Читать книгу The Bloody Herring - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 5

Chapter 1

The Last Download from Earth

He almost looked like he was asleep. He was actually in coma.

Dr. Chandra Falcon gazed down at him, rubbing her even chin. Robert Lozinski, 23. Among the brightest stars in the musical comedy and operetta firmament of Antique Terra’s repertory company. Specializing in such roles as Ali Hakim, Papageno, and Ko-Ko of Titipu. The only time Chandra had really talked to him for any length of time, he had been pre-miniscing about when he would be old enough naturally to play Sir Joseph Porter and the Duke of Plaza-Toro. (Aging make-up, like almost everything else, was precious in Papa’s Pride.) His friendly rival in the company, Steve Davis, who at fifteen years older was playing those very roles, had quipped that Bob had better enjoy the ones that could be interpreted as juvenile while he could, and why not go for Peter Pan while he still had his youth? Bob had said something about a good role, but…and that was all Chandra had heard before moving along to a different part of the reception. Two thousand colonists and about half a thousand mingling sisters and brothers of the O.C.C. might be a pinpoint population compared to your average small village on the Old Earth they’d left behind, but it was still too many people for anybody to interact intimately with everybody.

She had enjoyed Bob Lozinski’s work in any number of plays, though, since Liftaway, watching him grow up from young adolescent roles (when she hadn’t been much older, herself) to the ones he presently enjoyed. As she’d watched Steve Davis mature from ones Lozinski was playing now to the inescapably older-gentleman ones.

And now Steve Davis was dead and Bob Lozinski in a coma, following the same backstage accident during a rehearsal for The Yeomen of the Guard.

“Deuces,” said Sister Harriet, “doesn’t think it was an accident.”

“What, then? A practical joke that went wrong?”

“Murder. And attempted murder.”

“Murder and attempted murder?” nurse Misaki Lang wanted to know. “Who? And why? Bob himself? Could that be why he went into this coma? Couldn’t cope with the guilt? Or the knowledge of Steve’s having tried something? Stars know we can’t find any physical reason for Bob’s coma.”

Chandra Falcon said, “I’m going out and have a talk with Deuces Osborne. Maybe a good, long talk.”

* * * *

Deuteronomy Osborne, called “Deuces,” had been in his twenties at Liftaway, eight years ago. Now in his thirties going on fifties, a lank and craggy hawk of a man, after falling away young from a Bible Belt upbringing, he had jumped at the chance to sign on with Papa Al Gadore as a member of ship security. Osborne’s specialty was sniffing out conspiracies. Not that there had been many to sniff out the first several years, or that they had ever been either large or very serious. Usually two or three colonists at most, more often than not kids plotting to raid the ration baskets before distribution, or sneak marijuana seeds out of the flora ark in the core and raise a little of the stuff in some hidden patch in one of the forest pylons.

But as the voyage lengthened, the downloads from Old Earth grew weaker and stranger, and it became more and more obvious habitable planets were so few and far between in the galaxy that finding one might take several generations—that, in fact, everybody now in Papa’s Pride, and very likely their grandchildren, might live and die in the pylons and core without ever setting foot on a new earth or seeing a real atmosphere sky rather than a simulated one, something like what Old Earth had sometimes called “cabin fever” set in. Papa’s Pride took to calling it “pylon fever,” and for some years it was a very real, if slippery, problem. Among other symptoms, conspiracies started getting worse. Two or three actually managed to plant marijuana, and several groups learned how to cook up worse stuff in midnight kitchens. Drying addicts out, whether in the hospital or either of the O.C.C. pylons, wasn’t pretty. But every life was precious in Papa’s Pride, and worth salvaging when and if at all possible.

Less harmful—some already called it even beneficial—was the experimenting with family groups of multiple mommies and daddies. This had actually begun on Old Earth, but pylon fever gave it a big boost in Papa’s Pride. Things got pretty wild in the colony pylons. The Order of the Cosmic Christ might actually have had a lot more to alternately castigate and ignore in those last few years before the Coup than after genetic morality became colony law.

