The Cause of Death Read online

  She was relieved to see that Jamie responded with a grin. "Actually, I have to admit I did a lot better than I thought I would. I just asked questions, questions, questions, and didn't wait to read the answers."

  Hannah reached for a display pad, flipped it to show research status, and was duly impressed to see that questions posed by one Jamie Mendez had generated 23.34 gigabytes of answer-data--more than what she had drawn herself by a good four gigs. Of course, 99.999 percent of the data that both of them had turned up would end up being utterly useless. The challenge over the next few days would be in filtering it down, finding the remaining .001 percent that could help them deal with the situation on the ground--whatever it was, exactly--and keep them both alive.

  "It looks like you did good work," she said. "But now it's time to do more." She glanced at the nav displays. "We've got maybe nine or ten hours of cheap and easy radio contact with Center before we're out of reliable range of everything but the really big dish antennae--which they aren't going to bother to use to talk with us. Then we can switch to lasergram contact, which isn't quite so cheap or easy. A while after that we'll be so far off, and moving so fast, that the laser transmitters in Center orbit will have trouble tracking us, and the signal delay times will get impractical. We'll be out of effective range of anything but QuickBeam messages, and we don't want to have to rely on QB more than we have to."

  "We don't have a QuickBeam sender on this ship, do we?" Mendez asked, plainly alarmed. Human-built QB senders had a bad reputation for detonating now and again.

  "Stars no!" Hannah replied. "A QB sender would be bigger than this ship. But we can receive QB, and we can relay via radio or laser, and ask for Center to send a query via QB to whatever other star system you like--within reason. They don't like us using QB any more than we have to. The BSI budget isn't everything that it could be."

  "Hmmm. Okay. There was one query I was thinking of sending, or at least wishing I could send."

  "What, and who to?"

  Jamie looked a little embarrassed. "To my old boss," he said. "Bindulan Halztec. The Pavlat I worked for. Kelly didn't give me a chance to say so, but I had heard of Reqwar--it's where Bindulan Halztec was from. He had to leave in a hurry years and years ago. I never did get the whole story. Some sort of political trouble."

  "I thought from what you said he was just a shopkeeper."

  "Just a shopkeeper on Earth," Jamie said. "It was pretty clear from the way he acted, and the way the other Pavlats acted, that he was something more--a lot more--than that before he came to Earth. And, if it came to that, his shop was something more than a shop. Any Pavlat with a problem wound up there, sooner or later--and usually the problem got solved. He had connections. I never was all that clear what they were, but he had them. Still does, I'm sure."

  "So you think he might be able to give you a little background help." BSI agents often used precisely this sort of back-channel friend-of-a-friend contact. The problem in the present case was that they knew so little about what the case was about that it would be hard to come up with a useful set of questions to ask, and even harder to come up with a set of useful questions that would be short enough to send via QB. "All right," she said. "Draft something short--very short--and show it to me. Do that first, while we're still in easy range of Center. Any other thoughts?"

  "Well, maybe just the start of one. I ran the name of the man we're supposed to escort back--if that's what we're supposed to do. Georg Hertzmann. Ran searches and metasearches and did some datamine work."

  "Yeah, so?"

  "So what I came up with is that if you run a query on Georg Hertzmann, and on Pavlat or Reqwar or both--practically everything that references those items has one other common referent."

  "Okay, I'll bite. What's the punch line?"

  "Pax Humana."

  Hannah made no attempt to conceal her surprise. "That muddies the waters. If Hertzmann belongs to PH, how is it a guy who belongs to a nonviolent action movement was convicted of murder?"

  "That's what I was wondering. I didn't have any chance at all to track it further than that--it might not even be that he is a PH member. But there's definitely some sort of connection. PH has a big office on Center. They might know something that could help us."

