ftp.ee.pdx.edu/2014.02.ftp.ee.pdx.edu.tar/ftp.ee.pdx.edu/pub/frp/stories/harrison/har03

Text File | 1991-04-25 | 14KB | 302 lines

                  Harrsion  -  Chapter Three

Copyright 1990 by Jim Vassilakos.  All rights reserved.  Permission is
hereby granted by the copyright holder to copy and freely redistribute
copies of this work, so long as no commercial or barter consideration is
obtained in exchange for such copies.



                            Three



   "Are you family?" The nurse's eyebrows wrinkled in rehearsed
concern as he scratched down Mike's name and Tizarian I.D.
number.
   "No, but will this do?" Mike showed the nurse his Galactican
press clearance. The shiny blue and silver card was nearly
identical to his Tizarian personal identification or his Imperial
consumer profile. The three were hard to tell apart at a glance.
   The young man nodded in acknowledgement and hurriedly escorted
Mike through the long white corridors of the medical center. The
usually polished floor tiles showed dirty tread markings where a
pair of wet, oversized starlaw boots had recently stomped. Mike
grinned and snapped a picture though he doubted that analysis of
the photo could tell much more than the boot size and service
division of its wearer.
   The air felt slightly colder as the nurse pushed aside a set
of green double doors. The word "Freezers" was painted in icy
blue across their surface. Mike followed closely.
   "So what d'ya want with a 'corpsicle' anyway?" The nurse
smiled at his own joke. He was being too smooth. Mike guessed
that they were giving him loads of preferential treatment because
they were scared silly of the bad press he could inflict.
   "It's a long story." Mike bent over the computer and with a
few quick keystrokes he scanned the registry of the dead. Niki
had taught him how the system worked last month and the lesson
came back to him as quickly as were it taught yesterday. Such
were the benefits of being lectured by a Siri, Mike thought as
the nurse approached the terminal.
   "Hey, wait a second buddy." The nurse was visibly surprised,
but he scanned the screen seeing Mike had found his way through
the system.
   "He's gone." Mike closed his eyes in the anticipated
frustration. It was too much too expect that the Imperial police
would leave his subject's body on cite. That would make
verification of the time of death too simple a matter.
   "I thought you guys held a patient's body for autopsy."
   "We do. I least we're supposed to." The nurse hit a few more
keys and scanned the screen for more data.
   "Here. The verdict was heart attack due to the stress
medication. It happens occasionally. The body's been taken to
Greenflower mortuary."
   The news startled Mike momentarily, and he wondered what the
Imp's motives could be. He pushed himself away from the console
and straightened out, slowly perceiving the implications. The
nurse gazed up from the computer and tried to read Mike's
expression.
   Mike finally smiled, "At least Fork's going out in style. Say,
you got a spare hour?"

                        *     *     *

Surrounded by lush costal woodlands and set around a wild flower
garden, Greenflower easily rated as the prettiest community in
Silver-Tri county. It was small, quiet, nearly perfect in every
way. Mike would have lived there, but it lacked in one crucial
respect: no beach.
   Mike watched the passing trees and sighed as the nurse
suddenly turned delivery boy drove the white grav-car along the
highway. The med-center was being too kind but totally
predictable, loaning him a nurse and a car, all to straighten out
its reputation with one reporter from a very powerful news
syndicate.
   "I hope you're enjoying this." The nurse sounded slightly
irritated.
   "Sure am. Watch out for the cat."
   Small rain droplets marched steadily up the windshield and
swerved sideways with every curve in the road as the sun poked
between the clouds with sporadic recess, its rays shattering into
a kaleidoscope of colorful, dancing patterns.
   Cruising at a hundred kilometers per hour, the grav-car sped
over the highway at an approximate altitude of one meter. Mike
thought that it felt like they were floating on a current of air
though he knew that wasn't the case. They were floating on the
force of gravity which was really the curvature of space. Mike's
mind began to swim with equations learned in a series of
undergraduate science courses he had been dragged into by a
friend. Something about down-vectors and Higgs boson emissions.
He couldn't quite remember who to hate for it. Mike had always
liked science, but never enough to actually understand it.
   The nurse pulled up to the mortuary and gently touched earth.
Outside the deep grey building a small service seemed to be
taking place. The dark gloomy afternoon made the mourners looked
like an assembly of Draconian diplomats dressed in sleek black
suits huddling together exchanging whispers. Their somber mood
was catching.
   Mike climbed from the car and headed warily for the mortuary.
A pit of ashes was exposed to the rain about a hundred feet from
the building's entrance, green clover petals curving in along its
red brick walls. The nurse, genuinely fascinated, stopped to look
down. It was archaic. Almost barbarian.
   Mike entered the building's lobby while the nurse ran to catch
up.
   "What'd you see?"
   "Nothing. It was too dark," the young man puffed catching his
breath.
   "May I help you gentlemen?" A middle aged woman with a pale
complexion suddenly appeared as if from thin air. She was dressed
in a long black gown and wore a black pearl necklace.
   Mike took out his press clearance, "I hope so. I'm looking for
a man, I mean a body of a man which was brought here this
morning."
   The women seemed strangely amused. "Does this body of a man
have a name." Her words sang out like music.
   "He was listed as a jay-dee eighteen from Silver-Tri costal
med-center."
   "I see," She seemed absolutely enthralled.
   Mike smiled, "Great," then consciously dropped his smile.
"Where is he?"
   She slipped between Mike and the nurse and crept to the lobby
entrance, opening the large oaken doors and pointing her long
slender arm toward the ash pit. Mike watched the rain fall in
disappointment.

