Daughter of Regals (29 page)

“Cremated. At Sharon’s
Point. The complaints say that spouses have to sign a release before the
hunters can go there. A custom some of the spouses don’t like. But what they
really don’t like is that their husbands or wives are cremated right away. The
spouses don’t even get to see the bodies. All they get is notification and a
death certificate.” He looked at me sharply. “This is not against the law. All
the releases were signed in advance”

I thought for a minute, then
said something noncommittal. “What kind of hunters were they?”

The Inspector frowned
bleakly. ‘The best. Most of them shouldn’t be dead.” He took a readout from the
file and tossed it across the desk at me. “Take a look.”

The readout was a
computer summary of the forty-five dead. All were wealthy, but only 26.67% had
acquired their money themselves. 73.33% had inherited it or married it. 82.2%
had bright financial futures. 91.1% were experienced hunters, and of those
65.9% had reputations of being exceptionally skilled. 84.4% had traveled extensively
around the world in search of “game”—the more dangerous the better.

“Maybe the animals are
experienced too,” I said.

The Inspector didn’t
laugh. I went on reading.

At the bottom of the
sheet was an interesting information: 75.56% of the people on this list had
known at least five other people on the list; 0.00% had known none of the
others.

I handed the readout
back to Inspector Morganstark. “Word-of-mouth for sure. It’s like a club.”
Something important was going on at the Sharon’s Point Hunting Preserve, and I
wanted to know what it was. Trying to sound casual, I asked, “What does the
computer recommend?”

He looked at the
ceiling. “It says to forget the whole thing. That damn machine can’t even
understand why I bother to ask it questions about this. No law broken. Death
rate irrelevant. I asked for a secondary recommendation, and it suggested I
talk to some other computer.”

I watched him carefully.
“But you’re not going to forget it.”

He threw up his hands. “Me
forget it? Do I look like a man who has that much common sense? You know
perfectly well I’m not going to forget it.”

“Why not?”

It seemed like a
reasonable question to me, but the Inspector waved it aside. “In fact,” he went
on in a steadier tone, “I’m assigning it to you. I want you out there
tomorrow.”

I started to say
something, but he stopped me. He was looking straight at me, and I knew he was
going to tell me something that was important to him. “I’m giving it to you,”
he said, “because I’m worried about you. Not because you’re a rookie and this
case is trivial. It is not trivial. I can feel it—right here.” He put his hand
over the bulge of his skull behind his right ear, as if his hunches came from
the transceiver in his mastoid process. Then he sighed. “That’s part of it, I
suppose. I know you won’t go off the deep end on this, if I’m wrong. Just
because people are getting killed, you won’t go all righteous on me and try to
get Sharon’s Point shut down. You won’t make up charges against them just
because their death rate is too high. You’ll be cheering for the animals.

“But on top of that,” he
went on so I didn’t have a chance to interrupt, “I want you to do this because
I think you need it. I don’t have to tell you you’re not comfortable being a
Special Agent. You’re not comfortable with all that fancy equipment we put in
you. All the adjustment tests indicate a deep-seated reluctance to accept yourself.
You need a case that’ll let you find out what you can do.”

“Inspector,” I said
carefully, “I’m a big boy now. I’m here of my own free will. You’re not sending
me out on this just because you want me to adjust. Why don’t you tell me why
you’ve decided to ignore the computer?”

He was watching me like
I’d just suggested some kind of unnatural act. But I knew that look. It meant
he was angry about something, and he was about to admit it to both of us for
the first time. Abruptly, he picked up the file and shoved it at me in disgust.
“The last person on that list of dead is Nick Kolcsz. He was a Special Agent.”

A Special Agent. That
told me something, but not enough. I didn’t know Kolcsz. He must have had
money, but I wanted more than that. I gave the Inspector’s temper another
nudge. “What was he doing there?”

