In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns Read online

  “Yeah,” she said. The horn glittered dangerously. “I haven’t broken any laws in India.”

  The sasquatch stood up discreetly and backed away.

  “It is my unfortunate duty,” Indrapramit continued, “to inform you of the murder of your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin.”

  The unicorn blinked iridescent lashes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re talking about something I have killfiled. I won’t be able to hear you until you stop.”

  Indrapramit’s avatar didn’t look at Ferron, but she felt his request for help. She stepped forward and keyed a top-level override. “You will hear us,” she said to the unicorn. “I am sorry for the intrusion, but we are legally bound to inform you that your mother, Dr. Jessica Fang, a.k.a. Dr. Dexter Coffin, has been murdered.”

  The unicorn’s lip curled in a snarl. “Good. I’m glad.”

  Ferron stepped back. It was about the response she had expected.

  “She made me,” the unicorn said. “That doesn’t make her my mother. Is there anything else you’re legally bound to inform me of?”

  “No,” Indrapramit said.

  “Then get the hell out.” The unicorn set her amber gaming stone down on the grid. A golden glow encompassed it and its neighbors. “I win.”

  “Warehoused,” Indrapramit said with distaste, back in his own body and nibbling a slice of quiche. “And happy about it.”

  Ferron had a pressed sandwich of vegetables, tapenade, cheeses, and some elaborate and incomprehensible European charcuterie made of smoked vatted protein. It was delicious, in a totally exotic sort of way. “Would it be better if she were miserable and unfulfilled?”

  He made a noise of discontentment and speared a bite of spinach and egg.

  Ferron knew her combativeness was really all about her mother, not Fang/Coffin’s adult and avoidant daughter. Maybe it was the last remnants of upping, but she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “What she’s doing is not so different from what our brains do naturally, except now it’s by tech/filters rather than prejudice and neurology.”

  Indrapramit changed the subject. “Let’s make a virtual tour of the scene.” As an icon blinked in Ferron’s attention space, he added, “Oh, hey. Final autopsy report.”

  “Something from Damini, too,” Ferron said. It had a priority code on it. She stepped into a artificial reality simulation of Coffin’s apartment as she opened the contact. The thrill of the chase rose through the fog of her fading hypomania. Upping didn’t seem to stick as well as it had when she was younger, and the crashes came harder now–but real, old-fashioned adrenaline was the cure for everything.

  “Ferron,” Ferron said, frowning down at the browned patches on Coffin’s virtual rug. Indrapramit rezzed into the conference a heartbeat later. “Damini, what do the depths of the net reveal?”

  “Jackpot,” Damini said. “Did you get a chance to look at the autopsy report yet?”

  “We just got done with the next of kin,” Ferron said. “You’re fast–I just saw the icon.”

  “Short form,” Damini said, “is that’s not Dexter Coffin.”

  Ferron’s avatar made a slow circuit around the perimeter of the virtual murder scene. “There was a DNA match. Damini, we just told his daughter he was murdered.”

  Indrapramit, more practical, put down his fork in meatspace. His AR avatar mimicked the motion with an empty hand. “So who is it?”

  “Nobody,” Damini said. She leaned back, satisfied. “The medical examiner says it’s topologically impossible to turn somebody inside out like that. It’s vatted, whatever it is. A grown object, nominally alive, cloned from Dexter Coffin’s tissue. But it’s not Dexter Coffin. I mean, think about it–what organ would that be, exactly?”

  “Cloned.” In meatspace, Ferron picked a puff of hyacinth-blue fur off her uniform sleeve. She held it up where Indrapramit could see it.

  His eyes widened. “Yes,” he said. “What about the patterns, though?”

  “Do I look like a bioengineer to you? Indrapramit,” Ferron said thoughtfully. “Does this crime scene look staged to you?”

  He frowned. “Maybe.”

  “Damini,” Ferron asked, “how’d you do with Dr. Coffin’s files? And Dr. Nnebuogar’s files?”

  “There’s nothing useful in Coffin’s email except some terse exchanges with Dr. Nnebuogar very similar in tone to the Jessica Fang papers. Nnebuogar was warning Coffin off her research. But there were no death threats, no love letters, no child support demands.”

  “Anything he was interested in?”

  “That star,” Damini said. “The one that’s going nova or whatever. He’s been following it for a couple of weeks now, before the press release hit the mainstream feeds. Nnebuogar’s logins support the idea that she’s behind the utility virus, by the way.”

  “Logins can be spoofed.”

  “So they can,” Damini agreed.

  Ferron peeled her sandwich open and frowned down at the vatted charcuterie. It all looked a lot less appealing now. “Nobody came to Coffin’s flat. And it turns out the stiff wasn’t a stiff after all. So Coffin went somewhere else, after making preparations to flee and then abandoning them.”

