The Devil's Eye (14 page)

"Okay. What can you tell me about it?"

"Okay. Please." There was a pause. Then a male voice:
"Starlight Tours."
"My name is Benedict. One of your ships is the
Hassan Goldman
?"
"Yes. That's correct."
"I'm trying to locate a friend. Her name is Vicki Greene. I think she took a tour on the
Goldman
several months ago. I was wondering if you could verify that?"

Alex looked in my direction. Worth a try. "I wonder if it would be possible to speak to the captain of the
Goldman
."
"He's off duty,"
came the response.
"He'll be in tomorrow morning."
Alex said thanks, switched off, and looked up the specifications for the
Goldman
. Among them he found the captain's name. Ivan Sloan.
"Ivan?"
I said. "Yes. Do you know him?" "He was one of my trainers at StarFlight." "Good," said Alex. "Marvelous." He asked the AI to find the number for Ivan Sloan. "You'll probably find him at Samuels."

"Please." Alex got up, signaled for me to do the call, and left the room.

Ivan was one of those people who strikes you as being a bit slow until you get to know him. He was always there when I needed him and, when I was having some doubts about whether I'd ever graduate, he took me aside and asked how serious I was about piloting interstellars. I told him I was serious. That there was nothing in my life I wanted more than that. "Then get your act together," he'd told me. "You'll be okay. You've got all the talent you need. Hell, it doesn't take that much talent. All you have to do is be smart enough to tell the AI what to do." He said that as if he meant it. "What you don't have," he added, "is confidence in yourself. Probably from too many people over a lifetime telling you what you've gotten wrong." There was truth to that. My dad was forever warning me not to touch stuff, so I wouldn't break it. When he saw me he knew me at once, and broke into a big smile.
"Chase,"
he said,
"what are you doing out here?"
He was seated at a table, with a cup in one hand, a dinner plate and silverware in front of him. Behind him I could see a mural. A sailboat. "Came out to see
you
, Ivan. How are you?"

"I'm on vacation," I said. "How about you? How do you come to be here?"
"I'm
from
here."
"You're kidding. You're from Salud Afar? I never knew that." He shrugged.
"I might not have mentioned it."
"Running tours?" He looked embarrassed.
"That's pretty much what it's come down to."
Tours from Salud Afar? I looked through a viewport at the black sky. "So where do people go? What's to see?" "Varesnikov," he said. "It has a magnificent set of rings and moons. And people like Sophora, too. It's a crystal world. Looks great when you get the right angle on the sunlight." "I guess." I saw something in his eyes. Pain, maybe. Or embarrassment. As if his life hadn't turned out the way he'd expected. "So how'd you turn up on Rimway?"

"I cleared out of here when I was twenty-two, Chase. Those were bad times. I didn't much like living under the Bandahr."
He turned away for a moment. Spoke to someone else, then angled the link so I could see the people with him: a man and two women. We did a quick round of introductions. One of the women was his wife Mira. She was attractive, congenial, probably twenty years younger than he was. The other couple were friends. "Let me ask a quick question, Ivan," I said, "and I'll get out of your way. A couple of months ago, you had a passenger named Vicki Greene. Do you remember her?"
"The company did,"
he said.
"I didn't."
"I assumed she'd gone out on the
Goldman
."
"As a matter of fact, she did. But it wasn't my ship then. Haley Khan was running her at the time."

"Would it be possible for me to talk to Haley? Can you give me his code?"

"How do you mean?"

"How could that happen?"

"You called the police?"
"The CSS. Yes. They couldn't find him either."
He paused. Said something to the others at the table. Came back to me:
"What's your connection with him, Chase?"
I told him about Vicki. "Do you know where she went? On the
Goldman
?"
"Probably the standard tour route. I never got a chance to talk to him after the flight."

"Did anybody else?"

"What about the AI?"
"The CSS took it. Part of their investigation."
He paused, lost in thought.
"There was something else odd, too."

"What's that, Ivan?"

"Would you guys take her someplace special if she asked?"

"Like if there's nobody else on board."

"Okay. So she wanted to go off the usual tour destinations. Where else might she have wanted to go?"
"Chase, you got me. There
is
nowhere else. There's nothing out here for hundreds of light-years in all directions."
"Do you know where she was coming
from
?"
"No. I can check the logs."

"Would you do that for me? And get back to me?"

"I'd appreciate it, Ivan."

He called the next morning.
"There's no record,"
he said. "What happened to it?"

Vicki, Ivan said, had signed on for the flight from a hotel in Moreska. Moreska was a small town in the middle of nowhere. It had no spectral claims, no demons, creatures from another age still haunting the roads. But it had once been home to Demery Manor, which, for reasons unknown, had been blown apart during the final year of the Bandahr's rule, just months before his assassination. Nobody knew why the incident had occurred, although everyone assumed Nicorps was involved. The manor's owner, Edward Demery, was not an enemy of the regime, as far as was known. I didn't think blowing up a house was enough to have interested Vicki Greene. Until I heard that seventeen other homes, throughout the region, had been destroyed the same night.

The Demery Manor site consisted of a few burned timbers and a couple of stone walls jutting out of the earth. The common wisdom held that Edward Demery had incurred the wrath of Aramy Cleev and paid the price. According to the flyers we'd gotten at the hotel in Moreska, "most experts" believed the Bandahr had been personally offended when Demery, during an interview, had described the compassion and basic decency of Dakar Cleev, Aramy's grandfather, without mentioning Aramy's own matchless compassion. The dictator had said nothing publicly, of course, and had in fact even praised Demery's perspicacity. But anyone who knew Aramy Cleev understood the failure to note his kindness would not have gone down well. The general destruction had come six days after those unfortunate remarks and had been spread over several hundred kilometers in all directions. Houses, villas, and manors had been leveled. There'd been no survivors anywhere. Nicorps, it was assumed by many, was closing its books on people who had incurred the Bandahr's displeasure. We were looking at the ruins, on a cold afternoon, while a wet wind blew in off the sea. We had an autoguide with us.
"They killed him and his wife,"
said the autoguide. "Eighteen houses in one night?" said Alex. "That seems a bit extreme."

