cells and oxygen supply. As rumpled as his jacket was, it was a more professional look than the envirosuit. Also, if he wore the envirosuit, it would hide his Space Patrol Academy class ring.
Then he had to ask for directions to the staircases. He groaned at the mere thought of the staircase, the ship’s gravity already dragging on his limbs. Copernicus had no lifts, so Prashanth had to descend fifty meters to reach the Village.
The drag of artificial gravity grew stronger as he descended. “Does this count as my one hour in the Ring?”
No.
Prashanth sighed. Coming back up was going to hurt.
The Village deck had a roof eleven meters tall and contained, well, a village. It had Day Lights overhead, as did the Garden Deck. Prashanth recognized lanes from his youth, and turned his head away. He couldn’t afford them, much as he liked the light, the gravity, the dirt, and the idea of a peaceful home. Someday, maybe.
He quickly found the building with the address Victoria Tan had sent; it was a three-story-tall house with a walled enclosure to the side. The building appeared to be made of marble, though the material must surely be some sort of concrete synthetic.
When Prashanth stepped up to the front door, it opened immediately. An AI in black cummerbund and tails appeared, rolling on a single oversized spherical wheel. “Whom may I present?”
“Prashanth Satyadeva. I have an appointment with Victoria Tan.”
He didn’t really have an appointment; he had an invitation. But he’d chosen to come see her face-to-face because he had found that clients who were on the fence, who had misgivings about hiring a private investigator, might ignore him when he tried to return their call. But if he showed up in-person, then they had already inconvenienced him, and very few people at that point were willing to back out.
“You are expected.” The AI stepped out of the way and then closed the door behind Prashanth. “Madame’s office is on the left.”
Prashanth passed through a wooden door with a pebbled glass window into a thickly carpeted office. The furniture inside was of dark wood. Certificates and plaques on the wall looked like the mementos of public commendation. A poster on the wall read TAN ARABICA—THE ZING YOU REMEMBER! Victoria Tan stood up behind her heavy wooden desk.
“The coffee barons,” Prashanth said. “I thought so, though I was unable to find your records.”
“I value my family’s privacy.” Victoria gestured at a wooden chair near Prashanth and then sat. “I reached out to you because I have been assured that you are very discreet. Coffee?”
“That’s much better than hearing that you reached out to me because I’m expendable.” Prashanth grinned. “Yes, please. Black.”
“You really like to taste the coffee.”
“When it’s good,” Prashanth said. “And when it’s bad, I’m just taking it for the caffeine anyway.”
The AI followed him into the room and busied itself at a brewer in the corner.
“Space Patrol.” She pointed at his ring. “Class of ’44. Retired early, but not dishonorably.”
“Medical discharge.” Prashanth smiled. “Chronic headaches.”
“Triggered by your implants?”
Prashanth tried not to show discomfort at the fact that she knew his medical history. She wanted discretion, of course she had checked his background. And still, apparently, she had chosen him, so he had nothing to complain about.
“I had them even as a kid.” Prashanth shrugged. “Brain chemistry. It’s manageable. They got worse as I got older.” He didn’t say: And without the Day Lights, they’re worse still. “Eventually, they got to be too much for the Space Patrol.”
“But not too much for work as a private investigator.”
“Space Patrol’s standards are very high. And I don’t really have any competition as a private consultant. This is still a small town, fundamentally.”
“Did you know Alexa, then?” she asked. “Alexa of the Oddity, the original Alexa?”
Prashanth nodded. “Not well. She was some twenty years older than me. How can I help you, Ms. Tan?”
“My daughter’s missing. Chao-xing. I’ll have all her biodata transmitted to your puter as soon as we’re finished here.”
Prashanth nodded. “How long has she been missing?”
The AI handed him his coffee. It was so strong and black, he could practically taste the dirt.
“I haven’t heard from her in forty-eight standard hours,” Tan said. “She’s not answering, and she isn’t in her apartment. We usually talk daily.”
“Toe Hold Security won’t even start to look for her for another twenty-four hours.”
“And I need discretion.”
Prashanth nodded. She probably also wanted at least a veneer of professionalism, or she might have called on one of the gangs for help. “Do you have any idea about why Chao-xing isn’t answering?”
“No. I have no suspects.”
“Is Mr. Tan here? I’d like to ask—”
“My husband, Elias Tan, will not be involved in this investigation.”
“Just a couple of questions.”
“Discretion, Mr. Satyadeva.”
Prashanth nodded. “Does the biodata include places of work or school and her apartment address?”
“Naturally.”
“My fee—”
“I’ll pay it. I’ll transmit you ten thousand credits as a retainer.”
“That about covers it.” Prashanth finished his coffee, set the cup down, and left.
He had just finished putting the envirosuit back on and boarding the return shuttle when Sally notified him that he had received ten thousand credits in his account. And Chao-xing Tan’s biodata.
