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THIRTY The Scene of the Crime

He'd dreaded this moment for what seemed like weeks.

In fact, it had only been a couple of days, yet Eichra Oren knew that the exercise, which was how he thought of it, however difficult or painful it proved, was necessary to his peace of mind; a matter of tying up loose ends. Not long ago he'd remarked that life consists of little besides loose ends and that often they were the only thing that gave survivors a reason for going on. The way things had turned out, he'd said it to someone who hadn't survived.

A great distance overhead, he spotted a tiny black dot against the yellow canopy, one of Scutigera's "flying bagels," coming from the direction of the human camp toward the Elders' settlement. Wondering idly who it was, he slid, sword in hand, from Scutigera's back, landing lightly on his feet (given his training and condition, he'd have landed lightly anyway) in the low gravity.

Neither noticing nor caring whether his friends followed—a heroic feat of shutting out the world considering that one of them was a talking dog and the other nine meters from antenna-tip to toe-claw—he pushed a curtain of leafy branches out of the way, each motion of his body stirring memories burned into his brain by later events, to cross a little creek he recognized, and began working his way upstream along its low bank. The air felt cool and moist, laden with the oddly mixed perfumes of fresh growth and decaying forest debris. For a few heartbeats, an iridescent blue-green dragonfly hovered over his shoulder like a singing jewel before darting off on some predatory errand. In the end, he came to a miniature waterfall that broke the stream's course at the sprawling foot of an enormous canopy tree.

Not more than forty-eight hours ago (although he realized all over again that it seemed much longer), he'd stood on this exact spot with a peculiar object in the palm of his hand, knowing it would resemble an undersized golf ball to the person he was showing it to, complete to color and texture.

"My office and personal quarters," he'd told her, "at least it will be in a few days. It's a seed with engineered genes. Be careful not to drop it or it'll try to take root. When it matures," he remembered saying with a glibness that made him feel a bit ashamed now, "it'll cantilever out over the stream and I can fall asleep listening to the waterfall."

Drawing sustenance from the tree (equally engineered to tolerate the process), the new growth jutted out now like a shelf mushroom, still many days away from its intended size and shape. All nautiloid construction on the asteroid had been accomplished this way, by living things designed at a molecular level to grow to a certain shape and size and die, leaving skeletons of titanium or plastic as coral leaves a skeleton of calcium—preconceived, rather than prefabricated. On the way here with Sam and Scutigera, he'd persuaded himself that he wanted to check the progress of the seed he'd planted. He was weary of his impersonal temporary quarters in the Elders' complex, wearier still of the forced companionship they necessitated, at meals for example. A need for solitude throbbed within him like a toothache. But at this particular moment he couldn't imagine dwelling on this spot. He had more compelling reasons for being here.

He and his guest had found a mossy place to sit at the base of the tree. Listening to the waterfall—in the clearer, deeper water a meter away, a handful of silver minnows darted and gleamed—he'd explained that the site he'd chosen was exactly halfway between the human and the nautiloid camps. This seemed appropriate, since it more or less described his own position. Had circumstances been different he'd have gone on to say that, as a human brought up with the outlook and values of the Elders, he'd felt a bit lost since coming to 5023 Eris and at the same time caught in the middle.

Had circumstances been different, he'd have asked her . . .

Instead, he'd accused her of a series of terrible crimes, tricked her into confessing, and dealt with her in the customary manner of a moral debt assessor, assisting her to pay the token price (it could be no more than that) for three lives she'd taken with far less concern than he was showing her. And now the thought of living and working here—but that was pointless. Suppose somebody lived as long as Mister Thoggosh—or his own mother—indulging in the kind of fetishism which made him avoid every place where something painful had occurred: eventually there wouldn't be anyplace he could go, anything he could do, that wouldn't carry with it some unbearable association.

"So the criminal does return to the scene of the crime!"

He turned, startled not so much by the presence of another person as by the fact that he hadn't noticed her until now. The first thing that impressed him about Doctor Rosalind Nguyen, here in the deep, kilometer-tall forest, was how tiny she looked. She wasn't the least bit frail; at the moment she seemed the most solid thing here. Her eyes were huge and dark, her skin the color of antique gold. Only as an afterthought did he open his mouth to protest the injustice of her words. Stepping toward him around the canopy tree, hands in her trouser pockets, she cut him off simply by raising her eyebrows.

"Forgive me, Eichra Oren, that was unkind and untrue. I just—well, it was there inside me to say." She scuffed at loose leaves lying on the ground and smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that appealed to him. If his culture had used the same symbolic conventions as hers, he'd have described her face as heart-shaped, its lines beginning with a small, almost pointed chin, sweeping upward through pleasing curves and angled cheekbones to a broad, intelligent brow. Her hair was black as space and unusually fine in texture. "Now that it's said, at least I don't have to think it any more."

They'd spoken several times in camp, but never like this, out of sight of the others. He was unaware that, like many Asian English speakers of even the third or fourth generation, she spoke with something that wasn't quite an accent, a lingering habit of family speech or even some minor difference of structure that nobody but a physical anthropologist would know or care about. What he heard he might have called a lilt. Sensitive as he was to language and the sound of words, he only knew that he enjoyed listening to her.

"What are you doing here?" He cleared his throat. The question hadn't come out as he'd intended, but like his idea of a police interrogation.

She shrugged, unoffended, a pretty gesture he surprised himself by hoping was uncalculated. "Trying to figure out what happened here—not the facts, I know them all too well—just how I feel about them, what they mean. Yours is a strange culture, Eichra Oren. It prefers its charity and brutality in unmixed portions."

