The Apex Book of World SF Part 19

He Lai did not speak for a whilst. "There are some things you don't forget. Zhen loved her father very much."

The implications were clear enough. He Zhen had not loved her mother.

He Lai said, "You can keep it, Mr Brooks. If you find Zhen--"

"You know I can't--" I said, and she cut me off forcefully.

"I know what I am doing. Keep it. You can always give it back to me later."

Her tone implied, very clearly, that she hoped I wouldn't have to give the pendant back to her.

I showed her the laptop, and she shrugged. "You can take that too." She sounded distracted, as if the pendant had brought back unwelcome memories. I guessed that seeing her daughter and her granddaughter quarrel regularly must have been disheartening.

I spent some time questioning the servants in He Chan-Li's house, asking them if they had any ideas of where she might have gone, but nothing interesting came of it.

After leaving the house, I took another train to the place they'd found the tracking implant. It was a shabbier mag-lev, which kept pitching as it ran, giving the impression it could leave the tracks at any time.

The people seated by me were the usual crowd: the wild-eyed youths drunk on opium and morphine, the dullard beggars reeking of rice alcohol, the lone mothers with tired eyes, hugging their children to their chests as if afraid someone would steal them. Many of them were Whites or Blacks, lured west by the promise of a better life in Xuya--only to discover they could not fit into this alien society. I, at least, had had Mei-Lin to help me, in the short months before cancer had carried her away. They had no-one.

I could not afford pity; I was already barely rich enough to help myself. But, still, every time a crippled beggar moved past me, I felt an obscure guilt.

I alighted at the Gardens of Felicity, a small station blackened by pollution and grime. The place reeked of urine; I silently made my way out of the station.

The place where they'd found the tracking implant was one of the numerous social buildings started by the previous magistrate of Fenliu and abandoned when Prefect En Pao had come to power and the whole staff of the tribunal had changed. I stepped over crushed paper lanterns and plastic wrappings, wincing each time my shoes. .h.i.t a puddle of unsavoury things. It seemed even beggars did not sleep there.

At last I stood on the fifth floor, staring into an incomplete apartment--the workers hadn't pierced the windows yet. There was nothing remarkable here.

No, not quite true. I knelt and rubbed my fingers on the ground. What I had mistaken for brown paint was dried blood. I looked up at the outer walls, which had once been decorated with plum flowers and swallows.

Beneath one fading set of characters, I found what I was looking for: two small holes, barely visible, with the same reddish stains. Bullet impacts.

I took pictures of the holes under all possible angles, and took a few samples of the blood. A quick scan with ultraviolet revealed a few hairs on the ground; I bagged those as well.

But, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find the sh.e.l.l-casings--which meant that someone had taken them away. Someone who was used to wielding a gun.

I was starting to understand why He Chan-Li looked so fearful. This wasn't a bored teenager running away. In fact, if, as I suspected, the blood belonged to He Zhen, there was a chance she might not even be alive.

I came back to my flat late at night, exhausted. I dumped He Zhen's computer on the bed and fixed myself a quick meal: instant noodles and sweet-sour pork.

When I was finished, I quickly rinsed the chopsticks and plastic bowl, and sat before my computer to look at the results of the search I'd started before leaving for He Chan-Li's house.

There wasn't anything surprising about He Chan-Li (co-founder of Leiming Tech, nowadays leading partner, and one of forty-nine businessmen ent.i.tled to the qi'lin insignia), or He Pao (He Chan-Li's husband and co-founder of Leiming Tech, dead of congenital heart failure ten years before). But on our smiling fiance Wen Yi....

Ostensibly, he ran a small but very successful company of personal care for the elderly. However, he had ties with the White Lotus: a rebellious organisation that had fought the Chinese motherland in Xuya, and that had subsequently turned to crime after the independence.

No charges had been brought against Wen Yi--not surprisingly, since there was no tangible proof, and since his money had funded part of Prefect En Pao's re-urbanisation campaign.

Clearly the kind of man who'd have access to guns and who would not hesitate to use them.

I sighed and ran an a.n.a.lysis on the blood and hair samples I had gathered at the derelict building, and on the pictures of the bullet holes.

In the three quarters of an hour that it took to complete, I busied myself with He Zhen's computer, rifling through her personal folders. There wasn't much. I found a few pictures of He Zhen with friends, grinning into the camera with that same reckless abandon. The pictures with her mother were more subdued; seeing the way she stood, I doubted her childhood had been happy. A businesswoman ent.i.tled to the qi'lin was not always the best or most sensitive of parents.

But the folders were abnormally empty; someone had indeed erased almost everything from the memory. They had made only one mistake: the only way to erase anything permanently from a hard disk was to destroy the physical support. If not, I could probably manage to recover the erased files, but it would require an enormous amount of time, all the more so because I had no idea what I was looking for.

