FSF Magazine, August 2007 Read online

  Mrs. McGarritt does care about her, and is worried about her, and sets in motion a series of events that will change Ari's life pretty much forever: she invites Ari to her home, and introduces Ari to her children. The oldest two, Kathleen and Michael, will become the first real friends Ari has ever had. But Kathleen figures out what Ari is so slow to come to terms with herself.

  Possibly my favorite parts of the novel—the ones that feel truest to me, as a reader—are those that involve the growing friendship between Kathleen and Ari, and the growing attraction between Michael and Ari; there's a real weight to it, and a sense of hope and wonder on the part of the narrator that makes her earlier isolation stand out. True as well is the portrayal of the family when tragedy strikes, and it's haunting—but it's not what the book is actually about, and given the difference in weight between these scenes and the scenes that involve the mystery of Vampirism, the Vampirism is pale and faded.

  Ari's response to the tragedy is to run as far away as she can in search of the mother who abandoned her at birth. She finds her mother, and finds her own kind—but again, given the understated complexity of her interactions with the McGarritt children, their reunion is all too easy.

  Having said all this? I finished the book, and I enjoyed much of it while reading; much of it was very, very strong, as noted above. But it doesn't quite stand alone for me; as a single novel, it doesn't quite gel at the end.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Murder in the Flying Vatican by Albert E. Cowdrey

  From his home in New Orleans, Albert Cowdrey continues to send us a variety of science fiction and fantasy stories. This month we bring you a sequel to his well-received story from our August 2004 issue, “The Tribes of Bela.” After the events of that story, we never expected Colonel Kohn to leave home again, but unfortunately for him (and fortunately for us), he has been called upon once again to investigate....

  I swore I'd never go into space again, not after the last time, not after the bloody events on Planet Bela.

  I'd not only promised myself, I'd promised my wife—a much more serious matter. Yet there I was, listening to the hiss of an airlock. In the words of an ancient philosopher, it was déjà vu all over again.

  I tried to comfort myself (as I'd tried to comfort her) with the thought that a mere orbital station isn't really space. Terra, big and blue and cloud-wreathed, hovered a mere 36,000 and some odd clicks below. And somewhere down there, in the Great American Desert, lay Manypalms Oasis with its new faux-adobe dwellings, its lush parks where retirees practiced tai chi amid flaming clumps of bougainvillea. Beyond it, a sun-shocked moonscape with hills of bare rock named for the animals they're supposed to resemble—the Mountain Lion, the Dromedary.

  In my mind's eye I could see Anna hard at work in her clinic, helping those who'd already lived too long live longer yet. I should have been at the Wellness Center nearby, conducting a martial arts class I started to help the oldsters keep spry. Ever seen ninety-year-olds smashing bricks with their hands? Makes them feel like they're seventy-five again.

  Well, I wouldn't be holding class for a while. I checked my new pocket omni, set it to record everything I heard, and buried it in a coded memory—including my own stream of consciousness, picked up from a chip embedded in my larynx. Then the seal on the airlock's inner door opened with a sigh of compressed air, a chunky hooded figure stepped forward to receive me, and I entered—for the first time ever—a lamasery of the White Monks.

  * * * *

  Nothing of the spook's face was visible except a bristly bearded mouth that growled, “Welcome to Heaven's Footstool. Please step through the scanner."

  Not at all the smooth, unctuous, clerical sort of voice I'd expected. Glad to hear him talking English, though that was no big surprise. Sure, India and China dominate everything today, but that means they're at loggerheads all the time. So here we are still chattering in English, everybody's second language, which is easier to learn anyway and politically okay because England and America don't amount to much any longer, so nobody feels intimidated by them. Indo-Chinese rivalry is also why the world capital's at New Angkor, sort of midway between the Dragon and the Elephant.

  This trivia was drifting through my head (and recording itself in the omni), while I stood gawking at the ancient space station. Impatiently, the monk cleared his throat.

