Voice of the Whirlwind (27 page)

“Any guess as to its effects?” Steward asked.

Zhou gave a taut, self-satisfied smile. He bent over his computer deck and tapped the keys a few times. A slightly different molecule appeared. “There,” he said. “That’s Genesios Three, the new Pink Blossom neurohormone. B-44, or Black Thunder.” Soft surprise whispered through Steward. He remembered the hum of a neurosword, his reflection in Spassky’s teeth, a steel needle slippery with blood. Zhou took a credit spike from his pocket and gestured at the model. “The head of the stuff you brought is the same, with a carbolic functional group here replaced by a nitrite functional group. And the structure of the tail is slightly different, with the same aromatic groups, but in different locations in the chain”—the spike moved deftly among the illusory atoms—“and there’s another very curious difference. Watch here. Let me show you.” He touched a key on his comp deck and the hologram shifted to the earlier model, then back again. One structure disappeared, then appeared again.

“See?” Zhou asked. “That side branch of the molecule. It’s present in your sample, and missing in Genesios Three. That’s the major difference, I think.”

“What would it do?”

“Genesios Three is stable. Degradation won’t occur at normal temperatures. That’s why it’s a perfect street drug—you can carry it around in a plastic bag for months and it’ll remain potent. But
this
stuff”—he flicked back to the first model—“that additional side branch makes the tail unstable. This whole tail wants to break off from the indole ring and float away. It’s so unstable that it’s going to do it within a short time, a matter of days. Especially if it’s exposed to air, light, or heat. That’s why your source refrigerated the drug, to keep it from breaking down. In a week, your neurohormone would be inert. Useless.”

A pulse of distant music invaded the apartment from next door. Zhou’s expression did not change. Steward watched the molecule as it rotated.

“What do you think it does?”

“My guess is that its effects would be similar to those of Genesios Three: enhancement of brain function, stimulation of neural connections. But it would be much easier to metabolize, so you’d need a lot more of it.”

“Would it have the same depressive effect on the brain’s own neurotransmitters?”

“Hard to say. I wouldn’t be surprised.” Zhou looked intently at the model. Something in the depths of his eyes reflected the bright neon colors of the hologram. He smiled and reached into his pocket for a nicotine stick. “I’d like to keep a small sample of it,” he said. “Do some checking.”

“That might not be wise,” Steward said. “If this is an experimental hormone, that means someone put a lot of work into it. And if it’s not trademarked, that means they’d have to defend it without recourse to the courts. Some of these groups kill people.”

Zhou seemed offended. “I’m not a fool,” he said. “There might be some reports in the literature. I’d be able to connect the reports with my knowledge of the drug and put two and two together.” He sucked in a fine spray of liquid nicotine and smiled coldly. “A very interesting problem you’ve set for me.”

“I’ll call tomorrow,” Steward said. “I don’t have a place where I can be reached just now.”

A slow smile crossed Zhou’s face in answer to Steward’s lie. Steward assumed he didn’t care—the problem, or the dollars, were enough to buy his interest.

“As you wish,” Zhou said.

Steward took the refrigerated inhaler from Zhou’s tabletop, slipped it into his pocket. His fingers tingled with the chill. “I’ll call,” he said.

He stepped out into a narrow apartment corridor. The life of Charter hummed distantly in the walls. The inhaler hung heavily in his pocket. Stoichko had advised him to have a party, and probably he would. But first, Steward had to reach a decision about what was in his pocket.

He went to a restaurant first of all, a place that catered to Earth tastes and that didn’t serve vegetable paste flash-fried in a high-pressure oil cooker. He figured he might as well get used to being rich, and ordered rôti de veau au céleri-rave. The veal was fresh, shot up from Earth in the luxury space of the daily shuttle. Before the waitress brought his wine, he went to the bathroom. He washed his hands, then took the inhaler from his pocket and looked at it.

Vee addict.
Y.

This was the stuff, he assumed, that had addicted the Alpha, the neurohormone that the Powers had brought with them from their alien labs. Steward knew that he had the vee tag, whatever it was, and that the hormone was potent. Memories of the Powers flooded his mind, the long, oddly proportioned arms with their quick, unlikely movements, the scent of the heavy hormone-saturated air, the look in Sereng’s eyes. If he took the drug, he’d know what Sereng had seen.

