Xenopath (7 page)

She turned to
Abdul. "You were telling the truth," she whispered in
amazement.

Down below,
fixed into place amid a great web-work of girders, was the silver
shape of a starship, like a great teardrop with fins. As her eyes
adjusted to the sight, she made out many viewscreens along its
length, with people moving about inside.

All around the
chamber, strange plants grew in the artificial light, big flowers and
vines hanging from the girders. Abdul explained that when the ship
had crashed it had been carrying a cargo of seed from a colony world,
which had escaped and grown into this crazy jungle.

"Welcome to
my home," Abdul said, leading her from the catwalk along a
narrow bridge strung from the edge of the chamber to the entry ramp
of the spaceship.

He ran ahead,
hardly touching the rail with his one hand. Pham followed, gripping
both rails as the bridge swayed from side to side.

At last they
came to the ramp and climbed into the starship.

He led her
through a wide corridor to a place he said was the bridge, or control
room, a big room shaped like an amphitheatre surrounded by screens
and control panels.

The first thing
she noticed was that it was full of children. There were hundreds of
them, of all shapes and sizes, Indians and Thais and Burmese and
Chinese, and even a few white kids in among. They were sitting
around, eating or playing or just chatting.

The second thing
she noticed was that every child she could see was injured in some
way. Some had arms missing, some legs; others were blind.

She turned to
Abdul and said, "Is this a hospital?"

He shook his
head, not meeting her gaze.

"But all
the kids, they're..."

"Look,"
Abdul said, pointing. "There's Dr Rao. Do you want to meet him?"

Pham stared
across the bridge to where an elderly Indian man was moving among the
groups of children with the aid of a cane. He stopped to chat with
the kids, smiling and laughing.

Despite having a
strange feeling about the place, she nodded. It would be rude to have
come so far with Abdul and refuse to meet the Doctor.

He took her hand
and led her down a slope into the bridge, and they weaved their way
among the children. Pham felt self-conscious as some kids stopped
what they were doing and looked up at her.

Dr Rao saw Abdul
and beamed. He looked, Pham thought, like a toothless turtle with
old-fashioned spectacles.

"Abdul! And
your little friend?"

"Pham,"
Abdul said, and he sounded proud. "I said I'd show Pham were I
live. She doesn't have a home. She ran away from a factory on Level
Twenty."

Dr Rao turned
his wizened, leathery face to Pham. "Is that so? You ran away? A
girl with daring and spirit, no? Now, would you care to live here,
with Abdul and the other children?"

Pham looked
around, wordless. She wanted to ask the doctor why all the kids were
maimed in some way.

In a tiny voice,
she asked, "What do I have to do?"

Rao grinned. "We
shall talk over specifics once Abdul has shown you more of the ship,
shall we? But first—Abdul, would you be so kind as to fetch me
a glass of chai? There's a good boy."

"Be back in
a minute," Abdul whispered to Pham, and scooted off back up the
ramp and disappeared along a corridor. Dr Rao shuffled off,
inspecting his charges. From time to time, Pham saw him bend to
inspect more closely the stumps of arms and legs recently amputated.

Pham stood
alone, frozen to the spot. For all she liked Abdul, she hated this
place. There was something about it that made her very uneasy,
something about all the injured children...

As she looked
around her, a voice in her head whispered,
Get out of here. Go the
way you came. You will he fine, believe me.

The voice
startled her. So she hadn't been dreaming, last night. At the same
time, there was something soothing in the words, in the
feel
of the voice in her head.

She knew that
the advice was right. She should get out of here.

She wished she
could say goodbye to Abdul, but she felt that he might be upset if
she told him that she didn't like where he lived.

She hurried up
the ramp and into the corridor, then followed the way she had come to
the exit. She looked behind her. There was no sign of Dr Rao, chasing
after her to drag her back.

She hurried down
the ramp and across the swaying footbridge. When she reached the
gallery, she looked back one last time. The ship was a magnificent
sight, but she shivered when she thought about what it contained. She
quickly climbed the ladder, opened the hatch and pulled herself
through.