The statement was so full of false assumptions that he didn't know where to begin setting her straight. She'd have done the necropsy, of course, and that would be influencing her. She was standing beside him now, looking up into his eyes, close enough that he caught the clean scent of her hair. That and the way she'd said his name suddenly made it difficult to think. Reille y Sanchez had had the same effect on him. What was it about American women?

"I—"

He wanted to argue, to tell her that whatever favors the Elders had done for her people, they hardly constituted charity. And more importantly, that the act of judgment—of justice—he had committed in this place had been the opposite of brutality. Somehow the words wouldn't come and he dragged himself to a halt at the first stupid-sounding syllable, unwilling to compound inanity.

Again she smiled. "Don't misunderstand me, Eichra Oren, that's not a criticism." She lifted a small, slender hand as if to lay it on his forearm, then let it drop. He saw, with the involuntary eye of a reflexive observer, that it had that look of transparent parchment—not as unattractive as it sounded—which came from a physician's practice of washing dozens of times a day. "At least I don't believe it is . . ."

He'd noticed before that Americans had characteristic reflexes of their own. At the moment, she was looking around to make sure they weren't being overheard, completely unaware that she was doing it. He encouraged her with a nod.

She got it out in a rush: "It might even result in a happier world."

That was the very point he'd come here to ponder, although he found, somewhat to his chagrin, that he was less interested in what she was saying to him than in how she looked as she said it, the way she moved, the way her mouth, her lips, her tongue, her small white teeth had with the words they made.

"That's interesting. Tell me why you think so."

"You have to understand," she was still tentative, "that everything about life the way we humans lead it—"

"You humans?" He suppressed an impulse to step back. What was implied by that phrase, even unintentionally, disappointed him. But at least, as she struggled to deal with her own awkwardness, he had a chance to catch his breath, regain his conversational bearings again.

"I mean . . ." She looked down at her small feet, keeping her eyes on the mossy ground, obviously feeling as self-conscious as he did. It was easier for her to speak to him this way, focused on battered Kevlar and neoprene rather than his face. " . . . those of us from Soviet America, from the United World Soviet, from our version of Earth. Everything about life there has always felt, to me, sort of murky and diluted at the same time—"

He bent, tilting his head to look up into her eyes, resisting an urge to reach out and lift her chin. Aside from the effect her small, well-shaped breasts and slender waist—contours easily discernable under her soft, well-worn ship-suit—seemed to be having on his endocrine and circulatory systems (how could this be happening so soon after what he'd just gone through with Estrellita?) she was the first of these people who promised to make anything resembling sense. He didn't want to spoil it.

"What do you mean, `everything,' Dr. Nguyen?"

"Nobody here but us Rosalinds." She looked up at him. "Anyway, I seem to have left my doctorate—and any wisdom I ever managed to acquire with it—back in camp. Or back on Earth, maybe. I don't know what I mean, Eichra Oren, the moral atmosphere, I suppose."

She shrugged, this time with tension and frustration, folded her hands and pressed the heels of her palms together. The tips of her left fingers were calloused. He remembered seeing a stringed instrument in camp and guessed—in his profession guesses were as important as deductions—that she seldom played for others. It wouldn't suit her character. Whatever music she made would serve her as a means of relaxation, meditation, even therapy.

"Polluted," she went on, "and at the same time lacking enough oxygen. At home all of our favorite homilies condemn seeing things in black and white. But that's the way I see them, Eichra Oren, the way I always have. I must, doing what I do, or people who are counting on me die. That's why I think I understand what happened here. There's a cleanliness in the way your people address moral issues, as if they were engineering problems, a genuine aspect of reality, that I find—whatever it reveals about me—exhilarating, like a mountain breeze blowing away the cloying humidity of a swamp."

He grinned at her. "Or the miasma of Marxism?"

"Nobody believes in that superstitious rot any more," she protested. "But somehow it seems to lead a life of its own no matter what anybody believes. And whenever anything important has to be done, we spend half of our precious time and energy giving it lip service, frightened to death that the other guy will turn out to be orthodox and expect it of us."

He searched his recently acquired memories. "Comrade Grundy?"

She smiled. "She's probably trapped just like the rest of us. The awful part is that you can never tell, nobody wears a sign, and the price for guessing wrong is terrible. Even once that's settled, we waste the other half of our time and energy trying to find ways around the constraints imposed by the belief-system itself. You should see the contortions our geneticists have to go through, just because Saint Karl backed the wrong theory of evolution!"

"Not to mention your economists. You're saying that, with the exception of the occasional dangerous believer, you're all compelled to live with Marxism the way your Western civilization was compelled to live, however uncomfortably, with Christianity for what . . . twenty centuries, wasn't it?"

She gave him a reevaluating look. "That was long before my time, Eichra Oren. As the saying goes, I'm an atheist, thank God. And `our' Western civilization aside," her eyes twinkled, "my ancestors were all Buddhists."

Whatever he'd intended to say never got said. They turned at the sound of someone, something, crashing toward them through the dense underbrush. When he saw who it was, Eichra Oren realized that the racket had been a deliberate, polite warning.

It worried him when Sam was polite.

"Hiya, Doc. I hate to break this up, Boss, but the reluctant crustacean says he has klicks to go and promises to keep. And His Majesty Thoggosh the First is paging us again. Anyway, you two don't have as much privacy as you think. Rubber Chicken Alvarez has been watching you from the bushes."

"Garbage grinder, practical joker, and Peeping Tom." Rosalind shook her head. "Somehow it doesn't surprise me at all."

 

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Framed