He had to know. Addiction couldn’t result from just a single dose—addiction didn’t work that way. And if the stuff was poison, there were a lot of simpler poisons, easier to manufacture, that Vesta could have chosen from. He watched himself in the bathroom mirror as he raised the inhaler to his nose. The touch of the chill metal on his upper lip made him shiver. He triggered the device once up each nostril.

Biting frost flooded his sinuses. The pain brought tears to his eyes, but through the cold he could smell the Powers, their heavy essence. Memories flooded him again: the uncanny way the aliens moved, spoke, flew bounding through the air wailing discordant cries from their organ nostrils. Steward shivered again. Blood roared through his veins as his heartbeat thudded in his ears.

His heartbeat slowed. Nothing was happening. He looked at himself in the mirror, and the face that looked back at him seemed surprised. Stimulation of brain function, enhancement of neural connections—he should
feel
that.

Adrenaline hit him then, the aftereffects of terror, and he could feel his knees turn watery. He controlled it, bending over the sink with his weight supported by his trembling arms. The neurohormone didn’t do anything, at least nothing that he could detect.

He gave his mirror image a shaky grin, raised the inhaler, fired again.

Nothing.

It was a good dinner.

*

Steward found his party later, after dinner, when he went to the light-grav bars near the docks. He wanted to laugh, to dance, and he found a partner in a Pink Blossom recruit named Darthamae, onstation during the last part of a thirty-six-hour leave. She was genetically shaped with ultraefficient heart and lungs for adaptation to a low-pressure environment, and through biofeedback techniques she had gained conscious control of her dive response. Her legs and arms were long and delicate, her dark-skinned face unnaturally placid, Madonna-like. She was surprised when he didn’t want to take a room in one of the inexpensive dockside hotels, but moved instead deeper into the old spindle, to the King George V, and got a low-gravity penthouse room with a transparent roof that gave a view of the arched habitat above them. The other side of the spindle was in night, and streetlights glowed above like new constellations.

Darthamae moved with the fluid grace of the altered, and when she spoke, she talked as well with her hands, a language she used among her peers in airless environments, her arms and fingers moving like flickering tactile signposts in the air. She hardly seemed to breathe at all. When she spoke, she often had to inhale first, to get enough air in her lungs to say what she wanted. Her hands often got it said before her lips.

She wasn’t at all like Natalie. Steward preferred it that way—he wanted Darthamae’s placidity, her calm. She was his exorcism. He wasn’t certain it was successful.

The landscape overhead grew light, grew new patterns of green and brown rectangles. Steward ordered champagne with breakfast, jumped out of bed, stretched. There was a persistent soreness in his ligaments. The light gravity here was a mercy. Darthamae was watching him from the bed.

“How did someone with your money end up as a rigger?” she asked.

“I just got lucky. Got a good stock market tip.”

Her hands floated in the air, gracefully encompassing the penthouse, the glass ceiling, the distant habitats in the sky. She breathed in. “Must have been a hell of a tip.”

He smiled. There was a knock on the door. “Ever had champagne?” he asked.

“Not out of a glass.”

“It’s better that way. Gives it what we call nose.”

A slow smile appeared on her placid face, then burst into a laugh. “I’ll have to remember to breathe it in, then,” she said.

*

After Darthamae returned to her ship, Steward left the George V and went to a public phone. Identifying himself as Captain Schlager of the Security Directorate, he called passport control and found out that Stoichko had come to Charter on a trans-lunar shuttle originating in Tangier. Stoichko was a citizen of Uzbekistan. His tickets showed he had appeared in Tangier on a flight originating in a town called Mao, in central Africa.

No one at passport control questioned the existence of Captain Schlager. Charter Station was living up to its reputation.

Steward called the library and referenced Mao. It was a small place, its major advantage the remoteness that permitted research to take place in Saharan isolation. Its only industry was Express Biolabs, a wholly owned subsidiary of Policorp Brighter Suns. Brighter Suns was forbidden to own territory, and Express didn’t have policorporate nationality or customs, and at least officially was run under local law—Express was just a very private investment.

