Open and Shut: Part 3
Before there was '23kpc' (cont'd, and final)
Important Note:
This is easily the longest section of “Open and Shut.” (Substack says it will take about 40 minutes to read — I don’t believe it, but that’s what it says.) If you’d prefer to read it offline (and I don’t blame you, heh), you can download a PDF of it from here at my personal site.
The story so far: You’ll find Part 1 here; Part 2 is here.
For those of you already up to speed, however…
Galaxy-cruising amateur PIs Guy and Missy Williams are looking into the strange and apparent sudden disappearance of Shawn Dodd, their neighbor from the cabin next door to theirs on the ISS Tascheter. Dodd had been entertaining a lady friend, Yolanda Templeton, when — reported Yolanda — a meteor struck the window of Dodd’s cabin, immediately evacuating the cabin’s contents (including Dodd himself) until his bedroom door automatically closed and sealed. She herself was safe inside Dodd’s airtight bathroom at the time of the accident; she immediately ran to Guy and Missy for their help. With their purser friend Matty Torricelli, the latter have entered Dodd’s cabin. Furniture and other objects all seem to have been sucked towards the bedroom door, and are piled up against it. The bathroom, however, is quite neat and undisturbed. On the floor, under the bathroom vanity, Guy and Missy’s Pooch, Durwood, discovers a ring box, decorated with a florid capital “R.” Missy identifies it as a box which once must have contained one of the fabulously rare and expensive diamonds from the planet known as Ri. But it’s now empty… except for a tiny piece of paper tucked into a back crevice. And on the paper — a receipt for the missing ring’s purchase — there is a mystery (unexplained so far): the date on which the purchase occurred.
Guy’s narration continues…
The whole “when did something happen” issue must confound anyone who’s never gone off-Earth (if anyone like that still exists), and small wonder: while you’re cruising, you juggle at least two major frames of reference. (Three or four, actually, if you’re a clone. But let’s keep this simple. Besides, you’re probably not a clone.)
The first is the self-centered day-to-day time you share with everyone on the same starliner you are. You say things like “a couple of nights ago” without stopping to think, you know, that a couple of nights ago can range anywhere from the conventional forty-eight hours to ten or fifteen actual weeks, depending on how many passengers and crew are sharing the voyage. It all depends on whether you dorm-cycled in the interval, or just slept as normal. True, any given starliner maintains at least two separate dorm-cycles so there are always people taking advantage of the facilities (paying passengers) and keeping the ship running (paid crew). But over the course of a cruise, the number of nights you dorm-cycle vs. those you sleep through doesn’t make any difference — at least to those aboard — because regardless of dorm-cycle schedule you’ve all been off-cycle (i.e., awake, sleeping, and aging per usual) about the same number of days.
But the neurons in your noggin are still human, you know. You picture the old days: feet planted on the ground, trees in the distance, sun or moon in the sky. Maybe (okay, probably) you’ll never see Earth again, wherever in the galaxy it even is anymore. But that’s when the second timeframe suddenly pops into focus: if you ever do see it again (which you won’t), it won’t be the same Earth. Not the one you remember. Everyone you know will be gone, or older — unless they’ve been dorm-cycling right along with you, or cloned like you — and institutions from governments to retail chains may have fallen, remade themselves, or simply gone out of style more than once, even. Religions will have come and gone. Folks will still dance to “Begin the Beguine”... played on instruments invented long after you left. (Luckily, we can carry a lot of the past around with us on the liners. A rose remains a rose remains a rose, and of course a perfect martini — or a B-grade opera — can seem to last forever.)
All of which makes no difference: something in starcruising you still wants to know what month, day, and year you’d see on today’s calendar if you still lived back there. How many times the planet has really turned on its axis, gone around the sun, and how many trips the Moon has made. And the crew, at least, needs to know: how long has this vessel been en route?
So when you see an actual date printed, like the one at the top right corner of this little scrap of paper inside the ring box, you always have a moment of disorientation as the two timelines suddenly converge, collapse into one. You may jump when you realize that you and the ever-young spouse of your bosom have been for the last eight “months” sharing a life of eleven Earth years. You may scratch your head when you learn that your Pooch’s wheels were last re-treaded four years ago, even though you’ve only “slept” a couple of nights since then and you know the little creature hasn’t left you at all during that time: it lay there on the rug next to the bed when you fell asleep, there when you woke up.
But this date that Missy and I are looking at, the date when somebody bought this Ri-diamond ring, makes no sense at all. Three hundred thirty-eight Earth years ago.
Here’s the problem: starliners seldom if ever revisit the same planet, and our own stop on Ri was just a year or two ago in Earth terms (a couple of weeks ago in ours).
So how did anything that old get aboard a starliner that didn’t even exist then?
And how did it get into Shawn Dodd’s bathroom?
And once it got there, how the devil did it leave?
Of course, as Matty soon confirms, we’ll never get to ask Dodd himself. The airtight shield is back in place over the busted window. His bedroom is empty. Stripped by vacuum, it must have been: there’s nothing on the walls. A lot of the bigger furniture was piled up around the wall beneath the window, but all the smaller loose stuff, including pillows, sheets, alarm clock, pile of chips from the ship casino: all gone. The closet — a mini-airlock itself — is still closed, and Dodd’s clothes are on the rack. But the guy who fits in them? Nope. Evidently, Dodd himself now drifts somewhere in the two or three cubic parsecs of empty space between the ship and Ri.