  “And the crime scene was staged,” Indrapramit said.

  “This is interesting,” Damini said. “Coffin hadn’t been to the office in a week.”

  “Since about when Morganti started investigating him. Or when he might have become aware that she was on his trail.”

  Ferron said something sharp and self-critical and radically unprofessional. And then she said, “I’m an idiot. Leakage.”

  “Leakage?” Damini asked. “You mean like when people can’t stop talking about the crime they actually committed, or the person you’re not supposed to know they’re having an affair with?”

  An urgent icon from Ferron’s mausi Sandhya–the responsible auntie, not the fussy auntie–blinked insistently at the edge of her awareness. Oh Gods, what now?

  “Exactly like that,” Ferron said. “Look, check on any hits for Coffin outside his flat in the past ten days. And I need confidential warrants for DNA analysis of the composters at the BioShell laboratory facility and also at Dr. Rao’s apartment.”

  “You think Rao killed him?” Damini didn’t even try to hide her shock.

  Blink, blink went the icon. Emergency. Code red. Your mother has gone beyond the pale, my dear. “Just pull the warrants. I want to see what we get before I commit to my theory.”

  “Why?” Indrapramit asked.

  Ferron sighed. “Because it’s crazy. That’s why. And see if you can get confidential access to Rao’s calendar files and email. I don’t want him to know you’re looking.”

  “Wait right there,” Damini said. “Don’t touch a thing. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Mother,” Ferron said to her mother’s lion-maned goddess of an avatar, “I’m sorry. Sandhya’s sorry. We’re all sorry. But we can’t let you go on like this.”

  It was the hardest thing she’d ever said.

  Her mother, wearing Sekhmet’s golden eyes, looked at Ferron’s avatar and curled a lip. Ferron had come in, not in a uniform avatar, but wearing the battle-scarred armor she used to play in when she was younger, when she and her mother would spend hours Atavistic. That was during her schooling, before she got interested in stopping–or at least avenging–real misery.

  Was that fair? Her mother’s misery was real. So was that of Jessica Fang’s abandoned daughter. And this was a palliative–against being widowed, against being bedridden.

  Madhuvanthi’s lip-curl slowly blossomed into a snarl. “Of course. You can let them destroy this. Take away everything I am. It’s not like it’s murder.”

  “Mother,” Ferron said, “it’s not real.”

  “If it isn’t,” her mother said, gesturing around the room, “what is, then? I made you. I gave you life. You owe me this. Sandhya said you came home with one of those new parrot cats. Where’d the money for that come f
rom?”

  “Chairman Miaow,” Ferron said, “is evidence. And reproduction is an ultimately sociopathic act, no matter what I owe you.”

  Madhuvanthi sighed. “Daughter, come on one last run.”

  “You’ll have your own memories of all this,” Ferron said. “What do you need the archive for?”

  “Memory,” her mother scoffed. “What’s memory, Tamanna? What do you actually remember? Scraps, conflations. How does it compare to being able to relive?”

  To relive it, Ferron thought, you’d have to have lived it in the first place. But even teetering on the edge of fatigue and crash, she had the sense to keep that to herself.

  “Have you heard about the star?” she asked. Anything to change the subject. “The one the aliens are using to talk to us?”

  “The light’s four million years old,” Madhuvanthi said. “They’re all dead. Look, there’s a new manifest synesthesia show. Roman and Egyptian. Something for both of us. If you won’t come on an adventure with me, will you at least come to an art show? I promise I’ll never ask you for archive money again. Just come to this one thing with me? And I promise I’ll prune my archive starting tomorrow.”

  The lioness’s brow was wrinkled. Madhuvanthi’s voice was thin with defeat. There was no more money, and she knew it. But she couldn’t stop bargaining. And the art show was a concession, something that evoked the time they used to spend together, in these imaginary worlds.

  “Ferron,” she said. Pleading. “Just let me do it myself.”

  Ferron. They weren’t really communicating. Nothing was won. Her mother was doing what addicts always did when confronted–delaying, bargaining, buying time. But she’d call her daughter Ferron if it might buy her another twenty-four hours in her virtual paradise.

  “I’ll come,” Ferron said. “But not until tonight. I have some work to do.”

  “Boss. How did you know to look for that DNA?” Damini asked, when Ferron activated her icon.

  “Tell me what you found,” Ferron countered.

  “DNA in the BioShell composter that matches that of Chairman Miaow,” she said, “and therefore that of Dexter Coffin’s cat. And the composter of Rao’s building is just full of his DNA. Rao’s. Much, much more than you’d expect. Also, some of his email and calendar data has been purged. I’m attempting to reconstruct–”

  “Have it for the chargesheet,” Ferron said. “I bet it’ll show he had a meeting with Coffin the night Coffin vanished.”