Chandra Falcon had been seventeen at Liftaway, and completed her formal education in the ship, progressing in leaps and bounds as long as the downloads continued from Old Earth. They grew incredibly more sophisticated as time dilation advanced Old Earth civilization and knowledge lifetimes to the ship’s months, until suddenly they stopped altogether. And Papa’s Pride could never know if this was because it had finally gotten out of range, or because human civilization on Old Earth was no more, or both.

By then, Chandra Falcon was formally educated to a fare-thee-well, both mentally and physically, with doctorates in liberal arts, physical medicine, and mental hygiene, as well as black belts of various degrees in several martial arts. But her informal education would never stop. There was already a suspended animation pod in the deep sleep pylon with her name on it: she was a ship’s treasure, to be stored at sixty for revival whenever the ship finally made planetfall and needed her brain and expertise in setting up a permanent colony.

Sister Mary Harriet Sanford had already seen her personal half-century mark at Liftaway; but procreational age didn’t count for the thousand aboard who belonged to the Order of the Cosmic Christ, any more than for the papal nuncio and the clerical members of his small staff: part of Pope John Paul IV’s price for helping finance the construction of Papa’s Pride. Sister Harriet had begun the voyage as one of the nuns strictly cloistered in the convent pylon, but by about five years into the journey had, Chandra believed, been among the earliest to start experiencing pylon fever—Harriet herself put it down to a late midlife crisis—when she supplicated for and received transfer to the sisterhood, which mingled freely with the colonists in public areas of the pylons and core. As a sister, Harriet had plunged into Antique Terra’s theater work, which was seen as an essential in keeping up morale. She specialized in directing light comedy, musicals, and operettas—the same shows Bob Lozinski was and Steve Davis had been such hits in.

Misaki Lang had been twelve at Liftaway. Now, at twenty, she was one of the best practical nurses in pylon 19, medical research and hospital. She had been assigned to Bob Lozinski at Dr. Falcon’s personal request. If any nurse’s input could help the doctor diagnose the reason for this coma, it was Misaki Lang. If Misaki suggested it might be conscience unable to cope with guilt—either Bob’s own or Steve’s—that might be worth looking into. Only…how?

* * * *

Deuteronomy Osborne, who didn’t really like the nickname “Deuces,” but put up with it because he didn’t really like the mouthful of his christened name, either, and preferred “Deuces”—if not by much—to such alternatives as “Deuter” and “Ozzie,” was in the nearest waiting garden. In a classic Old Earth movie, he would probably have been smoking. Clean air being precious in Papa’s Pride, smoking was prohibited except for virtual tobacco in virtual recreation booths, and a very few areas set aside for the thirty or so colonists who still practiced the amalgamation of beliefs and customs they had put together as recreated Native American religion, and who alone in the ship had the legal right to use any of their precious growing soil for actual tobacco. So Deuces was simply pacing, glancing only often enough at the oxygen-producing plants and soul-soothing aquariums all around him to avoid pacing into them.

“How’s the kid?” were his first words the minute Chandra came in.

“Still in coma. I understand you don’t think it was an accident.”

“Nup.” The tall man shook his head. “Like they usta say back on Old Earth, Doc, something’s about t’ go down. Something big. Either Lozinski’s in on it, or he knows who is, an’ what it is. And, lemme tell you, if this one’s as big as I think it is, it’s something we all oughta know about yesterday.”

“All right,” she agreed, half humoring him and half respectful because, even if Deuces Osborne sniffed conspiracies in every insul-tube, enough of his hunches played out to make him a security man worth listening to. “Let’s start with what you already know, and how.”

“Okay. First off. About half, two-thirds the Antique Terra folks are O.C.C., live in their own pylons—monastery an’ convent—just come over to the uptown pylon to put on their shows an’ suchlike. They’re okay. We don’t have t’ worry about them. The Order polices its own. But Lozinski’s in one uh those cozy little households, colony foursome with Pete Schultz, Barbara Cripps and Judi Oshita. Who are also with Antique Terra. Who also just happened to be backstage when that so-called accident occurred.”

Chandra almost asked Osborne who his spy had been this time, but she knew by now it was better to let him tell it his own way. He’d pause when question time came.