He sat down in the acceleration couch and belted himself in. “Summarize content and show me all video images,” he murmured.
He smiled at the steward.
Sally showed him a stream of images: an art studio, a large apartment on a main access corridor in the Primate Quarter, glamor shots and headshots of a young woman, images of both her entrepreneur parents. Elias Tan looked very earnest and serious, and had let a little gray creep into the hair at his temples.
Chao-xing Tan, twenty-one. Fashion and art model. Tan got her career start acting in commercials for Tan Arabica…
Prashanth listened without focusing and watched without staring, trying to let his mind settle into an unconscious, meditative state. The spare life details, the official data of addresses and contact numbers, and the images of a pretty young woman smiling for the camera flowed past him and kept flowing past him as he ruminated.
On landing, he tried Chao-xing’s contact number himself, and got no response.
In the spaceport, he accessed a cash machine and withdrew ten one-hundred-credit coins. You never knew what witness could be prodded into breaking a confidence or throwing a friend overboard for a little money.
Victoria Tan didn’t want him to talk to her husband. Why was that?
The Terra Gang were still on duty. Ratskull jeered as he admitted Prashanth back into the Primate Quarter. The Day Lights were on and Prashanth did his best to walk directly beneath the bulbs as he made his way to Chao-xing’s apartment in the borough of Newton. He felt a lightness in his chest. As he touched her doorbell pad, the Day Lights extinguished.
She had roommates, the biodata said. Dario and Illyria. The door opened to reveal a young man with a biologically improbable mustache and glazed eyes, who hopped from foot to foot.
“Dario,” Prashanth said.
“No, I’m Dario,” the young man growled.
“Dario-ling,” a woman called from within the apartment. “That’s what he means.”
Dario’s hands were balled into fists. Was he high? “What do you want?”
“My name is Satyadeva,” Prashanth said. “I’m a friend of Chao-xing Tan’s family. May I come in?”
“No,” Dario snarled.
“I’m looking for Chao-xing,” Prashanth said.
“Maybe you kidnapped her,” Dario said. “Maybe now you’re here to kidnap us.”
“Do you think Chao-xing has been kidnapped?” Prashanth asked.
Dario grumbled wordlessly.
“Look,” Prashanth said. “It sounds like you know something about Chao-xing’s disappearance. That’s good, you can help me. Unless you decide not to help me, and then you have a problem, because the next knock on your door will be either a strong-arm crew in the employ of the Tan family or a Cerite Security squad, and, in either case, they’ll be much less polite than I will.”
Dario stared at him, eyes glazing over further. “What?”
“Dario-licious, let him in!” the woman called.
Dario ground his teeth, but stepped aside; Prashanth entered.
The central sitting room of the apartment was larger than Prashanth’s own entire dwelling. It contained two sofas, a coffee table, and a coffee brewer in the corner. Through open doorways, Prashanth saw three sleep chambers and a utility space with a printer and refrigerator.
A young woman lay on one of the sofas, a mask of feathers covering her face from the nose up. From her flopped posture, she might have been completely boneless. She was not Chao-xing Tan.
“Illyria?” Prashanth asked.
“Yes!” Dario snapped. “Not that it’s any of your business!”
“Dario-vine, help me up,” she called, fluttering fingers weakly.
“You don’t need to get up for me,” Prashanth said.
“Not for you,” she trilled. “I must pose.”
Dario helped her stand. They both consulted a tablet and then assumed different poses, Dario a frightened crouch, hands up to shield his face, and Illyria an imitation of an obelisk, hands together and needling skyward.
“Which one is Chao-xing’s room?” Prashanth asked.
The woman pointed with both hands.
Prashanth examined her room and found it Spartan. A bed, clothing, a tablet. Her biodata included passwords, so he accessed her messages and read through them. Nothing indicating plans to leave. Nothing that struck him as out of the ordinary. No messages sent within the last forty-eight hours, and only one received.
The message was from Gambo Zubair. He knew the name from the biodata—Zubair was a sculptor who sometimes employed Chao-xing as a model. The message was dated the day before, and simply informed Chao-xing that she would not be paid for the day’s session, since she had not shown up.
In her calendar, Prashanth found the missed session.
All consistent, all unsurprising, all unilluminating.
He transmitted the tablet’s entire hard drive to Sally, and then pocketed it, for good measure.
“Lo, Camilla, behold how the king glares at me through the Pallid Mask,” Dario said as Prashanth moved from Chao-xing’s room to the other sleeping chambers.
“The king is not the Stranger,” Illyria answered.
“Who can tell the difference between the king and the king’s messenger?” Dario nearly shrieked his line.
Prashanth found nothing in the other rooms. Not even, to his surprise, recreational drugs.
“Behold the towers!” Illyria cried. “The towers rise behind the moon!”