“Maybe he’s even got the ring with him,” Matty says, nodding in the general direction of the empty box.
“If I know Dodd,” I say, “he’s probably got an iceglass in his hand too. Maybe the booze is gone but I bet there’s still an olive in it.”
Missy doesn’t say anything but I can see the wheels turning in her head. She puts her drink down on the counter. She flips the receipt over and holds it closer to the bright-white LEDs around the bathroom mirror, moving her head closer to the receipt so a sort of bright-white LED halo forms around her coif. I’m about to crack wise about this but then Missy grins and says, “A-ha!”
It’s not just a figure of speech. People really do say that, you know. Especially when they can simultaneously point to something which they know someone near and dear to them has overlooked.
Which is what Missy is now doing. The perfect aqua-polished ellipsoid of her right index fingernail pins the receipt to the counter. The tip of the nail lies near a corner of the back of the slip of paper.
I lower my head to look more closely, just as Matty does the same. We do the old slapstick head-bump, followed by a bit of the old, Whoops! After you! No I insist, after you! dialogue. Missy wisely decides to move out of our way. She grabs her drink from the counter and Durwood from mid-air, where he’s been observing the proceedings over our shoulders, and leaves Laurel and Hardy — us — in the bathroom.
I pick up the receipt, look more closely. This side of the paper is blank. I hand it to Matty and he agrees with me. I focus on the corner Missy had indicated. Pick up the receipt like she did, hold it up close to the lights. Nothing. There’s a little dot of dirt up there in the corner, but—
“It’s not dirt,” says Missy’s voice behind me. “It’s a speckle code.”
Matty and I, following the same script, both do the old slapstick double-take, and I think he even says “Huh?” I hold the receipt up to the lights again, and we both lean in at the same time, and again we bump heads. Or maybe halos, but probably not.
We know what a speckle code is, all right: what appears to be a single tiny black dot reveals, under magnification, a complex, shallow but three-dimensional grid of dots affixed to a flat surface. Missy tells us what she’s already told us, not in so many words:
“Ri diamonds? They can’t inscribe them with a laser like plain old regular ones. They can’t inscribe them at all.”
“So,” I say, “if you lose a Ri diamond you can’t identify it if it shows up later, in an auction or somebody’s pocket?”
She grins. “Usually. Which is why they tell you to keep your receipt in a safe place. The receipt with a speckle code on the back.”
“Because—?”
“Because the speckle code contains the Ri diamond’s complete molecular signature.” She showers us with a bunch of jargon which Matty and I nod at the whole time — Miller index, spectral density, like that — as though we’re universely-wise men of experience and sophistication, Of course, sure, who doesn’t know that?
“With the right equipment,” she says, “you can analyze any Ri diamond and reconstruct its speckle code. If it matches the code on a receipt, well, the diamond and receipt belong together.” She pauses. “I’m hungry.”
The Pooch yips at the word “hungry,” like it usually does. (I can’t remember if it came that way or we trained it.) And I realize my own gut is rumbling. I’ve had coffee this morning, and of course my share of a certain flask-dispensed libation, but I haven’t eaten since last night. And even then, I recall, about all I had to “eat” was the salt from the rim of an iceglass.
Missy and I drop Durwood off in our room while Matty locks up Dodd’s cabin. He can assign somebody else to clean it up, let alone investigate further, but I know he likes to save this sort of thing for himself (and maybe for us). There’s no hurry. We won’t be at the Mataburthian system for a while, with no mid-space dockings scheduled between now and then. No one’s standing in line to use the facility. Dodd’s room is conveniently empty, airtight, locked, and Matty turns on the dorming system manually so anything within which is remotely alive will go on-cycle.
We sail on.
The three of us continue to talk about it, of course. As discreetly as possible: we don’t want to panic anyone with speculation about the mysteriously opening window. We take Yolanda aside several times, swearing her to secrecy on each occasion. Which we know doesn’t guarantee much of an airtight oath — Yolanda’s already latched onto a new conquest-to-be, a female gen-3 clone from the other side of the ship, and who knows what they do or will eventually talk about? But at least asking her, and hearing her say “Sure!” in the daffy agreeable way she does, simplifies things in our own minds. We could use some simplicity. Especially where Yolanda’s concerned.
It’s the age-old mystery: how can someone so patently simple as Yolanda bring so much confusion to the lives of intelligent others?
Part of it, no doubt, comes from the blurry incisiveness and wit with which she seems to speak when her listeners have had too much to drink. (They all tend to drink too much around Yolanda.) Then you wake up in the morning, and whether she’s right there alongside you or not you’re already thinking Jesus, what a dope. (If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know you’re not referring exclusively to Yolanda, either.)