“And Steve Davis,” he went on. “Davis was sniffin’ things out for me. I had him tryin’ t’ move himself in with Lozinski’s household, scope out what they’ve been up to. He figured they were about t’ let him in, advanced age be damned. Last word I had from him, he was gonna meet me at Ishmael’s Downtown between rehearsal an’ supper. Said he had a really big can uh beans to spill, was hopin’ to bring either Schultz or Lozinski or both of ’em along, figured at least one uv ’em was ready to help him spill ’em. So. That’s where I’m waiting for ’em—Schultz and Davis—when the news hits shipnet there’s been some kind uh accident at the Antique Terra.” He paused long enough to signal her question time.

She asked, “But you don’t know who, exactly, is planning to do what, exactly. Unless that ‘accident’ was it.”

“Nope. That accident wasn’t it. I still don’t know what it really is. Just wish I did. One uh those housemates does—Lozinski, Schultz, Cripps, Oshita… Maybe all four.” The security man shook his prematurely graying head. “Whatever it is, it’s somethin’ big. Somethin’ that could maybe threaten this whole damn ship.”

“Something big enough to…commit murder about?”

“Could be,” said Deuces Osborne. “People are gettin’ funny in Papa’s Pride these days. In case you haven’t noticed. Puttin’ their values in funny places. Everything for fun and games, anything for a laugh, never mind what kind uv a laugh, or who’s the ones laughing.”

“And you haven’t questioned them yet—Schultz, Cripps, and Oshita?” If he had, he’d have summed up what they’d told him, even if he thought it was only lies and evasions.

“Hey. When th’ news hit shipnet—you know how it is, rumors at first and then as soon as anyone in power really knows anything hard, they cover it up—I lit out for the uptown pylon right away, figuring t’ find out what I could first hand and asap. Schultz could’ve been on his way to meet me, after all—I could’ve missed him in the insul-tubes. By th’ time I got uptown to the Antique Terra, medical already had th’ two casualties packed off to you friendly folks here in pylon nineteen, and Oshita and Cripps had packed themselves off t’ Lord knows where. Closest guess I heard, privacy pod somewhere t’ comfort each other…you know…an’ there’s privacy pods all over every pylon in this blessed ship an’ the core besides.”

“Except the two C.C. pylons,” Chandra pointed out.

“So they tell us,” Osborne replied noncommittally.

* * * *

Chandra had already heard what little Sister Harriet could tell her about the accident, which dovetailed with Osborne’s scanty data. As the show’s director, Sister Harriet had been out front, concentrating on what the audience would see. The late Steve Davis as Sir Richard Cholmondeley, the Liuetenant of the Tower of London, where the operetta was set; Bob Lozinski as Jack Point the jester, and Pete Schultz as Wilfred Shadbolt the head jailor were all in the wings offstage left, exactly where they were supposed to be, waiting for their next cue to go on, when the accident—a large falling ladder—had happened. Barbara Cripps as Dame Carruthers the Tower housekeeper and Judi Oshita as her niece Kate should have been in the wings offstage right, with most of the chorus: what they’d been doing offstage left with the three men at the fatal moment, Sister Harriet couldn’t say. In the first stunned flurry, she hadn’t asked; and by the time she thought of it, Cripps and Oshita had vanished.

Only two people had been onstage at the time: the romantic leads, tenor and soprano, both members of the Cosmic Christ. According to the script, a shot from an arquebus was supposed to interrupt their tender scene. The arquebus was a medieval weapon, and nobody in Papa’s Pride, or for that matter back on Old Earth at the time of Liftaway, had ever heard one fired, so the company’s backstage crew were using the same sound effect as for a standard loud gunshot. At first Sister Harriet thought they had tried something different this time, and made a quick mental note to tell them, “Too soon—wait for ‘I spake but to try thee—’ and tone it down some, we don’t want the audience thinking the ship’s shielding just failed and let a chunk of space debris crash through.”

But it turned out not to have been the planned sound effect. It had been that heavy ladder falling, catching Steve Davis right on the temple and, they’d thought, knocking Bob Lozinski out, too. Sister Harriet had been genuinely surprised when the scans showed Lozinski with no sign of concussion, leaving his coma a mystery.

