City of Golden Shadow (57 page)

Susan hadn't thought so, or at least she had discovered something she thought was significant, even if Renie hadn't found a way to follow it up yet. Doctor Van Bleeck had not been the kind of person to indulge anything she judged unwarranted foolishness in even her closest of colleagues, let alone an ex-student she hadn't seen in years.

What did she find out? What if we can't locate this Murat Sagar Singh? Or what if we do, but he doesn't know what it was that Susan thought was significant?

It was terrible to think she might have brought that dreadful attack onto her mentor, but it was also frustrating to think of the doctor working in her lab that night before it happened, perhaps discovering all manner of important things, even taking time to leave a message for her, but not bothering to record any of it. Who ever expected the world to change that rapidly? But it did.

Renie had been unsealing another pack of cigarettes, but now she dropped them on the desk and asked her pad to call Susan's house, hoping to reach Jeremiah Dako. The doctor's voice came on with her voicemail, dry and brisk.

"This is Susan Van Bleeck. I'm doing something interesting right now. Yes, at my age. Leave a message, please."

Renie found it hard to speak for a moment, but when she regained her voice, she asked Jeremiah to call her as soon as he could.

She picked up her cigarettes again and moved the exam template back to the center of the screen.

Jeremiah Dako hung back at the door of the elevator. "I cannot look at that place today." His eyes were red and he looked ten years older than the first time Renie had seen him. "It makes me too angry, too sad."

"That's no problem." Renie let !Xabbu step out and patted Dako's arm. "Thank you for letting us have a look. I hope we find something. We'll come back upstairs if we need you."

"The police have been here and gone. I suppose it doesn't matter what you touch anymore." He helped Renie lift her bags out onto the floor and then pushed the button. The door shut, the elevator hummed upward, and Renie turned for her first look at the lab.

"Oh, my God." Sour liquid rose in her throat and she swallowed hard. She had not expected the damage to be so extensive. The people who had beaten Susan so viciously had done a savagely thorough job on her workplace as well. "They must have brought sledgehammers with them."

Every single one of the long tables had been smashed to the ground and its contents pulverized. Hindered housings and shattered components made a carpet of plastic mulch half a foot deep across nearly the entire lab floor, a jigsaw puzzle without a solution. The screens on every wall had been shattered, too, their inner workings wrenched out through the jagged holes, cables dangling like the innards of a medieval torture victim.

!Xabbu looked up from where he squatted, sifting jagged bits of debris through his fingers. "Surely these men were not merely robbers. No robber would spend so much time ruining expensive equipment, even if they were looking for money instead."

"I can't imagine it. God almighty, look at this." The thoroughness of the ruin exerted a horrifying fascination-universal entropy demonstrated for beginners.

Pay attention, the wreckage seemed to declare. Some things cannot be undone, short of time pivoting in its groove and crawling back on itself.

Renie tried to imagine such a thing, like a video clip running in reverse, every ruptured piece flying back to its original site, equipment reforming, tables rising again like animals startled awake. And if she could run it all back, Susan would return, too, the spark of life leaping back into her cold body, her bones reknitting, the spatters of dried blood hidden under this wreckage liquescing and flowing together like mercury to leap from the floor and back into the doctor's closing wounds. Death itself would turn coward and flee.

Renie shuddered. She suddenly felt weak and sick. It was all too terrible, too hopeless.

She looked at !Xabbu as he idly handled the broken pieces of the doctor's work, at his slender, childlike back, and the weight of her responsibility returned to her. At this moment, it was not an unpleasant sensation. People needed her. Susan was gone and this horrible thing could not be undone-better to think about real things, problems that could be solved. She took a breath, unsnapped one of the equipment bags she'd borrowed from the Poly, and lifted out a small station node. Her hands were shaking. She cleared a place on the floor next to a wallport and jacked it in. "We'll just hope this station box has enough power to run the domestic system," she said, pleased with the steadiness of her voice. Crisis passed. "Jeremiah said he's had to turn the lights and everything else on and off manually, so they've disabled it somehow."