For instance, it’s a few nights later and she (although we don’t know it yet) will shortly join Missy, Durwood, and me at our favorite table back in the left corner of our favorite shipboard Italian place, called Cielo1 for what are probably obvious reasons. Missy and I finish our meals, although Durwood continues to gnaw contentedly on one of those designer recharging rods the place offers — Bone-a-Loni!, they’re called. But then we have the waiter open another bottle of wine, and when we finish that then he mentions we might be interested in an exquisite Tuscan-style dessert wine recreated by the ship’s wine captain and aged for months in the finest oaklike casks down in the hold. (“Months” on a starliner translating, of course, to “many years.”)
And then Yolanda burbles over to our table from someplace, and sits down, unasked, at a chair between the two of us. Missy says something pretty darned incisive and witty herself, and raises her glass, and I’m feeling like hot stuff with two such clever dames at my table so I raise my own glass and slur, “Here’s sediment in your eye, kiddos!”
Missy and I drink, and then Missy hands her glass to Yolanda and then I hand my glass to Yolanda, and now Yolanda’s got a glass of ersatz Tuscan wine in each hand, and that’s when I realize she’s got a little notepad open on the table in front of her. She’s had to put it there to accept our drinks. She sees me see it, and she gives this adorable miniature burp and she giggles and turns red. For her part, Missy sees me seeing all this, and okay, I’m probably grinning myself. So if our roles were reversed maybe it’d have been me instead of Missy trying to bring the two laughing idiots back to Earth.
“Is that a notepad2 you’ve got there, Yolanda?” she says.
“Yeah,” says Yolanda. “Got a bunch of them, whole closetful actually. Helps me remember, y’know?”
The notion that Yolanda — this Yolanda, our Yolanda, Yolanda Templeton, Starqueen of Planet Ditz — might actually remember something from one gen to the next strikes me as so outlandish that I burst out laughing. Missy knows what I’m laughing at, of course, and she too starts to smile but then she sees the wounded pout on Yolanda’s face. Missy shoots me a look. I reel Durwood in for a minute and bury my face in its furry flank. The Pooch wriggles in delirious happiness against my mouth, stifling my ongoing laughter. Eventually I pull myself together and release Durwood under the table, tossing it a fresh Bone-a-Loni! just as Yolanda holds up the notepad for Missy to read. She pushes a button on the side of the pad and says, “See? The one in the middle — any idea what that means?”
Missy turns the notepad so I can see the screen. There’s a bulleted list of three items there. The first and second ones are entire lengthy paragraphs, and for a split-second the laughter (Yolanda! Composing whole paragraphs of text!) threatens to resume. But the middle one is highlighted in yellow and draws my eye to its curious, brief contents:
In spite of myself and my frivolous, altogether non-business-directed mood of the moment, I can’t help asking: “You don’t know what that means?”
The words themselves aren’t particularly challenging, after all. E-Vac™ bags are just the usual — the waste-disposal bags used by starliner housekeeping staff to dispose of unsavory messes in restaurants and more private places around the ships: kitchens, bathrooms... And steamer trunks are what they’ve been for centuries, millennia, who knows: large, rigidly constructed pieces of luggage, often wrapped, even still, with decorative riveted straps. So the contents of this note present no mystery at all. One might wonder why Yolanda’s got an E-Vac bag in her luggage. But the words are plain enough.
“No,” she confirms. “I don’t. Do I have a steamer trunk?”
Missy chimes in on the detail which most interests her: “Yolanda? How would Guy and I know what luggage you have?”
She giggles and turns pink and looks down at the table and then, slyly, at each of us in turn: me first and then Missy. “Well,” she says, “I know that we know an awful lot about each other. So maybe, you know...”
She leaves the thought uncompleted. Now it’s Missy’s and my turns to redden, although we’re not giggling. “Yes, well,” Missy says. Which just about says it all, doesn’t it?
As for me, although I’m embarrassed — who wouldn’t be? (Jesus, what a dope) — a bit of dawn has shown itself over the dark horizon of my party mood. Because now I know why Yolanda’s got a whole closetful of notepads (or, more likely, a whole closetful of memory sticks3).
Ninety out of a hundred clones have chosen that starcruising option for one main reason, namely: they don’t want to remember. When they re-gen, they wake up with the same memories they had at the time of their original cloning. They know their favorite color, their mother’s maiden name, the way they sign their name, their first starcruising destination. What they don’t remember from their gen-zero days may eventually come back to them. But they don’t know anything that happened to them since. Which is fine by them, y’know, because clones are the last stop on evolution’s train ride to pure entertainment.
The thing is, entertainment has consequences in direct proportion to its purity. Clones (like the T-shirt slogan says) don’t do consequences. A clone always wants to wake up with a clear conscience, even if it means his or her head is wiped, too.
But then there are those ten percent of other clones, Yolanda apparently among them. This minority do want to hang onto some things from the past — practical things, usually. They want to remember what to order when they revisit a great restaurant. When they come out of re-gen, they want to know the name of the Pooch they adopted since their last re-gen, where this ship is headed next, how to dance the latest marengo, where they bought this fabulous outfit and who was with them when they did, why the cabinet door is dented, how to bid in Five-Card Moxie...
For this minority, history’s greatest invention is the portable notepad, with its potentially infinite assortment of interchangeable, auto-indexed memory sticks.
Which explains, no doubt, why Yolanda — to whom we were so recently Mr. and Mrs. Williams — now suddenly knows that she has a history, in fact an intimate history, with both Guy and Missy, and why we might know about her luggage: she’s gone back to her notepads to review the history her earlier gens have left for her.