  "I took my first trip to Luna from here,” I explained. “Almost fifty years ago. In those days it was OS-1. Busy place, with people going into space and coming back, scientists doing astronomy, cosmology, weightless studies—"

  "It's different now,” he snapped. “The scanner, please. Left your gun at home? Good, we don't allow ‘em here. Be sure your stickums are tightly laced. Pseudograv generator's practically dead, and you wouldn't want to bounce off the ceiling, eh? Now, look in the little mirror."

  He pressed a small oblong white box against my face. I hardly had time to flinch before the expected flash of intense light. While crimson dots spun across my field of vision, the monk read my name, rank, and serial number from the display.

  "Kohn,” he muttered. “Robert Rogers. SN 52.452.928. Colonel, Security Forces, Ret. Why'd they haul you out of retirement?"

  "Couldn't do without me,” I lied.

  Actually, HQ didn't want to waste a senior officer—which was what the monks were demanding—on what the cops called “the murder of some piss-ant little spook.” I'd gained a kind of ambiguous fame handling offworld homicides during the Bela episode, which—in addition to bringing me and Anna together, and almost costing both of us our lives—also cost me a chunk of my hard-earned pension.

  So, speaking religiously, all things worked together for good: HQ offered to reinstate my full pension if I would get the monks—who wield a lot of clout politically and can't be ignored—off their backs. They even supplied me a ride on an official cruiser, instead of making me wait two days and take the regular supply shuttle.

  But no need for this spook, who introduced himself as Brother Ion, to know all that background. While he was busy stowing his retinagraph in one of his capacious sleeves, I hit him with a line I've always wanted to use.

  "Take me to your Master,” I deadpanned.

  "Master Po's a hundred and twenty-eight,” he answered, apparently seeing nothing funny in my wit. “I spend a lot of my time watching over the old guy. The CM runs day-to-day operations."

  "CM?"

  "Chief Monk. The Most Reverend Aung Chai. Lemme tell him you're here,” he added. He pulled an omni out of the same sleeve—must've had pockets inside, like a kimono—and grunted into it, “Got him.” Then held the gadget in front of my face so the boss could see me. “Like the pseudograv,” he explained, “the whole damn monitoring system"—he gestured at an antique security camera on one wall—"is down, so we have to use omnis. Let's go."

  We set off at almost a run. I gathered without being told that the CM was an impatient man.

  * * * *

  You get used to Standard Gravity—Earth standard, I mean. Among other things it gives you hemorrhoids, heart trouble, big muscles and the habit of using them. I was wearing Velcro-soled boots ("stickums") that cling to the gray carpeting, but the rest of me bounced up at every step, because I was pushing down too hard. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, dammit.

  I decided to start doing my job, storing away faces and IDs in what was still a trained and ample memory. “Could you dispense with the hood for a second?” I asked Brother Ion. “I like to see who I'm talking to."

  "No can do. Regulation Nineteen, ‘In public, monks will cover their heads at all times except when eating or performing ablutions.’ By the way, I'm not supposed to be talking, either. Regulation Four: ‘Except in dire emergencies, all monks will observe the rule of silence from the beginning of Morning Meditation to the close of Great Meditation in the evening.’”

  "Isn't murder a dire emergency?"

  "For the corpse, yeah. Not for me."

  Abruptly
he halted at an unmarked door and struck it once with his knuckles. A growl from within, and Ion threw it open."His Reverence, honored Chief Monk Aung Chai,” he intoned, in a kind of chant. “Colonel Kohn, Security."

  "At least,” said a bass voice, “those clowns on Terra sent me a senior officer. Very senior. Call the doctor and make Brother Kendo ready to receive guests,” he added to Ion, who vanished, the door whispering shut behind him.

  "Ion's my seneschal,” the CM explained. “Closest thing we have to a cop here. Bit of a thug, I believe, before he got religion. Brother Kendo is the victim."

  He leaned over a broad red-lacquered Ming-dynasty table he used for a desk and waved one hand. I sat on a gilded chair facing him. Like all furniture there, it was clamped to the floor, and like all chairs it had a seatbelt that I cinched around my hara, or midriff, to keep myself from drifting.