Something about that line bothered Prashanth, but he couldn’t quite identify what it was. “Sally, what do ‘towers behind the moon’ refer to?”
The “towers behind the moon” are referred to in Robert Chambers’s fragmentary, fictitious play The King in Yellow.
Again. And yet Prashanth was certain that wasn’t why the line tickled at his memory.
Dario turned and glared at Prashanth. “Who are you talking to?”
“Just thinking out loud.” Prashanth smiled his best disarming smile. His head was beginning to throb again. “Are you two rehearsing a play?”
“Chao-xing was cast as well,” Illyria said. “Only she’s too good for us now.”
Prashanth nodded affably. “So there was tension between you and your roommate.”
Dario growled. “What business is it of yours?”
“Dario-lightful, he’s trying to find her. Yes, of course there was. We’re all actors, are we not? Only Chao-xing was spending more and more time with Gambo. Modeling. It went to her head, she said she couldn’t be in the play anymore.”
“Where are you performing?” Prashanth asked. “Where do I buy a ticket?”
“We don’t know!” Dario snapped.
“Guerilla theater, isn’t it?” Illyria’s voice was dropping slowly in volume and intensity. She sounded as if she were drifting farther away as she spoke.
“That sounds pretty avant-garde,” Prashanth said. “Really artsy. Who’s directing?”
“That’s a bit of a secret,” Illyria murmured. Was she actually falling asleep standing up? “He told us people would ask, didn’t he? Ruins the surprise if we tell, though.”
“Ruins the surprise!” Dario roared. He thrust himself suddenly into Prashanth’s face, foamy saliva flecking the quivering tips of his curled mustache.
Prashanth held his ground and smiled. “How am I supposed to see the play, then?”
“Maybe you’re not supposed to,” Illyria whispered. “But if you’re intended to see it, you will.”
“Rehearsal is soon,” Dario said. Speaking to Illyria, his tone was abruptly gentle. “Will you be able to make it?”
“I’m a professional,” she hissed.
“Time to go,” Dario grunted to Prashanth. “You ask too many questions.”
Prashanth raised his hands to show pacific intentions. “Thanks for your time.” He backed out the door.
The Day Lights were flickering. He crossed the access corridor to a bodega fifty meters down and bought a seed cake. “Search the biodata and the tablet dump,” he said between bites. “Look for any indication of who might be directing any play Chao-xing was cast in in the last six standard months, and where the play was being rehearsed.”
No indication of either.
Gunfire erupted in the corridor. Prashanth ducked. He kicked over a small table sitting in front of the bodega and crouched behind it, very careful not to reach for his pistol. Yet.
Half a dozen shots rang out, and then a short burst of automatic fire. They came from his left and he craned his neck, looking for the source of the noise and not seeing it. Then he heard cursing, and the wet cracking sounds of muscle-powered violence.
“Call Security!” someone shouted.
Prashanth looked back the other way just in time to see Dario and Illyria disappearing into the crowded traffic of the corridor.
“Did I neglect to mention, Ms. Tan,” he muttered, “the premium I charge when I’m subjected to the risk of violence?”
Is that a rhetorical question?
He ignored Sally, left the table where it lay, and rushed after the actors.
They left the access corridor in two hundred meters, entering one of the lateral halls. The ceilings here dropped dramatically and the halls narrowed. In the earliest years of Toe Hold, these had held vertical aquaponic stacks, but much of that equipment had either become obsolete, or been moved to the roomier chambers near the agricultural boroughs. Now the halls were stacked with junk, and trickled with thin streams of traffic as people looked for shortcuts or privacy away from the main corridors.
Ahead, Prashanth saw the backs of two women in burnooses and, beyond them, the actors. Dario was dragging Illyria by the hand.
“Tell me about Gambo Zubair,” he said.
Zubair, Gambo. Sculptor. In Gambo Zubair’s early career, now classified as his “Primitive Period,” he made rude, totemistic sculptures, plastic printed and painted to resemble unworked wood. Three standard years ago, he transitioned into his “Modern Period” of hyperrealism. Zubair is noted for the extreme accuracy of his printed sculptures of living objects. Early Modern Period works were principally plants and small animals. Recent works include human subjects.
“Cross-reference Gambo with plays,” Prashanth said. “Dramatic performances. And the Tan family and Chao-xing Tan. Look in public media as well as the biodata and the tablet dump. Exclude Chao-xing’s contacts list and communications between Gambo and Chao-xing.”
Nothing.
“Does Gambo mention a play or acting in any of his messages to Chao-xing?”
He does not.
Dario and Illyria passed through a doorway at the end of the hall, stepping over a jumble of pipes. Turning right, they passed out of sight. Prashanth wasn’t intimately familiar with these tunnels, but he knew that they were entering into another hall. The women in burnooses passed through the doorway and turned out of sight, and then Prashanth saw two young men standing beside the door. They were primates like Prashanth, and they were dressed like street toughs: holes deliberately cut into their jackets and pants, and long, thin chains hanging from their belts.