“If I’d only cast Steve as Point,” Sister Harriet kept repeating. “He wanted Jack Point—he’d played it back in ship years three to five—there isn’t any reason Point shouldn’t have a few gray hairs—but I wanted to try it with a younger man this time…especially after giving Bunthorne to Steve last year—they’d both read for it, Steve and Bob…if Steve had just been standing a little farther back—the lieutenant goes on a few minutes before Point and Shadbolt—he might’ve still been alive.”

“And whoever else you had playing his role might’ve died instead,” Chandra tried pointing out.

“Maybe…maybe not…” The sister gave a shaky smile. “It’s really futile, after all, the ‘might have been’ game.”

* * * *

All that had been before Chandra’s chat with Osborne. Now, Chandra having shared with the nurse and Antique Terra director what Deuteronomy Osborne had had to say, Misaki told Sister Harriet, “So you see, if Deuces is right, it wouldn’t have made any difference what part you’d had Steve playing.”

Sister Harriet sighed. “At least he would have gone out in a role he really liked. He didn’t enjoy playing the lieutenant nearly as much.”

“Maybe not the role,” said Chandra, “but he was still doing the kind of work he liked, and that’s maybe the best any of us can hope for at the moment of death.”

“Unless it’s going into deep sleep as a future colony treasure,” Misaki remarked.

“Even if,” Chandra replied. “Even if deep sleep and revival works, a person still has to die sometime, sooner or later. Meanwhile. If there’s anything solid beneath Osborne’s theory, and if it’s even half as big as he’s afraid, we’d better do everything we can to find out what it is.… I think it might be time to risk trying that last download from Old Earth.”

“‘That last download’?” asked Sister Harriet. At almost the same instant, Misaki said, “Dr. Falcon, are you sure?”

* * * *

As nearly as they understood it, it was a refinement on the old method of sharing virtual realities, but whether for recreational, or therapeutic, or psychoanalytic purposes, or some combination of all three, they hadn’t entirely figured out. By the time Old Earth uploaded this one to them, thought patterns back there seemed to have morphed and fluxed almost beyond recognition.

Of course, for two or more participants to share a virtual reality had already been popular before Liftaway, and was standard recreational procedure in the uptown and downtown getaway pods of Papa’s Pride: the hope of keeping morale balanced was worth the power it took to run the equipment. But these were preprogrammed virtual realities, chiefly from computer files of Old Earth sites and sights: the Louvre, Bayreuth, the Grand Canyon. Also specific historical recreations of the Crystal Palace, the original ancient Grecian Olympics, the Battle of Gettysburg, and so on. And of course it was popular for people to create their own made-up worlds and share them with other people…once they were created and filed. What the last download from Old Earth seemed to provide was a modification allowing new auto-fictional reality to be molded from one user’s mind, then one or more other people to experience and actually lend input while it was actually being created—a sort of simulation of that elusive wisp, the shared sleep-dream. It had been a philosophical and scientific daydream for so long, it was only surprising they had taken so much time developing it, back on Old Earth where power supplies were less strictly conserved.

The modifications of the virtual reality equipment in Papa’s Pride looked feasible, and Dr. Falcon thought they had effected them well enough. And the directions for building the virtual reality from one person’s brain and opening it for another brain’s input seemed as nearly straightforward as anything could seem in downloads from Old Earth by this time, when the language at the uploading end had morphed and fluxed even more, perhaps, than the thought patterns, and the people uploading had had to translate into the language that had become almost as archaic as Linear B to the people back on Old Earth.

Chandra had even tested it, once, with Dr. Omar Tarkindar, who had been her lover for a brief time before his laying to sleep with premature symptoms of Riker’s syndrome. They had shared a visit to the Mahabharata, and it had worked quite well. But they had had no motive beyond testing the process, seeing how well it worked for them. Chandra had not had the equipment out since. Power was too precious in Papa’s Pride.

She had thought about it, wondered if it might offer enough potential for boosting morale over and beyond what the standard virtual realities provided to be worth the risk of magnifying and spreading grimmer kinds of fantasizing…but time was precious, too, even on a long, long journey through galactic light-years, and the pair of virtual-sensory kits with their specially modified modems had stayed unused in a box in medical research storage.

Dr. Chandra Falcon led the way to get them out now.