"Maybe she lives elsewhere on Demoth," I suggested. "It takes next to no time for someone to travel here by sleeve…" Tic looked away again, then turned back. "No one fitting Maya’s particulars has taken the Bonaventure sleeve in the past two weeks."
I stared at him in great gaping shock. Sure, the Transit Board required sleeve operators to record who passed through when… but those records were kept confidential except by court order. Police could get warrants to track criminals; accident investigators could find the names of travelers splattered or spaced by malfunctions; but members of the Vigil had no authority to check the movements of private citizens. If I tried such a thing, the world-soul would stonewall me with information does not exist or is not validly accessible. It might also notify my superiors, who’d demand to know what in merry hell I thought I was doing.
"Transit records are tight-sealed," I told Tic in a low voice. "How can you search through them—"
"I can’t," he replied. "But the world-soul can. And Xe’s a dear old girl who’ll do her utmost to be obliging if you ask your questions persuasively. One: I am interested in locating a murderer, who is by definition a dangerous non-sentient creature. Two: we have honest reason to believe this Maya passed information, knowingly or not, to our murderer sometime between her evening with Chappalar and Chappalar’s death the next morning. Three: it’s my duty as a citizen of the League of Peoples to warn other sentients about potentially lethal risks… which means I should notify Maya she spoke to a dangerous non-sentient at least once and presumably may do so again. Four: I direct the world-soul to warn Maya posthaste. Five: the world-soul asks how to contact the woman, and I provide all the leads I can, including that she might have recently traveled on the Bonaventure Sleeve. Six: the world-soul anxiously replies it can’t send the warning because no woman fitting the criteria appears in the transit records." He shrugged. "Perfectly straightforward."
The shrug was a nice touch — Tic’s face looked wholly sincere, as if anyone could have strung together that chain of reasoning in the half second it took to link with the datasphere.
No thought at all of trying to impress me.
Whether or not I was impressed, I swore I wouldn’t show it. "So this Maya…" I stopped, struck by a thought. "Conceivably, ‘Maya’ is a nickname that has nothing to do with her real name. That would make it hard to find her in the city database or the transit records."
"Oh. True." Tic’s face darkened. Literally. Went a shade grayer in the gathering dusk. "Nicknames are such a flippant human custom. Impertinent. Jaunty. If you don’t like your old name, go through a proper rechristening like decent people instead of just deciding…" He fell silent a moment, his face distant. "All right," he said, after a few seconds, "the world-soul will phone every woman in Great St. Caspian over the age of one hundred, and tell her there’s an urgent message if she goes by the name Maya. It will do the same for anyone in the right age range who traveled here by sleeve recently. If there really is a Maya, we should flush her out."
"If there really is a Maya?" I repeated. "Why do you think she might not exist?"
"I took a quick peek at the language database," he replied. "The world ‘maya’ appears in several human tongues; but in Sanskrit, it can be translated as ‘fleshly illusion.’ I find that thought-provoking, don’t you? Especially when we know our murderer uses androids."
Ouch.
We waited for the world-soul to send its messages. It wouldn’t take long to get a response — any woman who got an emergency beep on her wrist-implant would answer it pronto unless she was under anaesthetic. Or under a twenty-year-old stud with rock-hard dollies.
But I digress.
Night was falling faster now: a cold-looking night that would freeze puddles and frost the trees. One of our tiny moons, the fast one called Orange, floated gibbously above the Bonaventure skyline; its usual apricot color looked faded tonight, like a shrivelly yellow pea.
Three stories above us, Jupkur launched off his window ledge, gliding home for the evening. His breath steamed… which showed it really was cold, considering the coolish Oolom body temperature. I watched him disappear into the gathering darkness, his skin turning purple with the sky.
And me standing by the window. One hand against the un-glass, letting the nano-puppies lick me again. Bored with waxing poetic about the dusk and the moon, wanting to do something.
Tedious thing, waiting. Elusive thing, patience.
Mother used to make me say that prayer, "God grant me the serenity, etc." but I could only chant it through twice before getting the screamy-weamies. Then I’d bound out of the room and go for a run or something.
It wouldn’t look good if I ran out on a master proctor… especially with him sitting pond-placid on the edge of my desk, staring out at the twilight. And how much longer would we really have to wait? There could only be a few dozen women of the right age in Bonaventure. Half that number in the mining towns and outports. Maybe half again among travelers who’d recently used our sleeve. A hundred people? On that order.
And if none was Chappalar’s sweetheart? Now that Tic had planted ideas in my mind, I couldn’t help harking back over the past few days. Maya hadn’t shown up at Chappalar’s funeral, had she? And she hadn’t sent flowers or a card, or even a white stone in the Oolom tradition — I’d checked over the memorials at the burial service, and hadn’t seen anything from her.
Was she a robot spy, sent to watch him? Possibly: top-price teaser androids could fool lonely chumps into thinking the artificial was real… at least for a while. And duping an Oolom would be easier than fooling a Homo sap; Chappalar might dismiss glitches in the android’s programming as normal human idiosyncrasies. Why should he know how our species behaved when things got breathy?
If Maya was a robot… but then, what about the other proctors who got killed? Did they have robot spies watching them too?
No need. According to news reports, three of the proctors were killed in their homes, and another two in their offices — no inside information required to find any of them. The final two were attacked together as they waited to present a report to a parliamentary committee… a presentation that was publicized days in advance.
So: the killer/killers had no trouble finding seven of the eight dead proctors. The exception was Chappalar… whose schedule that morning was known only to me and Maya.
"Let’s check Chappalar’s office," I said suddenly. "See if we can find anything about this mystery woman."
"The police searched the place carefully," Tic answered. "So did I."
"But neither you nor the police were specifically looking for information about Maya. Were you?"
Tic frowned, then said, "True." He headed for the door.
MINDLESS MACHINE
Three of the four walls in the elevator were vidscreens, showing a panoramic view of the city around our office — what you’d see if the elevator were glass and the tree trunk transparent. Oolom architecture used that trick a lot: cramped enclosed spaces like elevator cabs were prettied up with airy visuals (not to mention wind sounds and artificial breeze) to make them seem wide-open to the world.
Standing back by the elevator door, Tic quietly gazed at the cityscape. He had good stillness — no slouching, no, fidgets, no sighs. Presence in the present.
I had plenty of time to watch him. (More devil-be-damned waiting.) Oolom elevators climb slug-slowly… only as fast as you can glide up a lazy air thermal. Their elevators go down a lot faster, matching the typical airspeed of an Oolom in landing descent.