I return to the present moment and am about to clarify all this for her and for Missy too, although she probably knew it intuitively from the start. But the conversation has moved on, I find. My two dessert-wine-swilling lady companions are laughing quietly not about the steamer trunk but about some other suitcase which Yolanda keeps under the sofa in the front room of her cabin. I know what suitcase that is, of course, and so I know why they’re laughing, but instead of joining in or even trying to penetrate the suddenly thick cloud of double-X chromosomes shrouding the table, I carry out a classic male change-the-subject tactic: I flag the waiter down, and as he approaches I mime signing for the meal. I’m still thirsty, but we do have a bar back in the stateroom. And of course, desperate times call for desperate measures.
The next day, Matty has joined me on a constitutional around the deck. The “sea” is gray and choppy today, which probably means the Tascheter is working its way through an asteroid field. If we were really aboard an ocean-going vessel, we might get an occasional shower of salt spray; as is, though, the worst we have to deal with is some yawing and pitching. Which doesn’t bother either of us — we’ve been out here too long to let a little rough weather get to us — but Durwood probably doesn’t appreciate it much. I’ve brought The Pooch along to try draining some of the excess charge acquired from all the Bone-a-Loni!s last night, but because I keep weaving side-to-side on the deck, loosely tethered Durwood keeps banging on the ceiling and walls.
“Wait,” Matty says. “She’s got an E-Vac bag?”
“So the note said. Or implied. I thought it was strange, too.”
“‘Strange’?” Matty’s horrified. “But nobody’s supposed to have an E-Vac bag. They’re dangerous. They’re registered, for crying out loud.”
I know what he’s getting at. Individual staterooms have their own little E-Vac units for getting rid of table scraps too small for composting, nail clippings and such, and of course there are the larger units built into toilet basins. But the big reflective-foil bags, meters across, have no place in individuals’ hands. When you put something into one of those monsters and flip the switch, you’ve still got the E-Vac itself but its contents come out a couple thousand kilometers away, well outside the ship’s gravitational field. It isn’t just gone. It’s gone.
Naturally, I rush to the defense of the beautiful, or the crazy. “Let’s not be hasty, old man. It was just an entry in a notepad — a ‘journal’ if you want to call it that. Who knows what it means now, or used to mean? Who keeps a truthful diary? Yolanda?”
“Sure, but—”
“Matty. We’re talking here about the very same Yolanda Templeton who once asked me why her bathroom door hissed every time she shut it.”
He purses his lips — he is a purser — so he looks like he’s considering this, and he says, “Hmm,” so he sounds like he is, too.
We don’t get a chance to continue our conversation, though, because just then Nate Swarthout shows up in his tennis whites with a bag in one hand and two tennis racquets — one of them mine — in the other. I doubt Swarthout has broken forty years old; he’s one of those brash ever-adolescent dorm-cyclers who never seem to age, so never need to even consider cloning. He’s one of the cruise-line Swarthouts to boot: born with not just a spoon but an entire silver place setting in his mouth, with spare room for a couple of napkin rings and a gravy boat.
“Mornin’, fellas!” he says with the hearty false fraternity of a young man who smells an old one’s blood. He hands me the bag and my racquet. “Just came from your place, Guy.”
“Did you now?”
“Sure did. Wanted to see if I could interest you in a match, but your lovely better half said you were out patrolling this morning.”
“Did she?”
“She did. Even used that word. ‘Patrolling,’ she said.”
“And—?”
“And then she told me to wait there by the door for a minute and she came back with your racquet and stuff in the bag. Said no need to come back to the room, you could change at the court.”
I sigh. Missy’s been telling me for months I need to stretch my legs more, do some calisthenics or take up jogging or something else even remotely athletic. I know what went through her head when Swarthout showed up: if she didn’t act fast, the only muscles I really exercised for the rest of the day would be the ones I need to bend an elbow and clutch an iceglass.
I don a put-upon face and turn to Matty. “Mr. Torricelli,” I say, “maybe we can continue this conversation later. Would you mind terribly if I asked you—”
He grins and gives a little mock-formal bow. “Of course, Mr. Williams. Nothing would make me happier than to escort young Master Durwood to your cabin.”
Just before walking away with Swarthout, I glance up at The Pooch. Under normal circumstances, I could probably imagine in the ocular unit the sting of coming abandonment. At the moment, though, after two or three or a dozen bumps too many, all I see is relief. At least somebody’s morning has taken a turn for the better.
But ninety minutes later, I must admit, I’m feeling pretty darned sprightly myself. Swarthout may be a cruise-line Swarthout, with a pedigree a light-year long, but he obviously has spent more time fluffing his cravat than developing space legs and a sense of 3D proprioception.
