The Colonel took a deep breath and smiled grimly. “There was a dead man’s brake. I had to rig the lever with a sandbag. I didn’t want to bring the car back for a second try.”
Martin Silenus pointed to the rapidly approaching support tower and the ceiling of clouds just beyond. The cable stretched upward into oblivion. “I guess we’re crossing the mountains now whether we want to or not.”
“How long to make the crossing?” asked Hoyt.
“Twelve hours. A little less perhaps. Sometimes the operators would stop the cars if the wind rose too high or the ice got too bad.”
“We won’t be stopping on this trip,” said Kassad.
“Unless the cable’s breached somewhere,” said the poet. “Or we hit a snag.”
“Shut up,” said Lamia. “Who’s interested in heating some dinner?”
“Look,” said the Consul.
They moved to the forward windows. The tram rose a hundred meters above the last brown curve of foothills. Kilometers below and behind they caught a final glimpse of the station, the haunted hovels of Pilgrims’ Rest, and the motionless windwagon.
Then snow and thick cloud enveloped them.
* * *
The tramcar had no real cooking facilities but the aft bulkhead offered a cold box and a microwave for reheating. Lamia and Weintraub combined various meats and vegetables from the windwagon’s galley to produce a passable stew. Martin Silenus had brought along wine bottles from both the Benares and the windwagon and he chose a Hyperion burgundy to go with the stew.
They were nearly finished with their dinner when the gloom pressing against the windows lightened and then lifted altogether. The Consul turned on his bench to see the sun suddenly reappear, filling the tramcar with a transcendent golden light.
There was a collective sigh from the group. It had seemed that darkness had fallen hours before, but now, as they rose above a sea of clouds from which rose an island chain of mountains, they were treated to a brilliant sunset. Hyperion’s sky had deepened from its daytime glaucous glare to the bottomless lapis lazuli of evening while a red-gold sun ignited cloud towers and great summits of ice and rock. The Consul looked around. His fellow pilgrims, who had seemed gray and small in the dim light of half a minute earlier, now glowed in the gold of sunset.
Martin Silenus raised his glass. “That’s better, by God.”
The Consul looked up at their line of travel, the massive cable dwindling to threadlike thinness far ahead and then to nothing at all. On a summit several kilometers beyond, gold light glinted on the next support tower.
“One hundred and ninety-two pylons,” said Silenus in a singsong tour guide’s bored tones. “Each pylon is constructed of duralloy and whiskered carbon and stands eighty-three meters high.”
“We must be high,” said Brawne Lamia in a low voice.
“The high point of the ninety-six-kilometer tramcar voyage lies above the summit of Mount Dryden, the fifth highest peak in the Bridle Range, at nine thousand two hundred forty-six meters,” droned on Martin Silenus.
Colonel Kassad looked around. “The cabin’s pressurized. I felt the change-over some time ago.”
“Look,” said Brawne Lamia.
The sun had been resting on the horizon line of clouds for a long moment. Now it dipped below, seemingly igniting the depths of storm cloud from beneath and casting a panoply of colors along the entire western edge of the world. Snow cornices and glaze ice still glowed along the western side of the peaks, which rose a kilometer or more above the rising tramcar. A few brighter stars appeared in the deepening dome of sky.
The Consul turned to Brawne Lamia. “Why don’t you tell your story now, M. Lamia? We’ll want to sleep later, before arriving at the Keep.”
Lamia sipped the last of her wine. “Does everyone want to hear it now?”
Heads nodded in the roseate twilight. Martin Silenus shrugged.
“All right,” said Brawne Lamia. She set down her empty glass, pulled her feet up on the bench so that her elbows rested on her knees, and began her tale.
THE DETECTIVE’S TALE:
THE LONG GOOD-BYE
I knew the case was going to be special the minute that he walked into my office. He was beautiful. By that I don’t mean effeminate or “pretty” in the male-model, HTV-star mode, merely … beautiful.
He was a short man, no taller than I, and I was born and raised in Lusus’s 1.3-g field. It was apparent in a second that my visitor was not from Lusus—his compact form was well proportioned by Web standards, athletic but thin. His face was a study in purposeful energy: low brow, sharp cheekbones, compact nose, solid jaw, and a wide mouth that suggested both a sensuous side and a stubborn streak. His eyes were large and hazel-colored. He looked to be in his late twenties standard.
Understand, I didn’t itemize all this the moment he walked in. My first thought was, Is this a client? My second thought was, Shit, this guy’s beautiful.
“M. Lamia?”
“Yeah.”
“M. Brawne Lamia of AllWeb Investigations?”
“Yeah.”
He looked around as if he didn’t quite believe it. I understood the look. My office is on the twenty-third level of an old industrial hive in the Old Digs section of Iron Pig on Lusus. I have three big windows that look out on Service Trench 9 where it’s always dark and always drizzling thanks to a massive filter drip from the Hive above. The view is mostly of abandoned automated loading docks and rusted girders.
What the hell, it’s cheap. And most of my clients call rather than show up in person.
“May I sit down?” he asked, evidently satisfied that a bona fide investigatory agency would operate out of such a slum.
“Sure,” I said and waved him to a chair. “M.… ah?”
“Johnny,” he said.
He didn’t look like a first-name type to me. Something about him breathed money. It wasn’t his clothes—common enough casuals in black and gray, although the fabric was better than average—it was just a sense that the guy had class. There was something about his accent. I’m good at placing dialects—it helps in this profession—but I couldn’t place this guy’s homeworld, much less local region.
“How can I help you, Johnny?” I held out the bottle of Scotch I had been ready to put away just as he entered.
Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought I wanted him to drink from the bottle. Hell, I have more class than that. There are paper cups over by the water cooler. “M. Lamia,” he said, the cultivated accent still bugging me by its elusiveness, “I need an investigator.”
“That’s what I do.”
He paused. Shy. A lot of my clients are hesitant to tell me what the job is. No wonder, since ninety-five percent of my work is divorce and domestic stuff. I waited him out.
“It’s a somewhat sensitive matter,” he said at last.
“Yeah, M.… ah, Johnny, most of my work falls under that category. I’m bonded with UniWeb and everything having to do with a client falls under the Privacy Protection Act. Everything is confidential, even the fact that we’re talking now. Even if you decide not to hire me.” That was basic bullshit since the authorities could get at my files in a moment if they ever wanted to, but I sensed that I had to put this guy at ease somehow. God, he was beautiful.
“Uh-huh,” he said and glanced around again. He leaned forward. “M. Lamia, I would want you to investigate a murder.”
This got my attention. I’d been reclining with my feet on the desk; now I sat up and leaned forward. “A murder? Are you sure? What about the cops?”