She was in the
space between the decks now, and she wondered if she would be able to
find her way back.

It was as if
something were telling her to look down, and when she did so she saw
a series of footprints scuffed into the dust of the deck.

She followed
them to the column and dragged open the hatch. Then, she climbed
towards Level Two and safety.

On the way she
tried to talk to the voice in her head.

"Voice?"
she asked. "Are you still there, Voice?"

But the voice in
her head was silent.

LIES

Vaughan paid off
the taxi and hunched his shoulders against the hot down-draught as it
rose and sped off across the Station. The vision of the dead man
would not erase itself from his memory, and the thought of intruding
on his wife's grief, of having to read her mind, did not appeal.

Gulshan Villas
was a strip of exclusive residences on the north side of the Station,
each one custom built by an architect famed for innovation. The
Kormier residence was an elegant silver arrowhead arranged with its
point facing the quiet boulevard; behind it, a long greensward fell
towards the edge of the Station. On the lawn Vaughan made out a
series of domes arranged so that they rode each other piggyback
style, like an agglomeration of soap bubbles.

His handset
chimed. Kapinsky stared out at him. "I've drawn a blank at the
Scheering-Lassiter HQ," she said. "I'll tell you about it
later. I'm going over to the police records office now, checking
other laser killings. Thing is, the place is sealed, so you won't be
able to get through, okay? If you need me, leave a message."

"I'll do
that."

"Catch you
later, Vaughan."

He cut the
connection and approached the house. There was no reply at the front
entrance. He walked along the arrowhead's angled wall and tapped the
implant's code into his handset. Briefly he felt a belt of raw
emotion—grief and anger— emanate from the domes on the
lawn.

He killed his
implant and headed across the grass to the domes, his apprehension
increased by the power of the woman's grieving.

An airlock gave
access to the massed bubbles. He stepped through, moving from a hot,
humid summer's day to an atmosphere even more humid: it was like a
sauna, and his every breath was more a draught of liquid than air.

He was
surrounded by a thousand varieties of flower, a polychromatic panoply
of colour. He suspected that many of the blooms were alien—not
only by the fact that they looked elegantly tortured and unearthly,
but because most of them were thriving in alien atmospheres within
their own mini-domes.

He followed a
gridded metal walkway around the display and into a second, much
larger dome. Here, alien shrubs of every conceivable hue gave the
impression that he had left Earth and stepped onto the surface of
some far-flung colony world.

He headed
towards where he judged Hermione Kormier to be—in a smaller,
adjacent dome—and paused on the open threshold.

He decided to
question her first, unaided by his tele-ability. Only later, briefly,
would he access her thoughts and feelings.

She was tending
a cactus with a spray-gun, half-turned away from him. She was perhaps
fifty, silver-grey hair cut short, dressed in a kaftan as colourful
as her horticultural collection.

He cleared his
throat. "Excuse me. I'm sorry. There was no reply from the
house."

She turned,
startled, a hand moving involuntarily to the wrinkled skin of her
throat. "Oh, that was a shock. I'm sorry—I usually leave a
note on the door. You've caught me unprepared."

He smiled,
reassuring, and showed his identity-card. "I'm Jeff Vaughan. I
work for a private investigative agency commissioned by the Station
police to investigate your husband's case." He immediately
regretted the euphemism: it sounded even more crass than "your
husband's death".

Hermione Kormier
smiled. She had blue eyes emphasised by a sun-seared face, and
something about her no-nonsense outdoors appearance warmed Vaughan to
her. He would not have labelled her as someone grieving the death of
a loved one, but he knew that appearances were often deceptive.

"Ah, I was
expecting someone, sooner or later." She gestured at the
surrounding cacti. "Through here, if you'll follow me, Mr
Vaughan, are my pride and joy: these are moonblooms from Iachimo,
Rigel II. They flower only in the dead of night, once a month. They
are notoriously difficult to transplant."