We play a best-of-three-sets match. I trounce him in the first, and toy with him in the second: I throw the set, in fact, but make him work so hard that he’s almost blinded with sweat, chasing not just the real holopenns4 but blurry phantoms as well. As advantage swings back and forth from one of us to the other I picture him like Durwood up on deck, twitching belatedly every time I tug on a virtual tether, caroming off first one wall and then the other. By the time we’re a couple of points into the third set I feel almost guilty. But I suppose the operative word there is almost: ruthlessly, I fire serves straight at him, underlining his ineffectuality; he’s given up trying for each shot he has to lunge for because he knows even if he makes it, my return will just send him headlong to the far lane. At match point, his humiliation already final, literal injury piles upon insult when I lob a fluffer at him, to his right: he raises the racquet in token resistance just as the Tascheter heaves hugely to port, and its nose dives as though we’re plunging down the face of an ocean wave. Swarthout loses his footing and crashes into the wall one final time...
...and sprains his wrist.
The language which erupts from that corner of the court, and volume with which it does so, surely did not come from years of prep-school buffing. Maybe he can put it to use in a few decades when he needs to berate a housekeeper but in here, when it’s just two chaps having a bit of a go, he merely sounds like a wounded brat. I offer to call down to sick bay for him but Swarthout grimaces, picks up his racquet with his left hand, flings it spinning to the starboard wall, looks across the net at me and says, simply, “No.” He remembers to add, “Thank you,” so maybe some of that expensive breeding took after all.
I confess: on the way back to the cabin, still wearing my whites, my regular clothes in the bag in my right hand, I spin my own racquet in my left hand maybe a little too often, a little too jauntily. An observer might almost imagine the spring in my step to be conscious, intended. Ridiculous, of course. I’m happy to have won but saddened by the image of Swarthout holding a Manhattan in his left hand as he toasts my victory.
Alas, Missy is not there to celebrate with me. The Pooch is, though. Plugged into the living room wall, it spins in ecstasy when I enter. Which I know signals not delight at my company, but mere over-ampage in need of relief.
“Walk, Durwood?” I ask.
The spin becomes a blur. I shower and change quickly and then head out the door, Durwood in tow. Missy’s right, I think to myself: it will be nice to get some exercise this morning. And — I can’t help it — my face breaks into a grin.
Missy and Matty have news of their own, and it trumps anything I might’ve accomplished within the two hundred square meters of a virtual tennis court.
I’ve put Durwood down on the deck — they discharge much more efficiently when they’re rolling than when they’re floating, I’ve heard — and we are just going by Yolanda’s cabin when the door opens. I brace myself reflexively, but who emerges is not our incident-prone fellow passenger but Matty and Missy themselves, in mid-whisper. Matty’s putting his keycard in his pocket and Missy is clutching her so-called knitting bag which, in truth, transports gin far more often (and in far greater quantities) than yarn.
I blurt something in wordless surprise, which surprises them. But I can also see the immediate relief in their faces when they realize it’s just good old Guy and Durwood on hand, not Yolanda herself.
Matty salutes us both and heads off in the direction I’d come from, and Missy takes my arm to walk along with The Pooch and me.
“What the devil—”
“Shush,” she shushes me. “Let’s go get a private booth for lunch, hmm? I’m starving.” She winks at me and her head twitches once, twice ever so slightly. I look thataway and see what, or rather whom, she means me to see: Yolanda and her new clone-pal, headed our way. They don’t stop, though. They’re giggling and red-faced, and dressed in these gray-and-pastel lounging jumpsuits which the Tascheter’s shipboard couturière has been pushing this season. I suspect the recent imbibing of one too many Mimosas and/or Tequila StarRises as they waft by, Yolanda acknowledging us with the merest hint of a dazzling but very preoccupied smile.
“Yes, let’s,” I say. “Definitely a private booth.”
A little while later, we’ve finished our meals in just such a booth in the Tascheter’s Midship Diner. It’s just a franchise chain but sometimes a meal has nothing to do with the food. The seats are comfortable enough to support casual, long-winded conversation, and The Pooch — as long as we don’t shut it off — is quite happily clamped to the underside of my cushion. (Durwood has unhappy memories of being left behind, more than once, by its all too easily distracted human companions.)
“Okay,” I say, leaning across the table. “Enough about Nate Swarthout’s humiliation. Now: you. Matty. Yolanda. Speak, woman.”
“Well,” Missy says, “I knew Yolanda was meeting Thérèse — yes, yes darling, her friend — for breakfast this morning.”
“You did?”
“Sure. Women talk about that sort of thing.”
“Even when they—”
“Yes, Guy. Even then. You can be such an innocent.” She reaches across, taps my innocent schnozz with an index finger. “Let me tell it, all right?”
I grin and nod yes and she continues:
“So when Matty dropped Durwood by he was telling me about the conversation the two of you had — the E-Vac bag? — and I had an idea.
“‘You know,’ I said to him, ‘not to change the subject, Matty, but I think I might have left something in Yolanda’s room once. I think it was something important. Something I need right now. This instant. There might be an emergency, even, if I don’t retrieve it in the next half-hour or so, whatever it is.’ Are you following me, darling?”
It takes me a split-second, post-startlement, to realize she added the last bit for my benefit and not Matty’s. (I can be such an innocent.) “Sure,” I say. “So you and Matty—”
“That’s right, dear Guy. I needed the whatever-it-was, ASAP, and a ship’s purser with his universal keycard was standing there before me just at that very moment, so what could be the harm?”
“Indeed. No harm at all.”
“Exactly. And I’d even remembered exactly where I lost whatever it was.”