"Could ordinary criminals do that?"

"There's a lot of bootleg house-busting gear to be had these days, some of it very cheap. But I wouldn't think Susan would be the kind of person to leave her home vulnerable to that kind of assault, which suggests they must have had a pretty good package. I'll be able to tell you more if I can get into the house system."

!Xabbu frowned. "Did the police not investigate this?"

"Of course they did. Murder of a rich and well-known professor? Jeremiah said they were down here for three days-the private guard people, too. And you and I certainly answered enough questions about our last afternoon here. But even if they found something, they won't share it with us civilians-I tried, Jeremiah tried. About six months from now we might find out something useful. We can't wait that long." She turned on the station node, which blinked instantly to life. It was a very nice piece of Asian hardware which, if she dropped it anywhere between here and the Poly's lab, would cost her about half a year's salary to replace."Let's see what's left and what it can tell us."

Renie slumped into the chair. Dako poured tea for her.

"Will your friend want some?"

"I guess so." She stared at the steaming cup, too tired for the moment even to lift it.

Dako hesitated, then sat down across from her. "Did you find anything? Anything to catch those . . . murderers?" He held his own cup in trembling fingers. Renie wondered what it had been like for him to come back to this house the first time after the doctor's death.

"No. They put some kind of datakiller into the house system-I've tried every form of retrieval gear I could lay my hands on. It's a wonder anything still works here at all."

"The doctor made sure everything ran in parallel. That's what she called it. In case the system broke down." There was quiet pride in his voice.

"Well, those bastards did their work in parallel, too. Not only did they bomb the system, but they broke every piece of hardware they could get their hands on, too."

!Xabbu walked into the kitchen holding something in his hands. Renie looked up, heart quickening. "What's that?"

"I found this as I was leaving. Caught between a lab table and the wall. It means nothing that I can see."

Renie grabbed at the piece of paper and smoothed it Her own name, Irene, headed the page. Below, in Susan's unmistakable shaky handwriting, were the words Atasco and Early M.

"It doesn't mean anything to me," she said after some moments. "It could have been there for months, I suppose-it may be some other Irene entirely. But we'll check it out. It's something, anyway."

Jeremiah could make no sense of it either. Renie's momentary excitement began to fade.

!Xabbu sat down, his face solemn. "I saw the picture in the living room again as I passed," he said. "The rock painting." He stared at the cup before him. For a moment they were all silent. Renie thought they must look like they were conducting a seance. "I am very sorry," he continued abruptly.

"About what?"

"I fear that I made Doctor Van Bleeck feel uncomfortable about the picture on her wall. She was a good person. She valued it for what it meant, I think, even though it was not the work of her own people."

"She was so good. . . ." Jeremiah sniffed angrily and dabbed his eyes with a napkin, then wiped his nose. "Too good. She didn't deserve this. They should find these men and hang them, just like they did in the old days."

"She told us something important, anyway," Renie said. "And she may have left us this note. We'll do our best to find out what she learned. And if it leads us to the people that did that-" She paused, remembering the brutally impersonal thoroughness of the destruction below. "Well, I'll do whatever I can do-whatever I can do-to see them brought to justice."

"Justice." Dako said the word like it tasted bad. "When has anyone ever gotten justice in this country?"

"Well, let's face the facts. She was rich and she was white, Jeremiah. If anyone's murder is going to be solved by the authorities, hers will."

He snorted, whether in disbelief or agreement, Renie couldn't tell.

They finished their tea while Jeremiah told them all the things that had to be done to prepare for the doctor's memorial service, and how much of the work had been left to him. A niece and nephew were flying in from America, and on past experience Jeremiah fully expected to be pushed aside without thanks. His bitterness was understandable but depressing. Renie ate a few biscuits, more from politeness than hunger, then she and !Xabbu stood up to go.

"Thank you for letting us look," she said. "I would have felt terrible if we hadn't at least tried."