Not the Terra Gang; in fact, he couldn’t tell that they were wearing gang colors at all.
“Have you found the Yellow Sign?” one asked Prashanth.
“What?” he replied.
It was the wrong answer. One of the toughs punched him in the face and then jumped him, knocking him to the concrete floor. Prashanth rolled away, but when he tried to climb to his feet, the second tough cracked him on the top of his head with a length of pipe.
Prashanth’s head exploded in a meteor shower of pain. He howled; the tough hit him again, this time on the shoulder, and then he managed to get his pistol into his hand. The first tough was back on his feet again and was kicking Prashanth. He nearly kicked the gun away, but after taking a boot to the stomach twice, Prashanth finally got off a shot.
Shall I contact Security?
The hall filled with the flash, the bang, and the smell of burning propellant. The thug with the pipe stepped in to try another swing. Prashanth’s vision swam and his brain trembled in revolt at the mere thought of physical motion, but he shot again, hitting the bravo in the arm.
The pipe still struck Prashanth on the head, and his vision went black.
Shall I contact Security? I have no instructions.
Prashanth unloaded, firing his pistol blind in what he was pretty sure was the direction in which his assailants stood. He was rewarded with shrieks, and then with the thudding of booted feet as they ran away.
Shall I contact Cerite Security?
“Are my attackers still here?”
I can’t tell, Prashanth. I can only analyze your senses, and you are blind.
“Of course.” But no one was attacking him anymore. Prashanth crawled until he reached a wall, and then dragged himself to his feet. As his vision returned, he swooped and pivoted around an invisible access, and vomited.
But he was alone.
That had been way too difficult. What had happened to his reflexes, honed by the thousands of hours of VR Space Patrol training? Was whatever gave him headaches also rendering him groggy and slow?
He limped through the open doorway and looked down the way Dario and Illyria had gone: a corridor past hatches into multiple halls. He couldn’t tell where they’d gone, and had no way to follow them short of trial and error, poking around in this maze. And there were violent criminals in the maze with him.
What was the yellow sign?
“Yellow sign.” He started dragging himself back toward the main corridors. “Another Chambers reference?”
Yes.
“Can you access the original Chambers texts?”
Done. Shall I read them to you, or put them in your visual field?
He vomited at the thought of trying to read. “Just…wait.”
Why was Cerite Security not already swarming the hall? Maybe they were too busy dealing with brawling and gunfights on the main corridors.
His vision lurched so dramatically from side to side that Prashanth barely made it out of the hall. On his first attempt to exit into the corridor, he walked into the wall, but then he made his way by feel, groping a path back into traffic. His stomach churned and ice picks stabbed him in the brain repeatedly.
Guerilla theater. A surprise play, rehearsals kept secret. A missing model, who had once been an actress. An avant-garde sculptor. Passwords. And Victoria Tan didn’t want Prashanth to talk to her husband.
He badly wanted to go to sleep, but he feared that if he did, he’d sleep long again. He also wanted to reload his pistol, but was afraid he’d drop the bullets. Instead, he fumbled his way to the table of a café, signaling the lone waiter for a coffee.
“In the Chambers texts, is there an answer to the question, ‘Have you found the Yellow Sign?’”
There is not an answer. The Yellow Sign is an insignia that is never described.
Not helpful.
He drank the coffee when it came. He shouldn’t drink this much of the stuff, but the alternative to sleeping off a headache was to burn it off with caffeine. Sunbathing on the Observation Deck, so far, had done nothing. Maybe he shouldn’t be sunbathing; maybe he should look at Ross 248, or, at least, look at the Observation Deck by its light. He asked for ice water so he could hold the cold glass against his forehead. Unable to think, he held still and felt cold water trickle down his face, but when he finally set the glass down, he found he had a resolution.
It wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted an idea, he wanted understanding, but instead he had a determination to go to Gambo Zubair’s studio. He didn’t think of his plan as pushing buttons, but as testing a hypothesis, or maybe gathering data more actively.
Sally provided the address from the biodata. Prashanth walked slowly, taking deep breaths.
In the future, do you wish me to contact Cerite Security when you are being attacked?
Unfortunately, he couldn’t be sure that would always be the right course of action. “No.”
Zubair’s studio address was back in Newton. Prashanth passed within hailing distance of Ratskull and his toughs, examining some traveler’s ID card, and passed through into the larger, nicer section of the Primate Quarter. Like the Village deck of Copernicus, Newton was comprised of high-ceilinged chambers with freestanding buildings inside. A single Day Light overhead flickered on and off, which Prashanth found simply annoying, and which certainly did nothing to relieve his headache.
