Futures - Four Novellas Part 6

"Thank you. I wish it was under different circ.u.mstances."

He prodded the sungla.s.ses back up his nose. "For you, of course. For myself, I'm quite glad you're here.

You've put one of my charges in the clear."

"Yes. And thank you for the cooperation."

"A pleasure."

We rode a limousine over one of the bridges into the city itself. I complimented him on the height of the

buildings we were approaching. Manhattan was, after all, a Caesar city.

"Inevitable," he said. "The population in America's northern continent is approaching one and a half billion- and that's just the official figure. The only direction left is up."

We both instinctively looked at the limousine's sunroof. "Speaking of which: how much longer?" I asked.

He checked his watch. "They begin their descent phase in another five hours."

The limousine pulled up outside the skysc.r.a.per which housed the Caesar family legal bureau in

Manhattan. Neill h.e.l.ler Caesar and I rode the lift up to the seventy-first floor. His office was on the corner of the building, its window walls giving an unparalleled view over ocean and city alike. He sat behind his desk, a marble-topped affair of a stature equal to the room as a whole, watching me as I gazed out at the panorama.

"All right," I said. "You win. I'm impressed." The sun was setting, and in reply the city lights were

coming on, blazing forth from every structure.

He laughed softly. "Me too, and I've been here fifteen years now. You know they're not even building skysc.r.a.pers under a hundred floors any more. Another couple of decades and the only time you'll see the sun from the street will be a minute either side of noon."

"Europe is going the same way. Our demographics are still top weighted, so the population rise is slower. But not by much. Something is going to have to give eventually. The Church will either have to endorse contraception, or the pressure will squeeze us into abandoning our current restrictions." I shuddered.

"Can you imagine what a runaway expansion and exploitation society would be like?"

"Unpleasant," he said flatly. "But you'll never get the Borgias out of the Vatican."

"So they say."

Neill h.e.l.ler Caesar's phone rang. He picked it up and listened for a moment. "Antony is on his way up."

"Great."

He pressed a b.u.t.ton on his desk, and a large wall panel slid to one side. It revealed the largest TV screen I'd ever seen. "If you don't mind, I'd like to keep the Prometheus broadcast on," he said. "We'll mute the sound."

"Please do. Is that thing color?" Our family channel had only just begun to broadcast in the new format. I hadn't yet availed myself with a compatible receiver.

His smile was the same as any boy given a new football to play with. "Certainly is. Twenty-eight-inch diameter, too-in case you're wondering."

The screen lit up with a slightly fuzzy picture. It showed an external camera view, pointing along the fuselage of the Prometheus, where the silver gray moon hung over it. Even though it was eight years since the first manned s.p.a.ceflight, I found it hard to believe how much progress the Joint Families Astronautics Agency had made. Less than five hours now, and a man would set foot on the moon!

The office door opened and Antony Caesar Pitt walked in. He had done well for himself over the intervening years, rising steadily up through his family's legal offices. Physically, he'd put on a few pounds, but it hardly showed. The biggest change was a curtain of hair, currently held back in a ponytail. There was a mild frown on his face to ill.u.s.trate his disapproval at being summoned without explanation. As soon as he saw me the expression changed to puzzlement, then enlightenment.

"I remember you," he said. "You were one of the Raleigh representatives a.s.signed to Justin's murder. Edward, isn't it?"

"That's helpful," I said.

"In what way?"

"You have a good memory. I need that right now."

He gave Neill h.e.l.ler Caesar a quick glance. "I don't believe this. You're here to ask me questions about Justin again, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"For Mary's sake! It's been twenty-one years."

"Yes, twenty-one years, and he's still just as dead."

"I appreciate that. I'd like to see someone brought to justice as much as you. But the Oxford police found nothing. Nothing! No motive, no enemy. They spent weeks trawling through every tiny little aspect of his life. And with you applying pressure they were thorough, believe me. I should know, with our gambling debt I was the prime suspect."