  "If they're in the mood to share," Hannah said thoughtfully. "I guess we need to make that query too, before we're out of range. I'll work that side of it while you're writing your letter to Shopkeeper Halztec." It took no particular detective skill to spot the disappointment in Jamie's face. He had wanted to work the Pax Humana lead himself. Hannah was pretty sure she knew why, based on what she had seen in his personnel file. "Look, Jamie--I know you're a big admirer of Pax Humana. It's in your file that you applied for PH membership."

  "And got turned down," he muttered.

  "That might be more of a compliment than you think," said Hannah. "But it's off point right now. I can easily understand your wanting to be the one to deal with them. But you obviously have to be the one to write to Halztec, and we're pressed for time for both queries. That means I have to be the one to contact Pax Humana." And I don't think it's any bad thing that they don't see a request for information signed by a failed applicant who's still a big fan. Pax Humana was in no need of more uncritical adoration than it was getting already.

  PH would be more likely to respond with useful information if the query came from a more senior person with a more detached attitude. But the odds were against their responding at all. Pax Humana didn't hold the BSI in the highest regard--and Hannah, like most BSI agents, returned the favor. In her experience, they were awfully big on demanding respectful treatment but not so great on extending it. "Let's go," she said. "We're on the clock."

  * * *

  Hannah tried to be a bit cagey in her signal to Pax Humana's offices on Center. She was asking for information, not help, after all. She felt obliged to include the text of the message received from Reqwar, on the off chance that it contained some coded reference that would make sense to someone there, but she did her best to downplay the seriousness of the situation--easy to do when she knew next to nothing about it.

  Jamie, meantime, worked up a tight, well-drafted query for his Pavlat friend, in a format suitable for QB transmission, in less than twenty minutes. In less time, in fact, than it took her to draft her query. She could have told him that, just to give his ego a bit of a boost. But she allowed herself the luxury of keeping quiet--and of not knocking a corner off her own ego. She got busy, and got the signals sent.

  * * *

  REQWAR . . . Habitable planet currently occupied by the Pavlat (see cross-ref). Mass .703 Earth, diameter .91 Earth, surface gravity .85 Earth, atmosphere at sea level .940 bar (approx 92.5% Earth sea level normal.) Period of rotation 31 hours, 15 minutes, 4 seconds.

  Jamie rubbed his eyes, blinked, and tried to focus again. His cabin aboard the Hastings was, all things considered, a reasonably comfortable place, if you didn't mind having to fold just about everything in and out of the floors, walls, and even the ceiling, but it was, nonetheless, a small, windowless box. He could handle that. What was really throwing him off was time. Fatigue and time.

  He checked his wristaid, and tried to figure out what time it was, really. His wristaid had picked up the shipwide links and automatically defaulted to the standard shipboard timekeeper, which had already converted to the Reqwar's day/night cycle and timekeeping, localized on the capital region of Thelmhome and Thelm's Keep. But his body was still on Center City Standard, the time kept in the Bullpen. He was not entirely sure if, right at the moment, it was day or night, or yesterday, or today, or even tomorrow back home--wherever home was, for him, at this point. California? Center City? BSI Orbital HQ?

  But whatever time of day it was, whatever day it was, time was the one thing he didn't have to waste. He soldiered on with his reading.

  Atmosphere: Oxygen 17%, Nitrogen 81%, CO2, water vapor, and trace inert gases 2%.

  . . . Landforms: Five small-to-me
dium island continents, ranging from Greenland-sized to Australia-sized, all associated with coastal islands . . .

  . . . Native life on the planet has evolved to a state roughly comparable to the very early Cambrian fauna era of Earth, more or less on a par with the Burgess Shale fauna: relatively sophisticated macroscopic multicelled life-forms have evolved in a large number of genuses, each with relatively few species . . . Plants and animals have colonized most regions of the world ocean, but native life has yet to establish any sort of foothold on land. However, imported life-forms, especially plant life, are well established on all the main continents and many of the smaller islands. These are, for the most part, lightly modified and bioengineered variants of species found on the Pavlat home world . . .