Behind the front door of the studio was a small reception space and desk. An AI rolled forward to meet him. It consisted of a low, rectangular buggy chassis riding on four knobby wheels, with a single snakelike appendage rising from the center. The snake terminated in a luminous sphere containing a single roving, dark dot, like an eyeball.
“May I help you?” Buggysnake asked.
“I’m here to see Mr. Zubair. I was sent by Elias Tan, Chao-xing Tan’s father.”
Buggysnake disappeared through a door in the back of the room, returning moments later. “Please come in.”
Prashanth entered a long, high-ceilinged hall like a stable. Sculptures lined the walls. At the end stood several large machines and a short man with long arms. From the machines came humming sounds. Prashanth intended to talk to the artist, but found himself drawn instead to the sculpture immediately inside the doorway. It was of a woman, perfectly life-sized. She wore a dancer’s leotard and was posed standing on one foot, smiling. She had to have been printed, but the material she was printed of appeared to be pink marble. She looked East Asian.
She looked like Chao-xing Tan.
The sound of footsteps shook Prashanth out of his stupor. Gambo Zubair approached with a self-important swagger, pacing between a printed pink marble rosebush and a printed pink marble greyhound. He wore a yellow blouse and, over it, a canvas smock. His head was hairless, lacking even eyebrows, and his forearms and hands were enormous.
Prashanth looked Zubair in the eye. “Have you found the yellow sign?”
The artist hesitated, and for a moment Prashanth feared his experiment was a failure. But then Zubair looked left and right, cleared his throat, and said, “The Pallid Mask is not a mask at all.”
Prashanth nodded. So far, so good. Now, if he asked too direct a question, or too quickly showed his ignorance, he’d give the game away. Time for small talk. “I’ve admired your work.”
Zubair grinned, showing perfect teeth. Probably printed. He pointed at the statue of the dancer. “Did you come to pick this one up for Mr. Tan?”
“No, he’ll send someone else later. How did you do such a big printing? It had to have been all in one piece.” He smiled. “I mean, I don’t see seams.”
“Come look.” Zubair led Prashanth to the back of the studio. The machines Prashanth had seen were all printers, and Zubair showed them to him. They were programmable rather than standard menu-driven units, and had docking stations for tablets. The largest had a printing chamber two meters tall and two in diameter.
“So you can print a human-sized sculpture in one piece,” Prashanth said. “Of course.”
“Sounds like tonight will be your first performance,” Zubair said.
Prashanth nodded.
“So, what does Mr. Tan need from me?”
Prashanth took the thousand credits from his wallet and handed them over. “He just wanted me to tell you how much he appreciates your work, and especially your discretion.”
Prashanth left the studio. He walked around the corner and out of sight, and then crept back. He bought a crushable black cap at a bodega, reversed his jacket so that it was black-side out, and then sat, pretending to have a conversation using Chao-xing’s tablet as a comms unit.
He reloaded his pistol with trembling hands.
“Collect all the references from Chambers’s writings to the pallid mask, the king in yellow, and the yellow sign,” he said.
There were surprisingly few, and he read them in a window in his visual field. The still waters of the Lake of Hali, snippets out of a play that didn’t exist, the towers behind the moon, and dim Carcosa. And why was Carcosa dim? Black stars hung in the sky, obvious nonsense.
The stories were tales of madness, transformation, and unspeakable horror. His head thumping and his heart racing from the caffeine, Prashanth struggled not to feel himself sucked into the stories.
The towers behind the moon.
He had dreamed them. The towers behind the moon, the towers from the play that didn’t exist and that he had never heard of, were nevertheless inside his head.
Inside his head.
And then his heart, for all the caffeine igniting it at the moment, stood still.
He had been tricked. He was betrayed.
But what to do about it? Any medical intervention would take time, and would make him miss tonight’s performance. Which might make a difference of life or death to Chao-xing Tan.
Whose abductor, it increasingly appeared, might be in league with her father.
He tried not to look at anything out of the ordinary, and kept his tongue tightly under control. “Let me see those texts again,” he told the puter.
He had run through them a third time when Gambo Zubair finally emerged from his studio. The artist wore an embroidered tunic now; it looked very formal. His walk was cramped and unsteady, not at all the confident lope he’d adopted in his own studio. He scurried toward the tunnel that led to the gate.
Where was he going, to see this performance? The spaceport? Copernicus?
And then, in his heart, Prashanth knew.
He stayed back, walking casually and stopping often, making a show of looking in windows or examining marks on the floor. Once Zubair had passed through the gate, Prashanth approached the Terra Gang enforcers.
He handed over his ID.
He looked past Ratskull, watching Zubair continue on toward the Promise borough and the Observation Deck.
“Pr’shanth Sach’deva, here we go again,” Ratskull bubbled. “You’re a fellow on the move, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.” Prashanth unlocked Chao-xing’s tablet with her password and opened an empty note file.