"Then you should be happy to hear, you're not any more. Something's changed."

He flopped down into a chair and stared at me. "What could possibly have changed?"

"It's a new forensic technique." I waved a hand at the television set. "Aeroengineering isn't the only

scientific discipline to have made progress recently, you know. The families have developed something we're calling genetic fingerprinting. Any cell with your DNA in it can now be positively identified."

"Well good and fabulous. But what the h.e.l.l has it got to do with me?"

"It means I personally am now convinced you were at the Westhay that night. You couldn't have murdered Justin."

"The Westhay." He murmured the name with an almost sorrowful respect. "I never went back. Not after that. I've never played cards since, never placed a bet. h.e.l.l of a way to get cured." He c.o.c.ked his head to one side, looking up at me. "So what convinced you?"

"I was there at the club the following morning. I found a cigar b.u.t.t in the rubbish. Last month we ran a genetic fingerprint test on the saliva residue, and cross referenced it with your blood sample. It was yours. You were there that night."

"Holy Mary! You kept a cigar b.u.t.t for twenty-one years?"

"Of course. And the blood, as well. It's all stored in a cryogenic vault now along with all the other forensic samples from Justin's room. Who knows what new tests we'll develop in the future."

Antony started laughing. There was a nervous edge to it. "I'm in the clear. s.h.i.+t. So how does this help

you? I mean, I'm flattered that you've come all this way to tell me in person, but it doesn't change

anything."

"On the contrary. Two very important factors have changed thanks to this. The number of suspects is smaller, and I can now trust what you tell me. Neill here has very kindly agreed that I can interview you again. With your permission, of course."

This time the look Antony flashed at the family representative was pure desperation. "But I don't have anything new to tell you. Everything I knew I told the police. Those interviews went on for days."

"I know. I spent most of last week reading through the transcripts again."

"Then you know there's nothing I can add."

"Our most fundamental problem is that we never managed to establish a motive. I believe it must originate from his personal or professional life. The murder was too proficient to have been the result of chance. You can give me the kind of access I need to Justin's life to go back and examine possible motives."

"I've given you access, all of it."

"Maybe. But everything you say now has more weight attached. I'd like you to help."

"Well sure. That's if you're certain you can trust me now. Do you want to wire me up to a polygraph as well?"

I gave Neill h.e.l.ler Caesar a quick glance. "That won't be necessary."

Antony caught it. "Oh great. Just b.l.o.o.d.y wonderful. OK. Fine. Ask me what the h.e.l.l you want. And for the record, I've always answered honestly."

"Thank you. I'd like to start with the personal aspect. Now, I know you were asked a hundred times if you'd seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. Possibly some way he acted out of character, right?"

"Yes. Of course. There was nothing."

"I'm sure. But what about afterwards, when the interviews were finished, when the pressure had ended. You must have kept on thinking, reviewing all those late night conversations you had over cards and a gla.s.s of wine. There must have been something he said, some trivial non sequitur, something you didn't bother going back to the police with."

Antony sank down deeper into his chair, resting a hand over his brow as weariness claimed him. "Nothing," he whispered. "There was nothing he ever said or did that was out of the ordinary. We talked about everything men talk about together, drinking, partying, girls, s.e.x, sport; we told each other what we wanted to do when we left Oxford, all the opportunities our careers opened up for us. Justin was a template for every family student there. He was almost a stereotype, for Mary's sake. He knew what he wanted; his field was just taking off, I mean ..." He waved at the TV screen. "Can you get anything more front line? He was going to settle down with Bethany, have ten kids, and gaze at the stars for the rest of his life. We used to joke that by the time he had his three hundredth birthday he'd probably be able to visit them, all those points of light he stared at through a telescope. There was nothing unusual about him. You're wasting your time with this, I wish you weren't, I really do. But it's too long ago now, even for us."

"Can't blame me for trying," I said with a smile. "We're not Shorts, for us time is always relevant, events never diminish no matter how far away you move from them."