  Dr. Rao lived not in an aptblock, even an upscale one, but in the Vertical City. Once Damini returned with the results of the warrants, Ferron got her paperwork in order for the visit. It was well after nightfall by the time she and Indrapramit, accompanied by Detective Morganti and four patrol officers, went to confront him.

  They entered past shops and the vertical farm in the enormous tower’s atrium. The air smelled green and healthy, and even at this hour of the night, people moved in steady streams towards the dining areas, across lush green carpets.

  A lift bore the police officers effortlessly upward, revealing the lights of Bengaluru spread out below through a transparent exterior wall. Ferron looked at Indrapramit and pursed her lips. He raised his eyebrows in reply. Conspicuous consumption. But they couldn’t very well hold it against Rao now.

  They left the Morganti and the patrol officers covering the exit and presented themselves at Dr. Rao’s door.

  “Open,” Ferron said formally, presenting her warrant. “In the name of the law.”

  The door slid open, and Ferron and Indrapramit entered cautiously.

  The flat’s resident must have triggered the door remotely, because he sat at his ease on furniture set as a chaise. A grey cat with red ear-tips crouched by his knee, rubbing the side of its face against his trousers.

  “New!” said the cat. “New people! Namaskar! It’s almost time for tiffin.”

  “Dexter Coffin,” Ferron said to the tall, thin man. “You are under arrest for the murder of Dr. Rao.”

  As they entered the lift and allowed it to carry them down the external wall of the Vertical City, Coffin standing in restraints between two of the patrol officers, Morganti said, “So. If I understand this properly, you–Coffin–actually killed Rao to assume his identity? Because you knew you were well and truly burned this time?”

  Not even a flicker of his eyes indicated that he’d heard her.

  Morganti sighed and turned her attention to Ferron. “What gave you the clue?”

  “The scotophobin,” Ferron said. Coffin’s cat, in her new livery of gray and red, miaowed plaintively in a carrier. “He didn’t have memory issues. He was using it to cram Rao’s life story and eccentricities so he wouldn’t trip himself up.”

  Morganti asked, “But why liquidate his assets? Why not take them with him?” She glanced over her shoulder. “Pardon me for speaking about you as if you were a statue, Dr. Fang. But you’re doing such a good impression of one.”

  It was Indrapramit who gestured at the Vertical City rising at their backs. “Rao wasn’t wanting for assets.”

  Ferron nodded. “Would you have believed he was dead if you couldn’t find the money? Besides, if his debt–or some of it–was recovered, Honolulu would have less reason to keep looking for him.”

  “So it was a misdirect. Like the frame job around Dr. Nnebuogar and the table set for two…?”

  Her voice trailed off as a stark blue-white light cast knife-edged shadows across her face. Something blazed in the night sky, something as stark and brilliant as a dawning sun–but cold, as cold as light can be. As cold as a reflection in a mirror.

  Morganti squinted and shaded her eyes from the shine. “Is that a hydrogen bomb?”

  “If it was,” Indrapramit said, “Your eyes would be melting.”

  Coffin laughed, the first sound he’d made since he’d assented to understanding his rights. “It’s a supernova.”

  He raised both wrists, bound together by the restraints, and pointed. “In the Andromeda galaxy. See how low it is to the horizon? We’ll lose sight of it as soon as we’re in the shadow of that tower.”

  “Al-Rahman,” Ferron whispered. The lift wall was darkening to a smoky shade and she could now look directly at the light. Low to the horizon, as Coffin had said. So bright it seemed to be visible as a sphere.

  “Not that star. It was stable. Maybe a nearby one,” Coffin said. “Maybe they knew, and that’s why they were so desperate to tell us they were out there.”

  “Could they have survived that?”

  “Depends how close to Al-Rahman it was. The radiation–” Coffin shrugged in his restraints. “That’s probably what killed them.”

  “God in Heaven,” said Morganti.

  Coffin cleared his throat. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Ferron craned her head back as the point source of the incredible radiance slipped behind a neighboring building. There was no scatter glow: the rays of light from the nova were parallel, and the shadow they entered uncompromising, black as a pool of ink.

  Until this moment, she would have had to slip a skin over her perceptions to point to the Andromeda Galaxy in the sky. But now it seemed like the most important thing in the world that, two and a half million years away, somebody had shouted across the void before they died.

  A strange elation filled her. Everybody talking, and nobody hears a damned thing anyone–even themselves–has to say.

  “We’re here,” Ferron said to the ancient light that spilled across the sky and did not pierce the shadow into which she descended. As her colleagues turned and stared, she repeated the words like a mantra. “We’re here too! And we heard you.”

  –END–

  – for Asha Cat Srinivasan Shipman, and her family

  Image credit: Pegasus fresco from Pompeii by xueexueg on Photoree. (source) Used under Creative Commons.