"There are always rumors when terrible things happen,"
the tour guide said.
"If you want my personal opinion, I think Nicorps simply went rogue and decided to kill everybody they didn't like. But who really knows?"

"What did he do for a living?" I asked. "Demery?"

"Was he a native of this area?"
"Oh, no. No. He wasn't even from this
world.
Demery was born on Rimway."
"Are there any theories about why all these people were killed the same night?" asked Alex. "Other than Nicorps running wild?"

Alex stared at the ruins. "Did Demery leave an avatar?"

"By whose authority?"

"It would," I said, "have had to come from high up." Alex nodded. Of course it would.

Edward Demery had not only lost his life. He had undergone an electronic subtraction as well. And not only the avatar. You went looking for data on him, and there was enough to prove he existed. You could find a birth certificate, you could find brief accounts of his impending wedding, and there was real-estate information. Demery buys office building in New Samarkand. You could find an account of his acquiring controlling interest in Blackmoor Financial, and his contributions to the Aquarius Fund, which was striving to rejuvenate oceans hampered by the absence of a moon. There was an award from the Ballinger Historical Society. But of his personal life, what he thought, what he believed in, what he cared about, that was all gone. Orrin Batavian was a banker who liked to be thought of as an historian. We sought him out because he'd organized a speaking engagement for Vicki and because he'd been a close friend of Demery's. We found him at his home, a large, landscaped property on the edge of town. "Ed and I shared a fascination for ancient history," he told us. "For the early years." Because of that friendship, he said, he'd held his breath for several days after the explosion, wondering whether they'd come after him, too. "You never knew what might irritate Nicorps," he said. "It was the way they operated." We were seated in his office in downtown Moreska. "Somebody got in trouble, everybody he knew got swept up with him. I had my fingers crossed." The walls were filled with framed certificates of outstanding accomplishments by Batavian's bank and pictures of the man himself with various people whose postures suggested they were VIPs. "Why did he get in trouble?" Alex asked. "Do you have any idea?" Batavian shook his head. "I honestly don't know. He didn't like the regime. But nobody did." His chair squeaked. "Almost nobody. Some people saw no problem with Cleev. You did what you were told and didn't make trouble, then you had nothing to worry about." "But you do think Cleev was behind the attack." "Well, Nicorps was. I doubt it was anything big enough to draw the Bandahr's attention. You have to understand that it was the guys further down the food chain who caused most of the trouble. They had thugs and psychopaths running everything. And the way they looked good to their bosses was to be able to show a body count every month. "Those were bad times. So people didn't make an electronic record of themselves. Ed was an exception. People still don't do it, for that matter. Not the older ones. Call it force of habit, but there's always a

sense that the Bandahr might come back. So you don't put anything up. Especially not an avatar who's going to tell the government what you really think." Batavian had an aristocratic demeanor. His family had prospered under the dictatorship, and the word around town was that he'd survived when Demery went down because he had connections. "It might be true," he admitted. "I was never a collaborator, but my father was. And my sister." Alex's eyes narrowed. "Do you have any idea why they would have purged the Demery record?" "They did that routinely. They didn't have to have a reason. You got in trouble, you became invisible. Look, I don't know whether he just said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Or whether there was something they were actually afraid of. Demery didn't like the Bandahriate. But he never did anything more than talk. And he tried to be circumspect about the people he spoke to. He was like me. We both had a decent life under the sons of bitches, if you played by the rules and didn't mind keeping your mouth shut. So we played by the rules. Lived with it as best we could. I don't know. Maybe they took him out because somebody just wanted to run up the numbers. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he had some old fertilizer in the basement. I just don't know." "All right," said Alex, "let's try a different subject: Vicki Greene." "Ah, yes. I knew that was coming." "She did a program here. With you as moderator." He smiled. "She spoke to the Martian Society. By closed circuit. It was members only. And a few guests." "The Martian Society is-?" "-A group of people who pretend we've been taken over by aliens. Who keep out of sight." "The original aliens, apparently." He laughed. "We have a pretty good time. It's strictly a social operation. Nobody takes it seriously." "What did she talk about?" "Her books, of course." "That's all? Anything else come up?" "Well, it was a fairly wide-ranging conversation." "Did she mention the explosions?" He stuck his tongue in his cheek while he thought about it. "No," he said finally. "Not that I can recall." "How about Demery?" "No. There was no reason to. But she
was
interested in him. She was excited to hear we'd been friends." "Why was she interested in him?" "Because of the
Lantner
world ULY447." "Which is what?" "Well, it's not really a world. It's an asteroid-a long way out. Light-years, in fact." "And?" "Two ships disappeared out there. During a religious ceremony. Ed was always intrigued by it. Always coming up with explanations." Alex glanced my way. That sounded like another reason for Vicki's interest. "Tell us about it. About the disappearance." "Not much to tell, Alex. We had a corporation, Starloft, that used to sell people asteroids. The inner-system asteroids, of course." "Starloft
sold
asteroids?" I asked. "Yes." "Why? What can you do with an asteroid?" Batavian put on a beatific smile. "Immortality, young lady. They name it for you. Then they take you and your family and friends out to the thing, charging everybody for the transportation, of course. They hold a ceremony and install a monument with your name on it. People bought them to honor deceased relatives. Some people provided for it in their wills. It was a pretty lucrative business at one time." "But they don't do it anymore?"