  Well, that at least jibed with what he had read from other sources. He had found that some sources repeated sections almost word for word from other references, while other sections were wildly different or contradictory. Never mind. He'd find out soon enough which bits were correct.

  There was something comfortable about the grind of studying. It was all very much like crunch time back at Stanford. Except a failing grade here doesn't just ding my grade point average, he reminded himself. It might get me killed.

  That thought provided all the incentive he needed to keep going. For one thing, he definitely needed more information on the particular breed of xenos they would be dealing with. Unfortunately, the sources on the Pavlat weren't much help in a lot of ways.

  Pavlat: A species of deceptively humanoid appearance, sporting much the same body plan as humans: bipedal and upright, with their arms and hands all but completely evolved away from their previous locomotive functions and available for lifting, carrying, manipulation, etc. The Pavlat are generally taller and thinner than humans, and with a thicker, more leathery skin. They have six fingers on each hand, arranged more or less human-style, but with an additional opposable outer thumb. However, they have only four toes on each foot. It is unclear whether the "missing" toes are fused with other toes or simply fail to develop.

  There is some variation in coloration, but the Pavlat are mainly bluish-grey in color, with the face, the ventral area of the torso, the palms of the hands, and the bottoms of their feet tan or light brown. Their faces are longer and more angular than humans', but the mouth and eyes are arranged as per the human model. There is no nose; instead, there are breathing holes just behind the large and fanlike ears. The ears themselves generally lie flat, but are even more maneuverable than a cat's. Ear position is an important signal of a Pavlat's mood.

  As with their general bodily appearance, Pavlat biology is deceptively similar to human biology. The similarities mask vast and subtle differences that have shaped traditional Pavlat culture in many ways, some obvious, and some quite surprising. . . .

  Jamie scored that section at about 85 percent right, based on his own quite limited experiences with the denizens of Little Pavlavia in Los Angeles. At least the article warned that first impressions could be deceptive--but it would have been nice if it had gone a bit further and tried to explain exactly how the similarities were deceptive. Interestingly enough, nearly all of the information seemed to be from human sources, with no data provided by third races. Maybe the other Elder Races didn't know much about the Pavlat either.

  Communities on Earth like Little Pavlavia in Los Angeles merely provided the illusion that humans understood the Pavlat. The Pavlat on Earth had done a fairish job of assimilating themselves--and of keeping their reasons for leaving the Pavlat world very murky indeed.

  He remembered from his days in Bindulan's store how complex codes and oaths of secrecy seem to cover everything. The humans that lived in and around Little Pavlavia had a few standard jokes about them, told with more affection than otherwise.

  "How can you tell if a Pavlat is keeping a secret?"

  "It's breathing."

  "How can you tell when a Pavlat has told a secret?"

  "It's stopped breathing."

  If there was a hint of menace in that punch line, it wasn't out of place. The Pavlat did not deal gently with those who betrayed a trust, or a secret. It had taken a good long time for the Los Angeles cops to work out a way to deal with the Pavs, and the situation still wasn't altogether satisfactory.

  Jamie rubbed his eyes and got back to work, slogging through the endless data files.

  As with any widely dispersed intelligent species, the Pavlat have developed any number of cultures, each more or less adapted to the local climate and other conditions. However, it is safe to say that nearly all Pavlat cultures are strongly hierarchical, and are based in large extent on a complex and dense web of family connections, and a tightly interlocking system of obligations and privileges . . .

  Jamie read on, until long after the words didn't make any sense anymore.

  * * *

  It was morning in Los Angeles. Bindulan Halztec got Jamie's message over breakfast--or what a human would call breakfast, merely because it was the first meal of the day. In most Pavlat cultures, Firstmeal was something much more--it was the main social and ceremonial meal of the day, when visitors came to call, and supplicants came asking boons, and family business was resolved.

  Except, of course, that Bindulan was eating alone, in his very human-style kitchen, dressed in his ill-fitting but quite comfortable human-style coveralls, and puttering about the place very much in the style of an elderly but spry human widower.