“Don’t get yourself stabbed.” Ratskull handed back the ID.
Prashanth deliberately looked away from the tablet, used his finger to write eight words on it without looking, and handed the tablet to Ratskull.
Not waiting for a response, he walked through the gate.
The lift to the Observation Deck was shut down. The LED advertisement for chowder was gone, replaced with a sign that said, in bold text, CLOSED FOR PRIVATE FUNCTION. Two men in black suits stood impassively at the foot of the stairs. Their thick necks and grim expressions suggested Space Patrol training, but Prashanth didn’t recognize them.
One held up a hand to stop Prashanth.
“Have you found the Yellow Sign?” the other asked.
Prashanth nodded. “The pallid mask is not a mask at all.”
The men stepped aside.
Had he made a mistake with Ratskull? Did he really imagine that the Terra Gang would back him up? Maybe; more importantly, he wanted Ratskull to pass his message on to Lord Wimsey. It was too late to go back now. Prashanth climbed the steps.
Two more armed and muscled men waited at the top of the stairs. Prashanth felt himself sweating from the climb and the uncertainty both, but they offered the same challenge phrase and accepted the same password.
He entered the Observation Deck.
He had no idea what time it was on the standard clock; the long local day meant that the sky above him had barely changed. It was not hung with black stars, he noted with an absurd sense of relief, but with bright, glittering stars, one of which was Sol.
Where a writer named Robert Chambers had invented a play that he had never actually bothered to write.
That silly people were now…what, enacting? Exalting? Enthusing about?
The pond was still; the breeze generators were turned off. People in coats and gowns sat on wooden chairs arrayed around a flat sward of green on the shore; against the water stood a small canopy, two meters tall and two across, made of carpet-like textiles propped up on thin poles. A dim light glowed from the top of the canopy.
Prashanth strolled along the outer edge of the crowd, looking for a particular person. A chorus emerged, young women and men clad in linen robes. Each held a mask before his or her face, on a short handle. They sang, a modal dirge about the still waters of the Lake of Hali, about the coming of Hastur, and about the Stranger who was the King in Yellow.
Bow down your head, you son of dust, he heard.
Lay down ambition, hope, and lust,
And pray alone for
Lost Carcosa.
He found his target, who appeared to be sitting alone. Prashanth picked an empty chair from the periphery of the crowd and carried it down with him to set it beside the man.
He sat. “Dr. Goldberg.”
His physician steepled his fingers before his face and laughed. “My, my, Prashanth Satyadeva, you do not disappoint.”
You seek a never-dying boon,
From towers that rise behind the moon,
The towers look down on
Dim Carcosa.
The chorus finished their song and flipped their masks. The play-proper now commenced, with declamations and laughter. The crowd laughed along.
“There are a few things I don’t understand,” Prashanth said.
“Only a few? Then you’re quite perceptive.”
“Obviously, you knew I was coming. So you’ve warned someone, you have agents somewhere who are prepared to grab me. They haven’t yet, so I suppose they’re waiting for a signal of some kind?”
“Yes,” Goldberg said. “But the signal won’t come from me, so there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
Prashanth considered the scene: the wealthy of Toe Hold, or at least the wealthy Primates, seated as if for a concert; the masked thespians. “But in the meantime, there’s no reason not to answer my questions?”
“Meaning, are you going to die? Yes, I’m afraid you are. But then, we all are, sooner or later.”
“That doesn’t mean that I feel good about my time being accelerated.”
Dr. Goldberg chuckled. “Are you asking, ‘Why me?’”
“Why me? Obviously, you programmed my puter to betray me. Nothing else could have caused the auditory hallucinations I experienced. And maybe she’s been monkeying with my reflexes, too. Not to mention the weird, very apropos dream images. I’d never even heard of this Carcosa stuff, and suddenly it was in my dreams. You did that, so why me? How did you know that Victoria Tan would hire me?”
“We didn’t,” Goldberg said. “We just knew that, sooner or later, someone would hire you to look into us. So, we made the first move.”
Was one of the actors Chao-xing Tan? Prashanth was pretty sure the answer was no. He scanned the crowd looking for her, and saw nothing.
“Because Cerite Security is corrupted, so you’re not worried about them.”
“Enough of Cerite Security is friendly, or indifferent, to us that we’re not worried about them.”
“‘We’ means you and Elias Tan.”
“And others.”
Sweat trickled down Prashanth’s forehead and between his shoulder blades. “Chao-xing found out what her father was up to, so she had to be kidnapped.”
“No.” Goldberg was smiling.
“Then why?”
“The King in Yellow requires a sacrifice.”
“Killed?”
