IGMS Issue 38 Read online

  Issue 38 - March 2014

  http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

  Copyright © 2014 Hatrack River Enterprises

  Table of Contents - Issue 38 - March 2014

  * * *

  The Sound of Death

  by Gareth D. Jones

  Underwater Restorations, Part 2

  by Jeffrey A Ballard

  Extinct Fauna of the High Malafan

  by Alter S. Reiss

  Rights and Wrongs

  by Brian K. Lowe

  A Little Trouble Dying

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  At the Picture Show: Extended Cut

  by Chris Bellamy

  InterGalactic Interview With Allen M. Steele

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  Letter From The Editor

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  The Sound of Death

  by Gareth D. Jones

  Artwork by Scott Altmann

  * * *

  The doorway to the apartment was guarded by a Peace Officer, all six arms folded across his corrugated chest plate. The vermillion sash of the Service contrasted vividly with the dark grey leather of his skin. Inspector Ek-Lo-Don traversed the length of the corridor, floor-claws tapping out a signature of authority. The guard acknowledged his approach with a subservient-professional rattle of his upper-midclaws.

  "Has anyone been inside?" Ek-Lo-Don asked with a muted chattering of his outer jaw.

  "Only to verify the location of the body."

  The guard stood aside and Ek-Lo-Don pushed through the warm doorway sphincter which gave way with a welcoming murmur. Within was dim warmth. The entry matting gave under his claws with a tinkling crunch of joviality and sprang back into shape with a complementary whoosh of studiousness. The inspector cocked his head: an interesting combination.

  The room was a large oval, much bigger than standard. Four door sphincters at diagonal opposites led, he presumed, to the sleep chamber, excretorium, sloughing chamber and storage. Around the walls, an array of high quality furniture: tables, chairs, brood couch, trophy cabinet. In the centre of the floor, a body.

  The inspector stepped forward and leaned over the deceased. A male of early middle age with grey-green skin and dull, uncared-for claws. No obvious signs of violence, disease or unplanned sloughing.

  He circled the room slowly. There was no indication of a struggle, but several signs of neglect. Dust had accumulated on various surfaces, the door sphincter to the sleeping chamber hung limp. The trophy cabinet was disorderly, many of the trophies having been pushed back to make room for an empty tray stained scarlet with the remains of lika beetles. He lifted the tray carefully and held it close to his head. No sound. The beetles had been eaten at least several hours earlier for their remains to be silent.

  He put the tray aside carefully and turned his attention to the trophies, handling them respectfully. There was a curious mixture of awards for scholarly excellence and sporting proficiency. A suitable reflection of the entry matting signature. Each was marked with the dead male's name: Lak-Do-Sil. None were more recent than a dozen seasons ago. He placed each back in the cabinet carefully, lined up in an orderly display that would not distress the deceased's family. There seemed to be one missing; the trophies did not match the marks in the dust.

  He stooped beside the body for a particularly unpleasant task. Using his lower-midclaws he prised open the male's outer jaw and peered closely at the inner jaw. The lika staining was old and ingrained: an addict for sure. He let the jaws snap shut on the distasteful sight. Only his brood mate had ever heard the intimate chatter of his own inner jaw, and she had only seen its workings on brooding occasions.

  Addiction did not lead to death, merely to slovenliness and torpor. He shook the corpse gently from side to side. A faint tinkling. He leaned closer and shook the body harder. Lika beetle continued to chime for several hours after consumption, but something did not sound right.

  He stood and pushed through the sphincter into the storage unit. A dozen shelves held containers of all kinds, but the one he sought was directly ahead, within easy reach for the addict. Several dozen brown beetles crawled and squirmed silently within a clear glass case, vainly seeking escape. He carried the case out and placed it on a table.

  Ek-Lo-Don snatched a beetle from the case and crunched down on its carapace. It tinkled merrily as it died, and Ek-Lo-Don spat the remains onto the table where it continued to jingle as it oozed crimson fluids. The sharp, seductive taste trickled across his tongue and he almost picked up the broken shell to toss back into his mouth. He held his claws in abeyance with rigid determination. He could not afford to go down that route again.

  The beetle did not sound quite right. He peered carefully into the glass case. Some of the beetles were moving more sluggishly. He snatched one up and examined it closely. It was a shade darker than it should be, its underside striated instead of smooth. Wild lika-lika beetles. Same taste, same euphoric effect, very similar death sound, but toxic. A few would be tolerable, but too many were fatal. Around a quarter of the box looked to be lika-likas. They were slower, easier to catch. The addict was likely to have caught and eaten many of them. He could have bought them from an unscrupulous dealer, or maybe he was desperate enough to have foraged for them himself.