My computer beeped to warn me the a.n.a.lyses were complete; I moved from He Zhen's computer to mine, and looked at the results.

The bullet holes, first: from an automatic Yi-Sen with a modified barrel, a gun favoured by agents of the White Lotus. And the rest: no great surprises there, either. There were two different DNA types involved; the blood was He Zhen's, but the hairs belonged to smiling Wen Yi. Neither of whom, of course, had any reason to be in that building seven days before.

I debated whether to call Wen Yi and demand explanations, and dismissed that as clumsy. Wen Yi apparently still believed me on his side; better not do anything to antagonise him.

I launched a standard a.n.a.lysis on He Zhen's computer--on security files and erased mails. That alone was going to take most of the night.

Before going to bed, I moved the pictures of He Zhen's room to my laptop and looked at the splendid room, but try as I might, I couldn't find what I had missed.

I woke up long before my alarm clock beeped, seeing, over and over, the stylised b.u.t.terfly on the touchpad of the laptop, and knowing exactly what was wrong with it. The b.u.t.terflies of the Mexica G.o.d Quetzalcoatl did not have markings on their wings; this one had.

I got up, throwing a cotton robe over my pyjamas, and opened up the laptop again, looking at the wings very carefully. They looked like markings, but, if you bent the right way, there was something about them....

Something I'd seen before. Like He Zhen's favourite pendant, those markings were Mexica glyphs.

I did not speak Nahuatl, the language of Greater Mexica, but in the age of the Internet that was no trouble. I hooked up to my building router, then to a Mexica search engine, and from there to a Nahuatl-Xuyan dictionary.

The glyphs were easy to find. They read: Smoking Mirror.

Smoking Mirror. A further search ascertained that this was the frequent epithet of the Mexica G.o.d of war and fate, Tezcatlipoca, whose favourite occupation was challenging travellers at night to outlandish contests.

Which made me feel as though I'd leapt a wall only to find myself staring at a deep ravine, with no bridge in sight.

A pa.s.sword?

Think. Why had He Zhen left this here? Had she suspected that her laptop wasn't safe, and left a message for someone else, someone familiar with Mexica customs? I thought there might be a connection with the Mexica pendant I'd found in He Zhen's room, but no matter which way I looked at that pendant, I couldn't make the pieces fit together.

I finally let the matter rest, and checked the recovery I had launched on the laptop. I had not been expecting much, but what I saw was enlightening. He Zhen's computer was now on open session: all you had to do to make it work was to turn it on. But that had not always been the case. Eight nights ago, someone had switched the core routines from private ID session (which required a login, pa.s.sword and fingerprints to start up the computer) to open session.

It was an odd move. I'd have expected the reverse, if He Zhen had had some files to protect. I fiddled a bit with the computer, and asked it to retrieve the log history--which, of course, had been erased. But the log history was always in the same place on the hard disk--which was perfect to launch another recovery.

When I turned away from the computer, the waitbar on the screen was displaying a two-hour search, and it kept slowing down. Someone had gone to great trouble to change those parameters and not be discovered.

I left the computer to run its a.n.a.lysis and called my client, He Chan-Li.

She appeared on my screen already dressed for work: white makeup applied liberally to her face until no patch of skin remained uncovered, and a smart set of robes emphasizing the curves of her body, prominently displaying the qi'lin insignia. "So?" she asked. "Any progress, Mr Brooks?"

"Yes," I said, going straight to the point. "I understand why you haven't called the tribunal militia into this."

Her eyebrows rose. "What do you mean?"

"You know who Wen Yi is, don't you? That's why you're so afraid."

She stood, quietly, against a background painted a soft white. She did not move, did not look at me. From a Xuyan, it was as good as an admission.

"Did He Zhen know?" I asked.

He Chan-Li said, "The company--has trouble. Financial trouble. Wen Yi offered--"

"Support." I tried to keep the sarcasm from my voice. "In exchange for a docile wife. Did she know about Wen Yi's other activities, Mistress He?"

Her voice, when she finally answered me, was emotionless. "No. Zhen was very honest. She--"

"She wouldn't have stood for it. And Wen Yi would not have tolerated a refusal. Is this what you think happened?"

He Chan-Li looked at me, and would not answer.

"There's blood where they found the tracking implant. Your daughter's blood."

It was hard to tell with the makeup, but I think she had gone pale underneath. "He wouldn't have dared--"

"Do you truly think that?" I asked, watching her eyes--watching the minute flicker of emotion that crossed them.

She said, at last, "Zhen never understood--that the company was everything that kept us afloat. She never understood the meaning of filial duty." Her voice was bitter.

I pitied her then, for she was the one who had not understood her daughter. I only said, "I see."