“Surely not—?”
“Yes. In her steamer trunk.” She grins in triumph.
“And did you find—?”
“Whatever it was? No. Wait,” she says, “I need a refill. You want?”
I’m not thirsty, I tell her — at least not for something literally thirst-quenching, although I wouldn’t mind sipping at, oh, say, the rest of her story.
She nods as though I’ve merely answered her question without editorializing, but I can see the corners of her mouth twitching. She presses the Refill button on the wall, under the jukebox.
We sit there twiddling our thumbs while we wait for her drink, neither of us willing to break the silence, until a woofle of not-quite-alarmed confusion comes from under my cushion.
“Easy, little Pooch,” I say, putting a hand down there so Durwood can sniff at it. “Mommy’s just dangling Daddy over the fire for a moment.”
Missy does grin then, and then her second or third Cosmo arrives, and then she can wrap up her story.
“So anyway, no, we didn’t find whatever I still can’t remember it was that I might have left there. But while I was looking through the steamer trunk for it, well, you know, the knife in my hand just went right through—”
“The knife? You had a knife?” I don’t know whether to be appalled or delighted.
“Just a tiny little thing that Matty had in his jacket pocket.”
“Convenient.”
“Very convenient, darling. I might have damaged a nail. But anyway, the knife slipped and cut right through the lining at the back of the steamer trunk.”
“And?”
“And I already told you. We didn’t find whatever-it-was.”
“I’m not asking about whatev—”
“But we did find this.”
She picks up her knitting bag and unsnaps the top. I peek inside and get a brief glimpse of something highly reflective and flexible, something very like foil in fact. Satisfied that I’ve recognized it, she snaps the bag shut again and returns it to the cushion beside her.
“So you did—”
“Yes. And of course, as a ship’s officer Matty was obligated to confiscate that very dangerous and totally unauthorized object.”
“Of course. And he entrusted it to you because if Yolanda finds it missing, she’ll naturally suspect someone with a key to her room. Which means someone like Matty and unlike you, maybe?”
“So innocent,” she says, and taps my nose again, “and yet so clever.”
Which may very well be the case, and who am I to say? But I’m not clever enough — nor, as it happens, is Matty — to have made the same leap which Missy has made. Not right away, anyhow.
Matty brings Yolanda in for questioning about the E-Vac bag, but he plays it coy. He doesn’t tell her right away what he’s after, because he doesn’t know if she even knows the bag is gone. Clone memory, right?
For her part, apparently Yolanda thinks Matty’s leaning on her about her past. We don’t know what that’s about. Much to his surprise — and to ours, watching the whole thing from the far side of a one-way window in the wall of an interrogation room — she confesses without resistance to the truth of completely unsuspected facts.
She tells Matty she hasn’t re-gen’d a dozen times, two dozen, even three. What we think of as the one and only Yolanda — and really, could the galaxy support more than one at a time? — is actually just the latest link in a chain of hundreds of re-gens.
“I can’t help it,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
The it which he and we don’t know, by her lights, seems to be a sort of hyperintense vanity. “You look at your face in the mirror. Not just any mirror.” She glances over at the wall we’re standing behind and I wonder if she knows we’re here, if she’s pitching this at Missy. “Use the close-up mirror, right? Everything gets bigger, everything gets looser. You think anybody’s gonna look twice at you if they can stick a whole finger in a pore on your face? You don’t think you’d gen up?”
Matty tries to comfort her with logic. “Ssshh, come on. Listen, Yolanda, if it’s a close-up mirror, a pore only looks like a big pore. If you held a whole finger in front of that mirror you’d know it wouldn’t fit. The finger would look a half-meter thick.”
Evidently horrified by the prospect of fingers the size of tree trunks, and probably bark-covered to boot, Yolanda buries her face in her hands and says she won’t talk about it anymore.
Sheesh. What a mess. But lying about your cloning history does not go down well with somebody liable for keeping your interstellar person in good health. It gives Matty enough of a legal excuse to open an investigation of his own in the ship’s passenger archives. He digs even deeper into Yolanda’s medical, genetic, and family-history records. He traces her passage among other, earlier ships of this cruise line.
He learns, for one thing, that she started cruising not as a cloning passenger but as a dorm-cycling housekeeper, which explains how she managed to “borrow” her very own E-Vac bag. He learns that that first cruise of hers launched from Mataburthia itself; this is an interesting fact in its own right (once you head out to space, you pretty much say farewell to your home planet), although it doesn’t seem relevant to matters at hand.
And he finally runs up against something which makes only a very surprising sort of sense.
“He went back and asked Yolanda,” I tell Missy. “She won’t talk about it at all.”
We’ve just awoken from our final dorm-cycle until berthing, a couple of days hence, on Mataburthia. Our limbs stiff, as always when first coming out of a cycle, we’re out for a stroll on the so-called Lido Deck before heading to the restaurant for breakfast.
(Yes, yes, I know — there’s only one “deck” around a whole passenger level. But today they’ve rigged up the ceiling cameras and wall panels to display the perspective differently. When you go to the “railing” and look down, you seem to be another deck — the Lido — higher in the “air.” If you could see straight down right now, in fact, you’d see the tops of your own heads... tilted, and looking straight down.)