Goldberg wrapped his fingers together in a clenched double fist and laughed. “Ah, so there’s a limit to what you’ve been able to deduce. Well, don’t worry. You’ll understand very soon what happened to Chao-xing Tan.”
Prashanth looked for Elias Tan but did not see him. The actors in the play treated the canopy with great deference, the dialog implying that the canopy represented a throne.
“What are you all doing here, Doctor?”
“Can’t you tell? Worship.”
“Of what? The King in Yellow? Hastur? That’s all nonsense, made up by a nineteenth-century fiction writer!”
“Ah, but the human psyche is a curious thing,” Goldberg said. “Gods are like prayers and placebos. Sometimes they answer, even if they’re not there.”
Prashanth shook his head. “But why would people consciously join a…a made-up cult? Have they lost their minds?”
“They are moody,” Goldberg said. “Paranoid, fatigued. Their endocrine system is, to use technical doctor language, out of whack, and playing havoc with their minds. Religion serves no purpose unless it exists to give people relief, wouldn’t you say?”
“The towers!” an actor wailed. “The towers behind the moon!”
The actors all turned and looked up at Alexa’s World. The corona of Ross 248 was close enough to Alexa’s World that streaks of light seemed to reach between the star and the planet, like columns. Or towers. The streaks did indeed look, a little, like towers behind a moon.
The crowd stood and cheered.
Prashanth and Goldberg stood with them. Prashanth could still see the actors because he stood on ground raised slightly above the pond, and the flat green shelf beside it.
A new actor approached the sward. Just before he raised his own, apparently blank, mask to his face, Prashanth saw and recognized Elias Tan.
Tan stepped out onto the stage.
“The Stranger!” an actor moaned, showing a dismayed mask.
“The King in Yellow merits a gift!” cried another.
Two actors, tall and burly, grabbed a third and wrestled him forward. “No!” he screamed.
“Yes!” the crowd roared.
Both cries sounded genuine.
The strong men heaved their captive beneath the canopy. He jerked once, as if trying to escape, and then froze.
“Suspensor beams,” Goldberg murmured, as if appreciating the rich notes of a glass of wine. “Have you guessed yet?”
And then Prashanth realized what was coming, only an instant before it came. The actor didn’t scream and didn’t move, and the printer that was disguised inside the canopy was very rapid. It hummed, and within the space of a minute, the actor was entirely encased within a sheath that appeared to be made of pink marble.
Elias Tan, the mask of the Stranger held before his face, stepped beside the canopy. The burly men dragged the new-made statue from the printer and set it at the edge of the sward. The other actors reacted sluggishly—were they drugged? The crowd was silent, listening to a speech by the Stranger, but Prashanth couldn’t hear a word. His head buzzed and his vision swam.
He turned to look at Goldberg. The doctor had taken a step away from Prashanth and stood smiling at him.
He had stepped away.
The signal, someone else was to give the signal, someone other than Goldberg.
What if the signal was the offering of the “gift” to the Stranger?
Prashanth broke into a run. Behind him, he heard screaming—was it because of the disturbance he was now causing? Or was it because someone was now chasing him, or shooting at him, with the intent to kill?
And he knew now the fate of Chao-xing Tan. The King in Yellow had demanded a sacrifice, so he had had her encased by a printer, as a living statue. He had killed his own daughter, and Prashanth had stood and admired the corpse as a great work of art.
And his artist accomplice, the actual murderer—Gambo Zubair had killed the young woman, and then calmly sent a message to her puter chastising her for not showing up, in case he was ever investigated for the death.
Elias Tan fell silent as Prashanth broke from the crowd. Prashanth shouted his condemnation, but what came out was an incoherent shriek.
Tan dropped his mask as Prashanth charged him.
And he screamed as Prashanth tackled him, knocking the coffee baron to the ground.
Elias Tan fell back into the canopy, his head and shoulders slamming against the floor of the printer. The printer hummed, and a sheet of rosy pink printing substrate wrapped itself onto Tan’s shrieking face.
Prashanth felt a sharp sting in his left arm. Was he being stabbed? Shot, more likely.
He had to save Tan. Tan deserved death, but he deserved justice more. Prashanth dragged the murderer from the printer. Bullets struck the printer over his head, and the machine stopped humming with a sharp screech.
He grabbed for his gun and couldn’t find it; he’d dropped it in his attack.
Prashanth dragged Tan to his feet and spun around, raising Tan. He smelled scorched flesh and heard Tan’s agonized howling, but he ignored them both.
“Stop!” he yelled, thrusting Tan’s ruined, pink face forward. “This is a crime scene, and this man is a murderer!”
“The Pallid Mask!” an actor wailed.
“The Pallid Mask is not a mask at all!” moaned another.
The crowd fell to their knees, and so did the actors. Left standing were Prashanth, Dr. Goldberg, and six men scattered along the far edge of the crowd, each holding a pistol.