"Have you--" He Chan-Li swallowed "--found her?"

Her body. "No. I'm still working on a couple of things. I'll keep you informed." And I cut the conversation before she could take it further.

I sat for a whilst, thinking. If Wen Yi had indeed killed He Zhen that night, why was he so worried? He could not possibly have left any evidence in her room.

Think of it another way. If He Zhen's blood did indeed mean she was dead, why had Wen Yi killed her? He had her mother's agreement, and in Xuyan law that was enough for a wedding. If the bride was not docile, well, there were ways to tame her into submission; ways I was all too familiar with from a hundred sordid cases.

I remembered the searched bedroom and the erased files on He Zhen's laptop. He had not killed her because she had protested; he had killed her because she had threatened him. Because she had the only thing that would make him fall: proof of his ties with the White Lotus, proof the tribunal could not ignore.

It was a long shot. But not an absurd one.

Smoking Mirror. If He Zhen had indeed gathered proof, she would have been smart enough not to leave it on her computer. I could think of several places on the net where she could have opened an online storage account.

I tried them one by one, entering "Mexica," "Tezcatlipoca," and "Smoking Mirror" as usernames.

On the fifteenth try, I hit pay dirt. There was a "smokingmirror" account opened two years earlier on treasurechest.xy; after a maddening hour of fiddling with a pa.s.sword-breaking program, I was finally granted access.

He Zhen's treasure trove, though, was nothing like I expected. I'd thought I'd find ties to the White Lotus--things that would make Wen Yi feel threatened enough to kill.

What I found instead was a shrine to Mexica culture.

There were pictures of the ball-game champions, leaping beneath the vertical stone hoop with proud grins; videos of religious processions ending in blood-soaked sacrifices at the great pyramids; images of Jaguar Knights laying down their lives in the Tripart.i.te Wars before American rifles; icons of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses with their hollow eyes turned toward the viewer.

After a whilst, I finally turned away from the acc.u.mulation of data and checked the storage capacity. The account was almost full; if I wanted to look at everything, it would take me several days. I suspected I'd stop long beforehand.

Some admire the Mexica's self-sacrificing spirit and their relentless devotion. I think it is a sick religion, and an even sicker civilisation, making thousands of sacrifices every year for no other reason than bloodthirst.

Well, I knew the meaning of the b.u.t.terfly's wings, and it did not feel like a lot of progress. I turned off the computer, checked my log recovery--which still displayed a four-hour wait--and went into the kitchen to prepare lunch. As I was picking some coriander from the fridge, a glint from the window caught my eye. I put down the stalks I'd been holding and raised the curtains.

An aircar waited underneath my building: a slick red limo with tinted windows, conveniently masking the view of its driver and pa.s.sengers.

There was an itch between my shoulderblades: a familiar sign of danger. The sign, too, that I was onto something.

All I had to do was find out what.

Lunch was brief and perfunctory. I gobbled up my steamed rice and eggs, trying not to focus on the aircar, and came back before my desk to find He Zhen's computer blinking. My recovery of the log history was complete.

I stared at the screen, at the last few lines of the log. It had been He Zhen who had connected last, a few hours after midnight eight days ago--a remote session launched from an unknown router address.

Could it have been someone else? I thought for a whilst, but decided against it. If someone else had had He Zhen's login, pa.s.sword and fingerprints, they wouldn't have bothered with changing the session system.

I tracked the router address, which turned out to be a network centre not far from the Gardens of Felicity. What had He Zhen been doing? Erasing things from her computer?

I stared at the timestamp and saw that the connection had been broken after thirty seconds. Far too short to log in and erase multiple files--unless He Zhen had set up some kind of script. But I knew she hadn't been planning to run away, so there was no reason for her to have done so.

My phone was beeping--an incoming call that I had not seen for several minutes.

"Yes?" I asked, pressing the b.u.t.ton to light up the screen.

It was Wen Yi, now dressed in purple silk with serpentine animals embroidered on the sleeves. The animals looked very close to Chinese dragons, but not close enough to give offence--in Xuya, as in China, the only people ent.i.tled to the dragon were members of the Imperial Family.

"Mr Brooks? I wanted to check on your progress." He was speaking English, though he knew I could speak perfect Xuyan. By this he subtly relegated me to a rank inferior--the worst kind of immigrant, the one who could not fit into Xuyan society.

"You are checking," I said, curtly. "Is that red aircar yours?"

He laughed. "You Americans--"

It was a deliberate insult, and it smarted. But I would not give in to anger; that would only reinforce his low opinion of me. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Tell me how things are going."

"I do not think I can do that," I started. "My client--"

"I am not a man you can dismiss that easily, Mr Brooks."

"I do not doubt that. Still, my progress is my own."