Missy lets out Durwood’s leash another meter or so and it bobs up by the ceiling, wagging its tail happily just to be out and about again in gentle waters. “So,” she says, “the bottom line is that Yolanda and Shawn knew each other before ever boarding this ship?”
“‘Knew.’ Yes. I guess you could say ‘knew.’ Works as good as any other verb there, I think.” I pause, sip at the dawn’s early Mai Tai. “Not only sailed together all the time, but went on- and off-planet together. Stayed at swanky lodgings. Caught a ride on the next ship out, and so on. Always separate rooms aboard a liner, sharing a room when grounded.”5
“But why separate rooms on shipboard?”
“No idea. Maybe it just gave them a chance to play the field, you know?”
“But Shawn wasn’t a—”
“Clone. I know. I think the term they used to use was Sugar Daddy. A dorm-cycling Sugar Daddy with a clone of a kept woman.”
“Ewww.” Missy wrinkles her nose prettily. She heads off the injured protest I’m about to lodge. “Not that you aren’t terribly well-preserved for your age, darling. Perfectly so for my own taste. But if Yolanda has re-gen’d as often and as many times as Matty says she has, Shawn must have been ancient.”
I shrug. “Be that as it may...”
And there we leave it for now. When we dock at Mataburthia, no matter what we learn or do not learn, whether or not Yolanda adds anything to what we know, she will almost certainly disembark. Neither we nor Matty will ever see her again. If she’s up to something, we’ll never know. If she’s done something, she’ll get off without ever being charged, free to board the next liner, or the one after that, or just to stay there for the rest of her life. We have shipboard records of their pasts, of course, but no way to really connect very recent Yolanda to very recent Shawn.
But I look up at The Pooch, bobbing about over our heads on its invisible tether. And an idea occurs to me.
It’s just hours before docking: the engines have been decelerating for days. Everyone on our cycle has been up and awake for a couple days, of course, and the other shifts have been brought off-cycle so they can limber up, too. As always at this point in a cruise, the activity level aboard is way up: many more passengers and crew than usual milling about in the halls, trying to grab a last-minute meal.
Every place setting in the restaurant, and every wall panel in the halls and staterooms, includes a ship’s paper display. ATTENTION PASSENGERS, reads the big front-page banner. Below that, a smaller but still unmissable headline: MISSING JEWELRY. Whether they’ve read the details or not, everyone’s seen that much of the story. And everyone knows what it bodes:
Delays. Frustration. Upheaval. Inconvenience. Because jewelry is the only common medium of off-ship currency, if someone aboard reports it missing then everyone will be searched before disembarking. All their luggage, too. If nothing still turns up then attention will be turned to a room search. Things will get ugly, if for no other reason then at least because they may hold us all outside our rooms for hours, days even, without access to showers, toiletries, changes of clothes. Cameras will track our movements on the way to, from, and during bathroom visits.
Perhaps human lives will not hang in the balance, but the economies of the shipping line and the ports will. And the gods of the stars help anyone who’s caught with a missing but easily identified gemstone...
...a gemstone like, oh, say, just for instance: a Ri diamond whose generated speckle code matches the one on a receipt in someone else’s hand.
It took some work to convince Matty to plant the story, I’ll tell you that much. Just for starters, no one aboard, including the crew, looks forward to a gem search. The citizens of our Mataburthian port city — called “Vancouver” after a port back on Earth way back when — they sure aren’t looking forward to a gem search. They might all dream of getting an eight-carat Ri diamond for services rendered, but they’ll never get to render the services in the first place if the passengers can’t get off.
Really, we’re carrying out something of a double bluff here. After all, despite the clear insinuation in the ship’s-paper report, no one has reported any stolen jewelry. (The only one who might report it is no longer aboard. His diamond might be out there, too.) And by even mentioning the generation of a speckle code, Matty has implied that we, or the Vancouver authorities, even have a device capable of doing that.
We’re hoping the bluff won’t get called, of course. We’re hoping the anxiety will smoke out the perpetrator, whoever it might be, well before the search gets too far. And if it’s Yolanda, we’re hoping that she — as she seems to be — really is not the brightest candelabra on the piano, so to speak, and hence will not even recognize it all as a big sham in the first place.
The paper reports the procedure: no one will get off the ship until everyone has been cleared. Passengers will be searched first, along with any luggage, Pooches, or other property they plan to take with them. Passengers’ rooms will be searched next. Anyone with a Ri diamond in his or her possession will be expected to produce a receipt. If they have no receipt, their diamond will be (wink, wink) speckle-coded and matched against the receipt we do have. If that match is positive, before being turned over to the planetside authorities the perpetrator will have an “opportunity” to spend some time with his or her fellow passengers — his or her cranky, peevish, enraged, and by then possibly homicidal fellow passengers — while the paperwork is being processed.
The order in which passengers will be searched will be random, via lottery. Missy and I, with Durwood, just “coincidentally” happen to have drawn the first place in line. When Matty reads our cabin number aloud, we hear a few groans and boos among the others within earshot, and I think I may hear a muffled squeak of outrage from Nate Swarthout, who’s standing by the exit railing. (His splint is long removed, of course, but the first thing he apparently decided to hold was a grudge.) Yet at this point it’s all very good-natured, hearty “We’re all suffering this together!” kidding.