Steward punched out of the phone network and frowned at the terminal as it flicked on a directory of the hotel’s attractions. Stoichko’s story seemed to be holding together. Maybe it was time to visit him and find out what he was after.

The Hotel Xylophone was a medium-priced hotel of the sort that catered to ships’ officers and traveling businessmen. The lobby was full of holograms of miniature ultralight aircraft darting overhead, recordings of real pilots who flew their ultralights in the low gravity of the central spindle. Steward looked up in surprise as one of the hologram pilots raised a hand to wave to him.

There was a brisk touch on his right shoulder. His nerves flickered as he turned to the right, then heard a laugh from his left side.

“Hi, buck.” Reese was grinning at him, holding a traveling ruck on one shoulder by a strap. She was wearing a photojacket that ran pictures of distant beaches, white sand, blue sky, Heineken greenies. He wondered if she’d bought it from the waitress at the Spindrift Hotel.

“Take my stock tip?”

“Not yet.” He looked at her with mild surprise. “I figured you’d be on the shuttle by now.”

“I’m shacking up. I ran into an old friend and decided to postpone my departure.”

“Well. If he gives you any more stock tips, let me know.”

Her eyes were bright, reflecting the blue ocean that patterned across her chest. “Getting any yourself, mystery man?”

“I found someone nice.”

“Good. I called you last night at the
Born.
My friend had a friend I thought you might want to meet. But she took off for Spain this morning.”

“That was a nice thought. Thanks.”

Reese poked him in the ribs. “Gotta go. I’m having lunch with my financial adviser.”

“See you later, billie.”

Steward watched as Reese walked toward the door with her assured long-legged stride. The photojacket beaches passed through the door, across the alloy street outside. Steward looked for a phone and called Zhou.

The chemist told him that he’d been searching the literature but hadn’t seen anything even resembling a description of what Steward had found. Steward told him that the hormone may have originated at Express Biolabs.

“That’s a hard one,” Zhou said. “Nothing gets out of there. They’ve negotiated a deal with the government giving them control of thousands of square miles of desert around them. It’s like a little piece of Vesta, right there in the middle of Africa, even though the land doesn’t officially belong to Brighter Suns. It’s a way of getting around Brighter Suns’ restrictions about having national territory outside Vesta. They’re also the sort of outfit you mentioned yesterday. Who don’t like competition.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Steward recognized the sound of Zhou sucking on a nicotine stick. “I’ll find out what I can. But I don’t think there’s going to be much to find out, buck.”

“See what you can do. I’ll call tomorrow.”

He called Stoichko, then took the stairs to the second floor, brightly colored holograms pursuing him as his feet padded on the carpet. Once out of the lobby, the corridor was silent save for the hum of a cleaning robot moving from one room to another. He found Stoichko’s door and knocked.

Stoichko was dressed in white canvas pants and a shirt with lots of buttoned pockets. The buttons alone told Steward the man had come from Earth.

Stoichko grinned. Steward found himself grinning back. Salesman genes.

“Come in. Sit down. Cognac? Coffee?”

“Coffee, thanks. Black, no sugar.”

There was a room-service automated tray with a heavy pot of coffee on the warmer. “Bulb or cup?”

“Cup. Thank you.”

“You drink Earth-style. Good.”

“I’m Earth-born. As you know.”

Steward took the coffee cup and sat on a chair with plastic cushions and a battered chrome frame. Stoichko poured himself cognac. “You may not believe this,” he said, pulling another chair close, “but I actually enjoy staying in hotel rooms. Just sitting away from everything in a quiet little place, watching the vid, listening to music, drinking good cognac.” He shook his head. “A nice change of pace.”

“Away from the hurly-burly of the latest ice mission.”

Stoichko laughed lightly. His finger circled the rim of his glass. “Something like that.” He nodded. “I’m not a specialist in ice work, though. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“To get me to kill de Prey for you.”

“Not really. Whatever damage de Prey was going to do to Brighter Suns has already been done. We don’t care about him. He was just”—he raised an eyebrow—“an added inducement. Something to catch your attention.” He looked at Steward quizzically. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d have the same feelings toward de Prey that your Alpha did. Apparently you do.”