He jumped to his feet to
make shouting easier. “How the hell should I know?” Like all good men in the
Bureau, be took the death of an Agent personally. “He was on leave’ His goddamn
transceiver was off!” Then with a jerk he sat down again. After a minute, all
his anger was gone and he was just tired. “I presume he went there for the hunting,
just like the rest of them. You know as well as I do we don’t monitor Agents on
leave. Even Agents need privacy once in a while. We didn’t even know he was
dead until his wife filed a complaint because they didn’t let her see his body.

“Never mind the security
leak—all that metal in his ashes. What scares me”—now there was something like
fear in his bleak eyes—”is that we hadn’t turned off his power pack. We never
do that—not just for a leave. He should have been safe. Wild elephants shouldn’t
have been able to hurt him.”

I knew what he meant.
Nick Kolcsz was a cyborg. Like me. Whatever killed him was more dangerous than
that.

2

Well, yes—a cyborg. But it isn’t everything
it’s cracked up to be. People these days make the mistake of thinking Special Agents
are “super” somehow. This comes from the old movies, where cyborgs were always
super-fast and super-strong. They were loaded with weaponry. They had built-in
computers to do things like think for them. They were slightly more human than
robots.

Maybe someday. Right now
no one has the technology for that kind of thing. I mean the medical
technology. For lots of reasons, medicine hasn’t made much progress in the last
twenty years. What with all the population trouble we have, the science of “saving
lives” doesn’t seem as valuable as it used to. And then there were the genetic
riots of 1989, which ended up shutting down whole research centers.

No, what I have in the
way of equipment is a transceiver in the mastoid process behind my right ear,
so that I’m always in contact with the Bureau; thin, practically weightless
plastene struts along my legs and arms and spine, so I’m pretty hard to cripple
(in theory, anyway); and a nuclear power pack implanted in my chest so its
shielding protects my heart as well. The power peck runs my transceiver. It
also runs the hypersonic blaster built into the palm of my left hand.

This has its
disadvantages. I can hardly flex the first knuckles of that hand, so the hand
itself doesn’t have a whole lot it can do. And the blaster is covered by a
latex membrane (looks just like skin) that bums away every time I use it, so I
always have to carry replacements. But there are advantages, too—sort of. I can
kill people at twenty-five meters and stun them at fifty. I can tear holes in
concrete walls, if I can get close enough.

That was what the
Inspector was talking about when he said I hadn’t adjusted. I couldn’t get used
to the fact that I could kill my friends just by pushing my tongue against one
of my back teeth in a certain way. So I tended not to have very many friends.

Anyway, being a cyborg
wasn’t much comfort on this assignment. That was all I had going for me—exactly
the same equipment that hadn’t saved Nick Kolcsz. And he’d had something I didn’t
have—something that also hadn’t saved him. He’d known what he was getting into.
He’d been an experienced hunter, and he’d known three other people on that list
of dead. (He must’ve known some of the survivors, too. Or known of them through
friends. How else could he have known the place was dangerous?) Maybe that was
why he went to Sharon’s Point—to do some private research to find out what
happened to those dead hunters.

Unfortunately, that didn’t
give me the option of going to one of his friends and asking what Kolcsz had
known. The people who benefit (if that’s the right word) from an exclusive
arrangement don’t have much reason to trust outsiders (like me). And they
certainly weren’t going to reveal knowing about anything illegal to a Special
Agent. That would hurt themselves as well as Sharon’s Point.

But I didn’t like the
idea of facing whatever killed Kolcsz without more data. So I started to do
some digging.

I got information of a
sort by checking out the Preserve’s registration, but it didn’t help much.
Registration meant only that the Federal inspector had approved Sharon’s Point’s
equipment. And inspection only covers two things: fencing and medical
facilities.

Every hunting preserve
is required to insure that its animals can’t get loose, and to staff a small
clinic to treat injured customers (never mind the crippled animals). The
inspector verified that Sharon’s Point had these things. Its perimeter (roughly
133 km.) was appropriately fenced. Its facilities included a very well equipped
surgery and dispensary; and a veterinary hospital (which surprised me);
and
a
cremator—supposedly for getting rid of animals too badly wounded to be
treated.