                          *     *     *

The setting sun's amber beams tanned the evening coast, streaming
thoughtlessly past the white water's edge, scattering sullenly
across Michael Harrison's tired features. He watched two gulls,
wings outstretched, gliding peacefully over the shifting blue and
crimson waves, hanging precariously onto the thin salty air. As
if beckoning him forth, the sea approached within inches of his
face and then receded into the distance
while thoughts twisted about in his mind like delicate angels on
their way to a darktime's meal.
   But something was missing; something was overlooked. And for
the life of him, he didn't know what it was. What to do when
you're deadended? Go back and re-examine the facts. But there
were no facts. Everything was hidden behind lies.
   Unable to sleep in his only true home, he picked himself up
and walked back toward the house. The huge wooden doors seemed
even more menacing when sober, but he managed them open and
headed to the kitchen for a brew.
   His soft bed and cold beer summed up the perfect way to spend
an evening, but as he sat on the edge of the covers the camera
drew away his attention. Near the wall, it sat on the rug where
he had dropped it less than an hour ago as if pleading like a
child for a trip to the zoo, "take me a picturing, I want to have
fun."
   Mike smiled and stretched out on the floor beside his toy. He
opened the workset and began to review the pictures in memory. He
zipped past a Telmarian mountain range where strange animals
carried supplies across a snow ridge to the local guerrilla
faction, then floated along Tizarian waters as a shuttle from
nearby Aquapolis darted from under the seascape in a beautifully
chaotic conglomeration of white water spray and a rainbow of
sunshine, then noticed a Calannaan temple where the alter priests
sacrificed a political dissident with knives and a chainsaw, but
only one picture grabbed his attention-- that of two starlaw
guards scowling outside a medical center entrance in the wee
hours of morning.
   Mike pivoted the picture into different corners of the screen
and tried to decide where it would look best hanging from the
wall. He reversed the colors, intensified the light, rotated the
picture around, zoomed out for a wideangle, and suddenly noticed
what was missing.
   The small distorted numbers mocked him from the far corner of
the screen. He manually zoomed in on them and refocused. How
could he be so stupid? The medical center had no permanent cargo
shuttle. The vessel must have belonged to the Imperials.
   He looked toward the controller wall, "Cindy, load file from
Silver-Tri. Find Imperial shuttle 8372919041."
   She responded within the second, "That shuttle is found."
   "Where is it now?"
   "Docked onto the independent fast-merchant, Nissithiu, which
has jumped out of system fifteen point two centims ago."
   The idea itched like a hunch sent by the devil, "What was the
cargo?"
   "It was dropping off pharmaceutics."
   "Departure cargo?"
   "None."
   Mike leaned back on the bed, "That's pretty strange, leaving a
world as wealthy as Tizar."
   Cindy gave no reply.
   "Where is the ship headed?"
   "Flight orders don't state."
   "They should."
   "They don't."
   "Then read topside nav-data and figure it out." Mike hated
lazy computers.
   Cindy came back to him after a few seconds, "This will take me
twenty-four point seven centims to compute."
   "Why so long?"
   "I'm not a navigation computer."
   He shrugged, "Fine, Take your time."
   "Now computing," she responded as if more than a little
annoyed.
   Mike grinned. She'd be working until well past midnight. At
least he now knew how to keep her busy.
   As he stepped back outside, beer in paw, he shot the dying sun
a victory smile and sat down on the damp sands under a chilly
wind. Then, curling up next to the surf, Mike closed his eyes and
tried not to dream. Songs of water and birds soothed him with a
serenity beyond mere music as he drifted away to other seas.