  Every once in a while, Bindulan realized just how un-Pavlat his behavior had become. A human, a youthful human, seeking him out, no doubt for guidance on some matter. It had come to that: He had immersed himself so deeply in human ways that the humans came to him for advice.

  That realization brought him up short. He had, after all, come to Earth, come to Los Angeles, to escape the Reqwar Pavlat way of doing things, to turn his back on their medieval habits, the way they clung to traditions that might have made sense long ago but were now little more than formalized brutality, savagery made respectable.

  But even so, those ways were his ways, his people. And even if he had put distance between himself and those traditions, he had not abandoned his people.

  And yet, there, on Earth, without even being fully aware that they were doing it, the expatriated Pavlat community had set itself up as a distorted mirror image of the very society it was rejecting.

  Bindulan had been the patrician's scion of a very important family, and so, as a matter of course, he had become patrician to Little Pavlavia, even as he established himself as a mere grocer of no pretensions at all, a lowly shopkeeper with a well-earned reputation for being very close with a dollar or a UniStar--or any other unit of currency. Somehow, he had played both roles, side by side, both to the same audience, and none had ever questioned it.

  He poured himself another glass of whrenseed juice, carefully mixed in the proper amounts of salt and sugar, and stirred it thoughtfully for a moment. Then he sat down in front of his comm screen and opened Jamie's message.

  It took a remarkably long time to decrpyt, several seconds at least, long enough that Bindulan had time to decide it must be a long and involved video message, full sound and vision. He was startled indeed to discover it was a remarkably short text message, but with very heavy, slow-to-parse encryption--and then was startled anew, more than startled, shocked, as he read its contents.

  Jamie Mendez, a BSI agent, bound for Reqwar! And assigned to the Hertzmann case, of all things. Not a word concerning that incident--no, not incident, scandal, had made its way into the normal local news reports, of course--but the Pavlat community knew all about it and was absolutely abuzz. No two Earthside Pavlat could meet without sitting down to discuss the matter in detail over a glass or two of whrenseed. Bindulan remembered his own freshly made whren, reached for it, and took a large sip, hoping it would calm him down, serve to settle his thoughts.

  Every word of the too-brief message shouted out to Bindulan that Jamie Mendez had not the slightest idea that h
e was headed straight for the center of the quagmire, toward the twin black hearts of intrigue and murderous tradition that had driven Bindulan--and nearly every other Pavlat on Earth--out of Pavlat society in the first place.

  The boy was writing to ask for advice, for guidance. The message had come reply-paid. Good. Very good. For Bindulan had extended a loan to Qal Frenzic's new endeavor. No doubt Bindulan would see his money again in due time, but it did mean that his finances of the moment simply would not allow him to send any QuickBeam messages on his own credit.

  He paused for a moment to realize how highly he must think of Jamie, human or no, even to have considered the thought of paying himself. Even the shortest of QB messages would likely amount to more than all the wages Bindulan had paid Jamie for a full summer of hard work. Never mind that Jamie was human. Little Pavlavia was full of Pavlat to whom he would never consider extending so large an assistance.

  But what to say? Well, the proper guidance in this circumstance was crystal clear--even if there was not the slightest chance of Jamie taking the advice Bindulan was bound to offer. James Mendez would go to Reqwar and do his duty, as honor required.

  But honor also required that Bindulan warn and advise Jamie when asked, just the same.

  He glanced down at the reply-paid section of the screen, noted the amount authorized--and saw that, fortunately enough, there were no restrictions whatsoever on how he spent the amount. If he wished to send further messages elsewhere, there were sufficient funds to do so. He should take advantage of that.

  Very well, he would send the advice that honor required to Jamie. But that message would be brief, very brief. That would allow him to send a longer and more detailed message--in fact, a command--to where it would do Jamie--and Reqwar, perhaps--the most good.