  He returned to the corpse of Lak-Do-Sil and shook it again. Yes, that was it. The jingle of lika beetle corrupted by their wild and poisonous relatives. Satisfied at the answer, he called the Peace Officer to assist with the body. They pushed it into the excretorium and set the system to maximum purge.

  Yet there was a trophy missing. Ek-Lo-Don stood and pondered as the guard exited the apartment once more. It was unlikely that Lak-Do-Sil had put the trophy anywhere else, and the dust marks indicated that it had been in place until relatively recently. His initial, unbiased examination complete and the immediate cause of death established, it was time to delve into the dead male's background and start piecing together the puzzle of his life.

  From his abdominal pouch, Ek-Lo-Don pulled a small informational unit. The dark-brown slab of bioware meshed with the apartment's unit, assured it of Ek-Lo-Don's credentials and downloaded its former inhabitant's information. Most of it was of no interest -- humidity settings, diurnal cycles, auriology collection -- but as the data slithered across his unit, Ek-Lo-Don looked for items that would paint a picture of the victim's life. There was not much. Lak-Do-Sil had evidently been somewhat of a recluse, even before the lika addiction took control of his life. There were a few business associates listed, even fewer personal acquaintances. There were no records of any of them having come to the apartment. There was nothing in the recent past to explain why the victim lived in such a well-appointed apartment. It was evidently an achievement of his earlier years.

  Eventually he came to the records of most interest and paused the display to study a catalogue of trophies. He counted them off as he flicked through. The missing item was a fourteen-year-old winner's trophy for the regional Intelligencia challenge. It had no intrinsic value, else it may have been sold to pay for the lika addiction. It was equally an odd thing to steal.

  He left thoughtfully and rejoined the guard. Farther along towards the less desirable end of the corridor a wizened head peered at them curiously from another doorway, then disappeared swiftly within.

  "Standard questions to the neighbours will be required," Ek-Lo-Don said. The guard gave an acknowledging rattle and turned to his task.

  Ek-lo-Don appraised the door sphincter. It was spotlessly clean on the outside, like the rest of the corridor. Any sloughed cells would be caught on the inner edge, abraded away on exit from the victim's home. He took a gum-leech from its carrying cylinder and rubbed the sticky beast up and down the inner edges, allowing it to gather cells i
nto its preserving mucus for future digestion. The poor creature would sadly go hungry after its hard work, when the Service technicians extracted the cells for analysis, but Ek-Lo-Don was sure they would offer it some other dainty treat in recompense. He popped it back in the cylinder and clattered away from the door, leaving the guard to his questionings.

  The Peace Service was headquartered in a long, low building comprised of a series of interlinked ovoids. Inspector Ek-Lo-Don shared a large, curved office with several colleagues. He clacked greetings at them as he entered and snapped impatiently at a clerk who was trying to leave the room. The small neuter drone was laden with a mish-mash of carrying cylinders balanced precariously on its upper-midclaws. It bobbed and chattered nervously, darting behind Ek-Lo-Don and away into another room. The inspector sank gratefully into the warm cocoon of his console chair and relaxed against its spongy support.

  It would be a couple of hours before the lab could report back on the extracted cells from his leech. Ek-Lo-Don uploaded the data from his informational onto the much more powerful biomind of the office mesh and set it to work looking for patterns, correlations, anomalies and coincidences. While the console hummed and rippled, he leant back and closed his inner ocular veil, blanking his realtime vision so that he could replay the memory of Lak-Do-Sil's apartment. As the vision played out against his veil he used the freedom to study every part of the scene, no longer tied to a single point of focus as he had been in realtime.

  There was not much to see in the apartment, even on a second inspection. The dead male's furnishings were minimal, his possessions meagre. He followed the replay into the storage unit where, at the time, his attention had been on the lika beetles. This time he noted, one shelf above and a space across, an unopened jar of claw lacquer. It was the same variety Ek-Lo-Don used himself, in the smart new mauve design that had been launched only weeks earlier. A perfectly ordinary item in anyone's home, but out of place for a dishevelled addict. He watched closely as the viewpoint returned to the body, and peered down at Lak-Do-Sil's claws. They were dull and scratched. The male had obviously not lacquered them for a long time, so why would he obtain a new jar of lacquer?