  The Chief Monk had his hood pushed back—apparently neither Regulation 19 nor Regulation 4 applied to him—and his face not only grabbed but held my attention. Whatever I expected a Chief Monk to look like, a puma was not on my list. I used to hunt them in the Northern Mountains before I gave up killing except in self defense, and their resemblance to the CM is startling. A long broad nose, a five-day growth of ginger whiskers, long sharp teeth, and a pair of dark mesmerizing eyes that didn't appear to blink. Only the round pupils stopped me from thinking that some nutcase scientist had made a chimera while playing with the genes of two species.

  Yet I also felt an uneasy sense of kinship. He was about my size and we could've sung a bass duet if anybody ever wrote such a thing. He was clearly of European descent, his English accented from someplace near the North Sea. Adopted his name, I supposed, with a bow to Asia from which the White Monks derive their faith.

  A small serving bot with one off wheel wobbled up, asking politely if I wished tea. Very much, said I, and it scooted off about its housewifely duties. The CM sat back, one long arm lying on the desk, the other resting upright on its elbow. He was checking me out, just as I was contemplating him. He fit well into his setting—the Ming desk, the elegantly loomed carpet glued to the deck, the walls hung with antique scrolls. Sung landscapes with beetling cliffs, fathomless valleys, drifting clouds, rushing streams. Souvenirs of the Earth, where people were meant to live. Why was he here? Why was I?

  "A guest did it,” he said abruptly.

  "Pardon?"

  "People come up here, lay people. To make a retreat, escape the mindless distractions of worldly life. Recharge their spiritual power packs, so to speak. In addition to our eighty-seven monks, we have at present thirty-three guests. One of them stabbed Brother Kendo. Why, I can't imagine."

  The Chief Monk was either genuinely baffled or a very good liar. “He was so unimportant,” he said.

  "What are your guests like?"

  "Mostly people of consequence, in worldly terms. The rich and powerful need religion, too. But right now we have one who doesn't fit—just doesn't fit. Don't know what he's doing here. A gladiator, rich but crude, very crude."

  A gladiator. Hmm. I used to watch the Absolute Combat shows on telly before Anna made me stop. The eternal appeal of real blood—intermittently of real death. I was beginning to understand why the CM called on Earth Security for help.

  The monks’ excellent political connections are, of course, legendary. The Council of State in New Angkor not only gave them this elderly space station free of charge, it made the station legally a sovereign world, even though it depended on Terra for everything from food to, well, detectives. Hence unbelievers’ sardonic term for it: the Flying Vatican.

  And here, like the bravos in old Roma who served the more murderous impulses of the Renaissance Popes, lived a guest whose profession was death. I figured I might need my martial-arts training before this was over.

  "How and when did Brother Kendo die?"

  The Chief Monk frowned, rather a fearsome event considering the size and shape of his face. “That question will be answered fully later on. First, however, I've got some things to show you."

  When I started to object, he held up a big, dead-white palm. “I have my reasons. You've been seconded to the government here, and I am the government. Under, of course, Master Po. Like it or not, you'll do things my way. And now I imagine the corpse has been removed from the refrigerator and prepared for your inspection. So let's go."

  He sprang up with the speed only weightlessness makes possible. The bot reappeared with steaming cups of tea and, robotically, started serving even though we were headed out. I could hear its off wheel squeaking as the door whispered shut behind me.

  The CM had maybe thirty years on me and moved at a kind of modified gallop. I followed as best I could, stickums clutching the deck at every step and protesting as I pulled them free.

  As we strode along, the structure of the station started coming back to me. Basically it was four concentric wagon wheels connected by nine spokes. Set at the center was a hub (creatively named the Hub), which contained the central control room, mainframe computer and machinery for heating, cooling, water processing and recovery, and so on. Heaven's Footstool hadn't kept its orbit for over two hundred years on sheer inertia; attitude and altitude were constantly being adjusted by plasma jets fired through a couple of hundred vents on the outer hull. The lingo of the place was maritime, I remembered: the floor was always the deck, a wall a bulkhead, the ceiling was I didn't recall what.