"I'm not arguing," he said weakly.

"So what about his professional life? His astronomy?"

"He wasn't a professional, he was still a student. Every week there was something that would excite him; then he'd get disappointed, then happy again, then disappointed ... That's why he loved it."

"We know that Justin had some kind of project or theory which he was working on. n.o.body seemed to know what it was. It was too early to take it to his professor, and we couldn't find any notes relating to it. All we know is that it involved some kind of spectrography. Did he ever let slip a hint of it to you?"

"His latest one?" Antony closed his eyes to a.s.sist his recall. "Very little. I think he mentioned once he wanted to review pictures of supernovae. What for, I haven't got the faintest idea. I don't even know for certain if that was the new idea. It could have been research for anything."

"Could be," I agreed. "But it was a piece of information I wasn't aware of before. So we've accomplished something today."

"You call that an accomplishment?"

"Yes. I do."

"I'd love to know what you call building the Channel Tunnel."

My smile was pained. Our family was the major partner in that particular venture. I'd even been involved in the preliminary negotiations. "A nightmare. But we'll get there in the end."

"Just like Justin's murder?"

"Yes."

THREE Ganymede ID 1920 My journey out to Jupiter was an astonis.h.i.+ng experience. I'd been in s.p.a.ce before, of course, visiting various low Earth orbit stations which are operated by the family, and twice to our moonbase. But even by current standards, a voyage to a gas giant was considered special.

I took a scramjet-powered s.p.a.ceplane from Gibraltar s.p.a.ceport up to Vespasian in its six-hundred-mile orbit. There wasn't much of the original asteroid left now, just a ball of metal-rich rock barely half a mile across. Several mineral refineries were attached to it limpet-fas.h.i.+on, their fusion reactor cooling fins resembling black peac.o.c.k tails. In another couple of years it would be completely mined out, and the refineries would be maneuvered to the new asteroids being eased into Earth orbit.

A flotilla of industrial and dormitory complexes drifted around Vespasian, each of them sprouting a dozen or more a.s.sembly platforms. Every family on Earth was busy constructing more micro-gravity industrial systems and long- range s.p.a.cecraft. In addition to the twenty-seven moonbases, there were eight cities on Mars and five asteroid colonies; each venture bringing some unique benefit from the purely scientific to considerable financial and economic reward. Everyone was looking to expand their activities to some fresh part of the solar system, especially in the wake of the Caesar settlement claim.

Some of us, of course, were intent on going further still. I saw the clearest evidence of that as the Kuranda spiraled up away from Earth. We pa.s.sed within eight thousand miles of what the planetbound are calling the Wanderers Cl.u.s.ter. Five asteroids in a fifty-thousand-mile orbit, slowly being hollowed out and fitted with habitation chambers. From Earth they appeared simply as bright stars performing a strange slow traverse of the sky. From the Kuranda (with the aid of an on-board video sensor) I could clearly see the huge construction zones on their surface where the fusion engines were being fabricated. If all went well, they would take two hundred years to reach Proxima Centuri. Half a lifetime cooped up inside artificial caves, but millions of people had applied to venture with them. I remained undecided if that was a reflection of healthy human dynamism, or a more subtle comment on the state of our society. Progress, if measured by the yardstick of mechanization, medicine, and electronics, seemed to be accelerating at a rate which even I found perturbing. Too many people were being made redundant as new innovations came along, or AIs supplanted them. In the past that never bothered us-after all who wants to spend four hundred years doing the same thing. But back then it was a slow transition, sliding from occupation to occupation as fancy took you. Now such migrations were becoming forced, and the timescale shorter. There were times I even wondered if my own job was becoming irrelevant.

The Kuranda took three months to get me to Jupiter, powered by low-temperature ion plasma engines, producing a small but steady thrust the whole way. It was one of the first of its cla.s.s, a long-duration research and explorer s.h.i.+p designed to take our family scientists out as far as Neptune- Two hundred yards long, including the propellant tanks and fusion reactors.