                        *     *     *

Slowly, his soul floated about in black and empty space.
Silently, a touch from above pulled him away from sleep's
cherished womb. Sounds of music, songs from the sea, clustered
around him like the players of an opera theater, sinking in and
out of the void with a strange, perhaps arranged harmony.
   She bore no expression as he opened his eyes. He felt himself
gripped with a strange combination of confusion and fear as the
black sky above cast a bold contrast around her disarranged
golden blonde hair and deep blue eyes.
   She smiled sweetly whispering, "Good morning."

   For a moment, he felt as if he was dreaming, but the rush of
questions was uncharacteristic of sleepthink. In dreams he could
accept that life was death and good was evil, but on the surface
of thought there was only the here and the now and many, many
questions.
   "Why are you here?"
   "We found your psyche."
   The cold tide washed the tips of Mike's toes as a cool, salty
breeze lifted a few strands of Robin's hair.
   "Drop the story, or you'll never see her again."
   Robin walked slowly up the beach as Mike sat still in the sand
watching the ocean horizon curve away into the distance.

                         *     *     *

Dawn was particularly brilliant along the coast, a primary reason
for his choosing to live there. Mike watched the sunrise with a
rueful stare as the dull, throbbing pain stuck like a stiff arrow
in the base of his skull. Bitterly, he picked his sand encrusted
self off the beach and headed wearily toward the house. Grains of
earth fell off him with each dismal step.
   The large livingroom reeked of a dreary gloom. Mike glanced
toward the couch and the pillow where her head had rested two
nights before. He walked sullenly into the bedroom. The far
curtains remained closed, dimming the room. The chain locket
she'd given him rested on his bed with the camera.
   "Hello."
   It beeped compulsively as a point of light danced around the
controller screen.
   "Yes?"
   "The Nissithiu went to the Calanna star system."
   "Oh."
   Mike tumbled the junk off the bed, all except for the locket.
It was in the shape of a heart with words inscribed along the
front: "Go For It!"
   "Place audio connection call to Linden."
   The light danced around the screen.
   "Done."
   Mike gathered up his breath.
   "Hi, What's up Mike?" It was Linden's voice.
   "Morning editor."
   "Yes, and a very nice one it is too. Is there anything I can
do for you?"
   Mike consciously tried collecting his spirit.
   "Why did you tell Clay?"
   "What?"
   "You heard me."
   "I don't understand, Mike. What happened?"
   "They've got Niki."
   "...You think I told Clay about her?"
   "I know you did, Chuck. I just wanna know why."
   "Now don't start hurling accusations, buddy. I didn't say a
thing to Clay or anybody else. Now, tell me exactly what
happened. Did she screw up or something?"
   "No."
   "Well, how do you know?"
   "She's not a screw-up! Okay?!"
   "Well, I didn't say anything. Editor's honor, Mike."
   "Bullshit."
   "The honest truth."
   "No, it had to be you."
   "Nope."
   "Chuck, if I find out later..."
   "I'm clean."
   "Chuck... stupid question coming up..."
   Mike scratched his head with the locket searching for the
right words.
   "You ready?"
   "I love dumb questions. Shoot."
   "When's the last time you had your office checked for bugs?"
   Silence.
   "Chuck?!?"
   The line was dead.


_______________________________________________________________
I  Jim Vassilakos                       I  A rust monster...  I
I  University of California, Riverside  I    Run Awwaaay!!    I
I  [e-mail]                 I         :-)         I
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