Other information was
slim. The preserve itself contained about 1,100 square km. of forests, swamps,
hills, meadows, it was owned and run by a man named Fritz Ushre. Its staff
consisted of one surgeon (a Dr. Avid Paracels) and a half dozen handlers for
the animals.

But one item was
conspicuously absent: the name of the breeder. Most hunting preserves get their
animals by contract with one of three or four big breeding firms. Sharon’s
Point’s registration didn’t name one. It didn’t name any source for its animals
at all. Which made me think maybe the people who went hunting there weren’t
hunting animals.

People hunting people?
That’s as illegal as hell. But it might explain the high death rate. Mere lions
and baboons (even rabid baboons in packs) don’t kill forty-five hunters at an
exclusive preserve in twenty months. I was beginning to understand why the
Inspector was willing to defy the computer on this assignment.

I went to the programmers
and got a readout on the death certificates. All had been signed by “Avid
Paracels, M.D.” All specified “normal” hunting-preserve causes of death (the
usual combinations of injury and exposure, in addition to outright killing),
but the type of animal involved was never identified.

That bothered me. This
time I had the computers read out everything they had on Fritz Ushre and Avid
Paracels.

Ushre’s file was small.
Things like age, marital status, blood type aside, it contained only a sketchy
résumé of his past employment. Twenty years of perfectly acceptable work as an
engineer in various electronics firms. Then he inherited some land. He promptly
quit his job, and two years later he opened up Sharon’s Point. Now (according
to his bank statements) he was in the process of getting rich. That told me
just about nothing. I already knew Sharon’s Point was popular.

But the file on Avid
Paracels, Ph.D., M.D., F.A.C.S., was something else. It was full of stuff.
Apparently atone time Dr. Paracels had held a high security clearance because o(some
research he was doing, so the Bureau had studied him down to his toenails. That
produced reams of data, most of it pointless, but it didn’t take me long to
find the real goodies. After which (as my mother used to say) I could’ve been
knocked over with a shovel. Avid Paracels was one of the victims of the genetic
riots of 1989.

This is basically what
happened. In 1989 one of the newspapers broke the story that a team of
biologists (including the distinguished Avid Paracels) working under a massive
Federal grant had achieved a major breakthrough in what they called “recombinant
DNA research”—”genetic engineering,” to ignorant sods like me. They’d mastered
the techniques of raising animals with altered genes. Now they were beginning
to experiment with human embryos. Their goal, according to the newspaper, was
to attempt “minor improvements” in the human being—”cat” eyes, for instance, or
prehensile toes.

So what happened? Riots
is what happened. Which in itself wasn’t unusual. By 1989, crime and whatnot,
social unrest of all kinds, had already become the biggest single threat to the
country, but the government still hadn’t faced up to the problem. So riots and
other types of violence used to start up for any reason at all: higher fuel
prices, higher food costs, higher rents. In other words (according to the
social scientists), the level of general public aggression had reached crisis
proportions. Nobody had any acceptable outlets for anger, so whenever people
were able to identify a grievance they went bananas.

That newspaper article
triggered the great granddaddy of all riots. There was a lot of screaming about
“the sanctity of human life,” but I suppose the main thing was that the idea of
a “superior human being” was pretty threatening to most people. So scientists
and Congressmen were attacked in the streets. Three government buildings were
wrecked (including a post office—God knows why). Seven apartment complexes were
wrecked. One hundred thirty-seven stores were looted and wrecked. The
recombinant DNA research program was wrecked. And a handful of careers went
down the drain. Because this riot was too big to be put down. The cops (Special
Agents) would have had to kill too many people. So the President himself set
about appeasing the rioters— which led, naturally enough, to our present policy
of trying to appease violence itself.

Avid Paracels was one of
the men , who went down the drain. I guess he was lucky not to lose his medical
license. He certainly never got the chance to do any more research.

Well, that didn’t prove
anything, but it sure made me curious. People who lose high positions have been
known to become somewhat vague about matters of legality. So that gave me a
place to start when I went to Sharon’s Point. Maybe if I was lucky I could even
get out of pretending to go hunting in the preserve itself.