Jeremiah shrugged. "No one will be punished for this. Not as they deserve. And no one will miss her as much as I will."

Something sparked in Renie's memory. "Hold on. Jeremiah, Susan mentioned a friend named Martine, a researcher. I can't remember the last name-Day-roo-something."

Dako shook his head. "I do not know the name."

"I know the house systems were purged, but might there be anywhere you could look? Did she keep an old-fashioned diary, a notebook, anything on paper?"

Jeremiah began to shake his head again, then paused. "We have a household accounts book. The doctor always worried that there might be tax problems, so we kept duplicate records. " He bustled out of the room, his body language showing his gratitude at having something to do.

Renie and !Xabbu sipped at cold tea, too tired to make conversation. After about a dozen minutes had passed, Jeremiah hurried back in carrying a leather-bound ledger, "There is one small payment from three years ago, credited as 'research,' to a 'Martine Desroubins.' " He pointed. "Could that be it?"

Renie nodded. "It certainly sounds right. Any net address or number?"

"No. Just the name and the amount paid."

"Ah, well. It's a start."

Renie fingered the piece of folded paper, which now had the researcher's name written on it as well.

Fragments, she thought. Just bits of things-voices in the dark, confusing images, names half heard. That's all we have to go on. She sighed as Jeremiah steered onto the dark hill road. Here and there a glow through the trees showed the location of another of Kloof's isolated fortresses-the light, as always, a display of bravery against the huge and frightening darkness.

Bravery? Or was it ignorance?

Fragments. She let her head rest against the cool window. !Xabbu had closed his eyes. I suppose that is all we ever have to go on.

Renie sat down on the edge of the bed to dry her hair, glad of a quiet moment by herself. The evening line for the shelter's communal shower had been long, and she hadn't been in a gossipy mood, so the twenty-minute wait had made her yearn for a little solitude.

As she undid the turban she had made of her towel, she checked her messages. Someone from the Poly had called to tell her she was summoned to the chancellor's office the next day, which didn't sound like anything good. She set her search gear to work on the two names from Susan's scrap of paper. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered why Doctor Van Bleeck, who had spent her entire life working with information machinery, would make a written note instead of just recording a voice message on her home system. Perhaps there was more significance to !Xabbu's discovery than she had first thought.

The gear turned up a match between Atasco and Early M. fast enough, a twenty-year-old book in its third revision entitled Early Mesoamerica, written by a man named Bolivar Atasco. The first search through South African directories for Susan's researcher friend's name was less successful, so Renie started a worldwide investigation through the online directories for net addresses matching or close to Desroubins, then returned to consider the Atasco book.

As long as she was spending money she couldn't really afford, she decided, she might as well download the book itself. It was a little more expensive than normal, since it was apparently heavy on illustrations, but if Susan had left her some kind of clue, then by God she was going to find it.

By the time she finished drying her hair, it was on her system.

If Early Mesoamerica contained some kind of message from Susan Van Bleeck, it did not immediately yield up the secret. It seemed to be nothing more than a work of popular anthropology about the ancient history of Central America and Mexico. She checked the index for anything that might be significant, but found nothing unusual. She scanned through the text. The color pictures of Aztec and Mayan ruins and artifacts were striking-she was particularly taken by a skull made entirely of jade, and by some of the more elaborate stone carvings portraying flower-faced and bird-clawed gods-but none of it seemed to have anything to do with her problem.

A blinking light brought her attention back to her other inquiry. Nothing had turned up about anyone named Martine Desroubins on any of the conventional international directories. Renie called the Poly and accessed the school's much more comprehensive search engines-if she was going to get in trouble, she might as well get the most out of it while she still could-and then returned to the Atasco book, hunting for anything that might connect the text or pictures to the mysterious city. She had no better luck this time, and began to doubt that the crumpled piece of paper had been anything other than some old research note of Susan's. She skimmed back to the introduction and was reading about the author, Bolivar Atasco, who had apparently done a lot of interesting things in a lot of interesting places, when her father returned from the store.