  This was D Ring, the outermost. We turned from it into Spoke 9 and hastened past C and B Rings to A. Here the CM thrust like a battering ram through double doors into a big kitchen full of stainless-steel appliances, including a walk-in refrigerator.

  "We lack a morgue,” he said by way of explanation.

  Brother Ion and another, shorter monk were waiting beside the stiff and frosty body of a thick-set fiftyish man lying facedown on a stainless-steel table. A blue sheet covered him to the waist; a strap kept sheet and man from drifting. His upper torso was bare, and just under the left scapula a red circle drawn with a grease pencil highlighted an almost invisible two-centimeter-wide knife wound.

  For a few seconds we stood there, three monks and a detective viewing the one reality that links our professions, the fact of death. Then I asked, “Autopsy report?"

  "I'm the local M.D.,” said the second monk. The voice was a pleasant surprise. This monk was a doc and this doc was a woman.

  "You can call me Sister Jann,” she went on. “I'm not a pathologist, but I did a full-body scan and opened him up for a cursory check of the damage inside. He died from a single thrust by a thin, double-edged blade inserted posteriorly through the intercostal space between the fourth and fifth ribs. It nicked the aorta and leakage into the thoracic cavity killed him. Neat job, by the way,” she added with a touch of professional gusto. “Come to my office after Great Meditation and I'll give you everything I have."

  "The Inspector will be joining us for the ceremony,” came the CM's vibrating bass. He turned to me. “Brother Ion will take you to your cell. There you'll find your luggage and a clean habit. Put it on and let him guide you."

  "Why do I have to attend a ceremony? I'm not a monk, I'm a cop, and I'd like to get on with the investigation."

  "It was at the Great Meditation three days ago that our brother was slain. To understand how it happened, you have to attend."

  So there it was. I was in for a session of cosmic consciousness because, somehow, it had to do with this guy taking a shiv in the back. There was more to the religious life than I'd expected.

  * * * *

  Let me make it clear that I have nothing against meditation.

  My wife Anna, who's Chinese by birth and also a doc, believes in it on medical grounds—it tunes up the alpha waves in the brain, lowers blood pressure, cures warts and I don't know what. Every day for years we'd spent twenty minutes sitting on a rug back to back, hands pressed to our respective haras, eyes cast down, breathing out, letting nature do the breathing in.

  I found
it nice. Relaxing. I was glad she made me do it. But for me it meant communion with myself and her, not with the cosmos.

  This, on the other hand, was clearly going to be a production. When I was robed and hooded, Ion led me back to D Ring and into a dim amphitheater. I recognized it as a lecture hall, once the scene of cosmological get-togethers in the days when the orbital station was a scientific rather than a religious footstool to heaven. Below us, semicircular tiers funneled down to a stage holding a single empty chair like a throne. The only illumination came from a line of small red lights in the deck that divided the amphitheater into two unequal parts—more tiers below, fewer above. No seats; here you squatted or sat on the floor. Ion seated me on the highest tier, then descended and took up the half-lotus position in an empty spot near the stage. I saw him loop another belt around himself. The drifting problem again.

  I did the same. Through open doors to the left and right other hooded figures began to enter, filling the lower tiers, settling with grunts into either the lotus or the half-lotus posture, depending on how limber their joints were. A moment passed and then other figures, equally anonymous in their robes, began to enter and fill the tiers above the lights. I figured these must be the guests—one of them presumably the gladiator suspected of knifing Brother Kendo.

  Last of all the Chief Monk entered, robed and hooded. Leaning on one of his substantial arms was a tiny figure moving with a crablike gait. My first sight of Master Po, and I didn't see much—just one clawlike hand emerging from swathes of white. The CM deposited him on the throne and sat on the deck at his feet.

  The red lights went out. Profound darkness followed, the down-in-a-cavern dark that blinds even a cat. Then the CM's voice boomed out like the thunder of an ancient god. “Thus, my brothers and my sisters, do all things begin. This is the original state of the cosmos, the abyss without form and without mode of the waste and wild Divinity."