“Coincidentally,” too, our search goes quickly and, of course, comes up empty-handed. We don’t disembark, though, but stand aside to watch what follows; Missy takes out her flask, and raises it to the mob as though in salute. We’re grinning, all pals for a moment. A smattering of cheers: Maybe this won’t be so bad after all...!
Except, of course, that things immediately get slowed down. Suddenly Matty’s staff seems to become very suspicious of everyone. Suddenly the searchers wish to inspect every nook and cranny of every suitcase, the toe of every shoe, every pocket of every purse, pair of pants, and jacket. They’ve got little lens-wrenches out, and they’re removing the ocular unit from the front of every Pooch’s head and poking about inside. The medical staff is pulling people out of line, apparently at random, and taking them to separate rooms to be body-wanded. Anything in bottles is being poured out onto high-absorbency towelettes; the puddles are being fingered through by crewmen wearing gloves, and when all seems in order the towelettes are being wrung out over the mouths of the corresponding bottles (often, alas, producing a bit less liquid than the bottles originally held). Things are getting a bit restive. Tempers are rippling.
Finally — about a dozen places down in line, as we planned — Matty reads out Yolanda’s number.
We watch her closely as she approaches the inspection station:
She’s sweating a bit, but no surprise there. We all are. (Mataburthia’s average ambient temperature, planet-wide, is pretty high, about thirty-five degrees, and the ship’s interior has already started to ease up to that level so the disembarkers won’t go straight to heat-stroke level when stepping off the gangway.) More telling, maybe, is the expression on her face. She’s thinking and thinking hard. Someone will ask her something and have to ask her a second time because she’s distracted. Her eyes are a little shifty. Her voice breaks. Finally, she collapses apoplectically just as they’re lifting her biggest trunk onto the luggage belt.
They find the diamond in the underside of the trunk, hidden in a recess beneath one of the wheels. They probably hadn’t even planned to look there — I can see Matty making a little mental note for future searches — but Yolanda told them to. Anything to be done with it, see?
The next night, Missy and I meet up with Matty for dinner in Mataburthia’s swankiest restaurant.
“What tipped you off about Shawn Dodd?” he asks us.
It’s Missy’s story so I let her tell it.
“I got thinking about Yolanda’s story about that first night,” she says. “Everything had gotten sucked out of Shawn’s bedroom, right? And everything out in the living room-dining room was piled up against the bedroom door, at least until the airlock there sealed. But when you fellows were in the bathroom, Durwood and I noticed something not right: Yolanda’s clothes. They were folded neatly and placed by the cabin door, exactly where she’d left them before running to us with her phony story. If things had really gone like she said, they’d have been piled up with all the furniture and other stuff.”
“So Yolanda—?”
“Uh-huh. The E-Vac bag. Shawn of course, plus the bedroom furniture, prints on the walls, pillows, clothes. She could even take her time, spread it out over a dorm-cycle, run the bag on its low setting so nobody noticed the power drain. No mysterious open-and-shut window at all. No roomburst.”
One more interesting angle to the whole thing, Matty told us he’d found out just that afternoon: Shawn was a jewel thief. Yolanda knew, of course — or so she told Matty before he turned her over to the Mataburthian authorities. But she hadn’t known about the Ri diamond he’d been lugging around the galaxy for a couple of centuries. When he drunkenly bragged of that score during the fateful last card game, well, I guess a lot of us might feel a bit resentful of a long-time partner who’d kept a secret like that.
In case you were wondering, the Ri diamond in a case like this would normally be treated just like anything else left behind when someone with no survivors dies on shipboard. It would fall into the cruise line’s possession, in other words, for disposal at auction.
But one fact makes this case not so normal: no one remains to report the diamond missing.
That’s why we’ve met Matty here at this first-class place. The three of us will eat — and drink, and sleep — very well tonight. The way we figure, in fact, if we wanted to we could pretty much stick to the same rigorous agenda for the next six months or so, well after the Tascheter wraps up its maintenance cycle and heads out again.
But you know, space beckons: if you’ve got seven carats of Ri-diamond credit left over to spend, even split with partners, that’s the place you want to spend it.
And so we come to the end of “Open and Shut.” Hope you enjoyed this three-part. brief(ish) diversion — certainly more than, oh, say, Shawn Dodd, wherever he is!
To save you a trip to Google Translate, etc.: Italian for “Sky.”
“Notepad”: yeah. When I wrote this, I hadn’t really been thinking about technology. I guess it probably should have been something like a “notescreen” or something. (In 23kpc, I’ve been trying to watch out more carefully for this kind of anachronism.)
Aha! So maybe I wasn’t as short-sighted as I thought, per footnote #2…
“Holopenns”: sometimes I reached a little too quickly for the “fancy-tech this word or phrase up!” button. They’re just virtual tennis balls, the name coming from a brand of the actual physical counterparts.
This paragraph, all by itself, is practically the reason why I later started working on 23kpc. Why? Because writing all this about ships coming and going made no sense — especially not if the ships in question are repurposed asteroids, but even otherwise. So the later book began as an exercise in “fixing” that problem.