The blooms, in a
specially filtered half-light, were tiny and delicate and a thousand
shades of silver.

They gave off a
subtle scent that hit the nose in a wave, and then subsided, leaving
him wondering if he'd imagined the fragrance, until the next wave.

He followed her
through to another dome.

"All these
are examples of Dendri polycarpus, from the uncolonised world of
Aldebaran IV. They are really two plants in one."

Vaughan stared
around at the rude bursts of colour. He could only make out a single
scarlet bloom in each pot, but beside each one was a withered stem.

Kormier said,
"They exist in a unique symbiotic relationship, Mr Vaughan. Each
cannot live without the other, but often their existence appears
mutually destructive. One will feed off the other for a time, gaining
sustenance, and then the roles will reverse. We have been studying
the species for years, but we still don't fully understand the
process."

She reached out
and laid a sun-tanned hand on the apex of a dome. "I often think
that their life cycles are analogous to the human institution of
marriage, Mr Vaughan. Would you agree?"

He opened his
mouth to reply, but allowed a few seconds to elapse before saying,
"Could I interpret that as a comment on how you viewed your own
marriage?"

She looked away,
feigning interest in a vulgar, liverish bloom like a lolling ox
tongue.

"Come, I'll
show you to the house. One can become intoxicated by the atmosphere
in here after a while. Coffee?"

Taken aback by
her matter-of-factness, Vaughan followed her.

They left the
domes, crossed the lawns and entered the arrowhead dwelling through a
sliding rear door. She escorted him up a wide helical staircase and
into an open-plan study overlooking the greensward and the glittering
sea.

She told him to
make himself comfortable and left to fetch coffee. He moved around
the room, glancing at the ranked books—academic treatises on
horticultural subjects—and holograms of riotous blooms.

He stopped to
examine a shelf of holo-cubes. Each one showed a man and a woman
against an alien backdrop. The woman was Hermione Kormier, at various
ages from perhaps thirty to the present. The man was her husband,
handsome and smiling in every cube, his arms around his wife, staring
out in blithe ignorance of what the future held in store.

Vaughan felt
something catch in his throat and turned away.

"Are you
married, Mr Vaughan?"

She was standing
in the doorway, carrying a tray. Evidently she had been watching him.

He was still at
that stage of his marriage where he felt compelled to tell people
about it. "Nearly two years now, to Sukara. We're expecting our
first child in three months."

"Are you
happy?"

He smiled,
looking away from the woman and staring out to sea. "I would
never have thought that I could be so happy, before meeting her. I
worked as a telepath for years before that. It made me cynical."

"As it
must, I imagine, reading the minds of the criminal and corrupt."

"Of course,
our happiness is conditional on personal experience."

She looked
across at him. "Are you still a telepath?"

He nodded. "But
I haven't been for two years—"

"As long as
you've been married?"

He smiled.
"That's right."

"The cynic
in me would say that either the resumption of your telepathic duties,
or a few years of marriage, might blunt your happiness."

He had seen so
many relationships founder that he felt fear for his own marriage
and, at the same time, guilt at his happiness.

Hermione Kormier
crossed the room and laid the tray on a coffee table before the
window. She indicated a wickerwork settee and sat down opposite.

Vaughan picked
up a holo-cube and joined her. The cube was recent, he guessed. He
held it up. "You look happy in this one. It can't have been
taken that long ago?"

"Oh, I
don't deny that I was intermittently happy. Robert was a wonderful
man. I was in love with him until the very end. But I also hated him,
just as passionately, from time to time."

"Can you
tell me why?"

She sipped her
coffee, then said, "You aren't reading me?"

"Not yet."

She inclined her
head. "Robert could be very self-centred. Driven. Ambitious.
I've no doubt that he loved me—but, you see, I've no doubt also
that my love for him was stronger. He could do things which I
interpreted as neglectful, unloving, things which I would never dream
of doing to him. He wouldn't think twice about going away on a field
trip for months on end, without me."