They raised their firearms, and Prashanth closed his eyes. He did his best to drag Elias Tan in front of himself as a shield, but he was too tired and too sick to run, and there was nowhere to run to.
A series of shots rang out in quick succession…and Prashanth was not dead.
He opened them again and saw Lord Wimsey. Wimsey himself, who was rarely seen in person. He was three meters tall, his chest spherical and his head another sphere and a monocle cocked improbably over one eye. He was dressed like someone’s idea of a Victorian gentleman, if said gentleman only wore purple. The metallic troll in his purple frock coat and top hat strode down through the trembling crowd. Wimsey held a rifle in both hands, and he whistled as he came—“Rule, Britannia,” Prashanth thought.
Behind him came the Terra Gang. Several held firearms, and one had the four doormen up against a wall with a rifle trained on them.
Wimsey stopped at the edge of the sward. He addressed the crowd. “You’re all under arrest. Some of you will object that I don’t have the authority, but then, I do have a big gun, and friends, so I shouldn’t object too loudly, if I were you.” He turned to Prashanth. “You’re very lucky, Mr. Satyadeva.”
Prashanth let Tan fall to the ground. The coffee baron whimpered and kicked at the turf. Where was Prashanth’s gun? Where was Zubair? Victoria Tan had to be told; had she suspected already? There were too many loose ends. “I don’t feel lucky.”
“Well, in the first instance,” Wimsey said, “you are lucky that Mr. Ratskull delivered your message. Also, your penmanship is atrocious, and it took me some time to decipher. And in the third instance, you will agree that ‘murder observation deck Cerite security corrupt tell Wimsey’ is not an exceedingly clear call for help. But I arrived in time, nonetheless.”
“The message had to be compact,” Prashanth said. “And it had to get you here without you calling Cerite Security.”
Wimsey nodded, then surveyed the wreckage of the scene. “What is all this, then?”
“It is madness,” Prashanth said. “Murder. A placebo. A dream. It is paranoia and moodiness. It is dim Carcosa.”
* * *
The return to Copernicus was tedious, with Sally removed. Prashanth had to call and reserve a shuttle seat for himself, and more than once he’d found himself asking research question to his former AI.
But he’d had Sally removed, because Sally had been hacked, and he couldn’t trust her anymore.
On balance, he felt he’d made the right choice.
Copernicus’s gravity weighed on him even more than it had on his prior visit. Victoria Tan’s door opened as he approached it, and this time, the AI led him wordlessly to Tan’s office.
“I know what happened,” she said. “You were a victim, too.”
Prashanth shrugged. “Your husband will get a Cerite trial.”
“C’Sapunkov,” she said. “Cerite city, Cerite law, Cerite trial. I need him to be convicted. Spaced. Unmarked grave. For what he did. For what he did to my daughter.”
“That’s what he deserves,” Prashanth said. “And there were a lot of witnesses.”
“I want it to the tune of one hundred thousand credits.”
Prashanth took a deep breath. “I’ll do everything I can to help secure that verdict. C’Sapunkov is a just man. I’ll do everything I can do to help him. Everything I can legally do.”
“Take the hundred thousand credits anyway.”
“I can’t guarantee a conviction,” Prashanth said.
“You’ve lost your implant,” she said.
Prashanth felt surprise, but tried not to show it. He nodded, as if the information was public knowledge.
“You’ve probably also alienated a bunch of potential clients,” she said. “Worshippers of the King in Yellow. Elias’s playmates.”
“Probably. On the positive side of the ledger, my headaches have stopped.”
“Good.” Tan smiled. “You work for me now. Your first job is to monitor the trial, and help C’Sapunkov get to the right outcome. Any way you legally can.”
“One hundred thousand credits is a lot of money,” Prashanth said.
“You’ll need it to get quarters on Copernicus,” Tan told him. “I want you close to hand when I need you. And the higher gravity will be good for you.”
“And the light.” Prashanth grinned. “I’ve had enough of dim Carcosa.”
The year 2666 / 83 AA
Humanity continued to expand into the Ross 248 system, but old age began to take its toll on the Ross 248 Project leadership. Admiral Gordon died at the age of 248 during a routine organ replacement. She was replaced by Captain McBane, who became the new Space Patrol admiral. The Guardian E and Copernicus remained in orbit above Liber, along with most of the space manufacturing infrastructure. Captain BeKinne died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 256 and was replaced by her first mate, Yoel Aronson, who also became head of the project with 5-of-Chandra as his deputy. Earth life has been introduced into Poseidon’s Ocean at some of its deep thermal vents and is doing fine. A normal human settlement is underway on Nordheim, the fifth planet. The as-yet empty sixth planet was recently claimed by SAIN. Alexa’s World has been studied but is currently unoccupied. Liber’s Toe Hold is flourishing. Eden is now the home of several research stations, but no formal settlements.