The screen went blank before I could say thank you.
STRAWBERRY SMOKE
I had goaded/charmed/blustered my family into leaving Sallysweet River when I was twenty-one. By then, I was bored with the boonies and stabilized enough after my years of wildness to get cringey over the way people looked at me on the street. Anyway, a bare-rock mining town had bugger-all opportunities compared to the big city of Bonaventure… where Winston got his scholarship to law school, Angie found she was a VR savant, Egerton bought his first cargo-hauler, and so on. The family thanked me eventually, each by each, for nagging and ragging till we moved.
Despite that, my spouses hadn’t totally cut their ties with the old hometown. They’d all returned time and again over the years, visiting parents and siblings, showing off their children and other successes.
Me, I’d never gone back. Dads was dead. Mother had left town the day I got married — either washing her hands of me, or just taking the opportunity to attend to her own sanity now that my spouses were in charge of mine. Whatever the reason, Ma had scarpered south to the jungles of Argentia and was now breeding Demothian orchids for their natural antivirals, living in a grass shack with a gentleman Oolom pharmer. So I had no family to visit in Sallysweet River. And nary a success to show off… not unless you counted mere survival. On top of which, how could you feel nostalgic for a slag heap of a town, filled with bad memories and folks who thought I was dirt?
Even so… even so. I found myself going dewy-eyed as the police skimmer soared over forest and tundra toward my birthplace. The darkness got to me; no lights below but the glint of stars reflecting off snow. I remembered nights as a girl, walking through that darkness — with Dads, with a boy, with friends, or by myself, each type of walk different and each one rare magical.
Funny how you forget about magic. Even when you say (as we all do) that you’ve never lost the spirit of childhood, you find that for years you haven’t felt the slightest magical shiver. And you don’t really acknowledge that till magic touches you again.
Darkness. Quiet.
Yes, the police skimmer had some dim interior lights. And there was the background mutter of a ScrambleTac sergeant outlining plans for contingencies. But that had nothing to do with me. I sat by the window and let my mind be swallowed by the night.
Unyielding tundra night: the same night that had hugged me as a child. The same night that had wrapped this land in silence for untold humanless millennia.
Deep roots. Continuity. Home.
Sallysweet River had grown. Our old family compound once stood on the edge of town; now it anchored a dandified second village, dotted with tourist shops and tourist chalets and tourist amusement plazas. All but the Henry Smallwood Guest Home were huddled down empty now, hibernating in the darkness. This was the lull season, too late for skiing, too early for hiking, too muddy for damned near anything. The skimmer settled down in the guest-home parking lot. Cheticamp, Tic and I waited while the ScrambleTac team fanned out to deploy themselves around the perimeter. The club-thumpers looked right chipper as they slunk into the darkness. I don’t know if that meant they were confident there’d be no trouble or happy at the possibility they might get into a firefight.
On the trip in, one of the detectives made a bet with all takers that Maya had nothing to do with the killings. At most, she might have babbled too freely in a public place, gossiping that her snuggle-time pal Chappalar was scheduled to lead a secret inspection of Pump Station 3. One of the real bad guys probably overheard her and seized the chance to scrag a proctor on the job.
The detective who proposed this theory was a man named Willis Bleak — a roly-poly Homo sap with a boyish unwrinkled face that surely doomed him to play Good Cop for his entire professional career. His partner, P.O. Fellburnie, was a female Divian of the TyeTye breed: a head taller than me, thick as a barrel, and spilling out of her clothes with muscle. TyeTyes were originally designed for life on a planet whose gravity topped 2.3 Earth G’s; Jupkur once joked they weren’t engineered genetically but geologically, like walking chunks of real estate that could bench-press nine hundred kilos. Among friends, Fellburnie came across as quite the amiable woman, a classic "genial giant"… but on the job, I could imagine her slipping into Bad Cop any old time she felt like it.
The detectives took the lead, with Cheticamp, Tic and me following them up the guest home’s front walk. My own dome had sat somewhere in this vicinity — hard to tell the exact spot, with so many landmarks hidden by darkness. Then again, who knew if the landmarks were even there? The rocks and trees of my childhood may have been cleared away to make room for the guest home’s croquet pitch.
The front door opened as we approached, and in we went to a relentlessly cozy lounge. Overstuffed chairs of leaner hide sat buff and bulgy around a circular flagstone hearth. The fire was burning bluebarrel logs; I could tell because their smoke had a stringy scent of strawberries, subtle but sweet enough to make my stomach growl. No one was seated near the fireplace, but an oldish Oolom woman wearing a wood-bead necklace stood behind a counter at the back of the room. She looked up, smiled, and said, "Good evening. May I help you?"
Fellburnie and Bleak produced ID cards. The woman (wearing a badge that said hostess) took Bleak’s card and pressed it against her wrist-implant for verification by the world-soul. We all nodded in approval — too many trusting civilians take a gold-embossed ID at face value. In less than a second, the world-soul triangulated on Bleak (or rather Bleak’s wrist-comm) and reported that yes, the real Detective Willis Bleak, officer in good standing of the Bonaventure Police, was no more than a step away from the card. The hostess handed back Bleak’s ID and asked, "What brings you to Sallysweet River, Officers?"
"We’re looking for a woman named Maya Cuttack," Bleak said. "She’s staying here?"
"Dr. Cuttack has a room with us, yes," the hostess replied. "She’s been here since autumn — she rents by the month. But I haven’t seen her in several days."
Beside me, Cheticamp stiffened. You’d expect cops to have a better poker face.
"Do you know where she might have gone?" Fellburnie asked.
The hostess whispered into her wrist-implant, then turned to a desk screen to read the result. "Dr. Cuttack didn’t tell us where she went," the hostess said. "She’s made several trips down to Bonaventure recently… and she has all-weather camping equipment too. You know she’s an archaeologist? It’s not unusual for her to spend several nights away now and then, examining various sites in the neighborhood."
Even though she never got a license, I thought to myself. Looks like our Maya doesn’t stand on legal niceties.
"Do you know where these sites might be?" Bleak asked.
"She was interested in abandoned mines. There are a number near here, dating back some three thousand human years. I can lend you an excellent survey map that shows the known sites… although I doubt if you’ll find Dr. Cuttack at any of them. Rumor has it she’s found a promising new site. But then, I never heard the doctor say that herself; someone on staff may have just been spreading speculations."
There were plenty more questions. When exactly was Maya last seen at the guest home? Two days before Chappalar died. Did Maya have friends who might know her current whereabouts? Dr. Cuttack kept to herself. Had Maya ever had any visitors? None that the hostess could recall.
In other words, nothing. Maya could have been a bona fide archaeologist, innocently pursuing her studies; or a killer biding her time in the back of beyond, occasionally disappearing on "expeditions" as a cover for more sinister activities.