  With a satisfied shimmer, Ek-Lo-Don's console announced the completion of its data analysis. None of the victim's acquaintances had any recorded connection to lika addicts or suppliers, or any criminal records more serious than a public sloughing offence. Two acquaintances had competed in Intelligencia competitions alongside the victim, and one had formerly lived in a neighbouring apartment.

  The Peace Officer from the apartment complex arrived in the office and handed over his informational. Ek-Lo-Don meshed it with his console, downloaded the neighbour interviews and sent the officer to deliver neighbour cell samples to the techs and ascertain the locations of local lika suppliers. Addicts became creatures of habit, unable to concentrate on anything too complicated outside of their routine. The dead male's source would be local.

  There were eleven interviews on the download, and the officer had flagged three of them for attention. First, a furtive male from the far end of the corridor who barely answered any questions but showed signs of aggressive jaw-tremor when Lak-Do-Sil's name was mentioned. The second was a shy female with decorated chest plate who admitted to entering the apartment on several occasions to offer addict counselling; apparently this was her avocation. She did not seem discomfited by the death. Ek-Lo-Don recognised the third face as the elderly male who had peered at him from along the corridor. The male was brusque, almost confrontational. He admitted to disliking his late neighbour, with whom he had argued on several occasions. The arguments were, apparently, about trivialities, not necessarily worth killing over. These arguments were confirmed by several of the other neighbours. Ek-Lo-Don skimmed through these interviews swiftly, trusting the judgement of the officer that they were of lesser significance.

  Evening was approaching by this time, the swollen orange sun low on the horizon. Ek-Lo-Don turned his console to slumber mode where it would continue to think subconsciously about the data from the case and possibly draw new conclusions by morning.

  He allowed his mind to relax from prolonged concentration before rising. Unbidden, thoughts of his brood mate came to mind, Se-Se-Lin-Dor as she had been when they first met. Young and green and burnished. He had long since banished from his mind the image of her broken body after the accident. The accident that left such a huge hole in his life. A hole that only lika beetle seemed able to fill.

  He hated this kind of case, the memories it stirred. Se-Se-Lin-Dor's death was an accident; there was nothing to be done about it. The decline of his power, his increasing inability to investigate even the most straight-forward of crimes, the threat of being evicted from the Peace Service. Those were the things that triggered him to break free of lika. Now the pursuit of justice was his addiction.

  It was still early when Ek-Lo-Don made his way back to the office. The sky was barely tinged orange and only a few neuter drones were going about their business on the sleepy avenues. He was first in the office and helped himself to a beaker of stimulating karva juice while his console trembled into wakefulness.

  Results from the cell samples had been uploaded from the lab overnight. There were three individuals whose samples were fresh enough to be of interest: the female amateur counsellor, the argumentative neighbour, who had not mentioned entering the apartment, and one of Lak-Do-Sil's acquaintances from his intelligencia society. The locations of three lika traders in the vicinity of Lak-Do-Sil's apartment had also been flagged for his attention.

  After considering the best route to take, Ek-Lo-Don left his office to head across town and visit intelligencia Ak-Ron-Bar. There was not enough time to spare for such a long trek on foot, so he summoned a pair of drones. The two prostrated themselves before him and he stepped on to their backs. He clacked peremptorily and they galloped down the avenue, carrying him swiftly through the thickening stream of pedestrians. Rows of low, domed buildings in subtle shades passed by as they crossed half the town and entered a neighbourhood of homes that were old and worn yet still dignified.

  Ak-Ron-Bar's doorchime fluted arrogant intelligence.

  The door sphincter relaxed a moment later and Ek-Lo-Don pushed through into darkness, leaving the drones to bask in the sun. He stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the change in luminosity. There was no change, just pitch darkness. He felt suddenly dizzy, put out his upper and lower midclaws to steady himself. There was nothing within reach. He lurched forward in the sudden realisation that the floor was tilting away from him.

  He fell into the unknown.

  Warm light gradually illuminated a small, circular room and Ek-Lo-Don levered himself to his hindclaws. Above, a ramp led into darkness, out of reach even if it had offered any grip to pull himself out. Trapped.

  Then light suffused the space above the pit and a small face peered over the rim.

  "I do not know you," the male said.

  "No," Ek-Lo-Don replied curtly.

  The face disappeared. Seconds later the ramp lowered down to Ek-Lo-Don's level and rippled into a tractionable pattern. He clambered awkwardly up to the entrance hall and the ramp slid smoothly back into place. He turned slowly and glared at the small, quizzical male who stood staring at him in turn.

  "I am Inspector Ek-Lo-Don of the Peace Service."

  "Really? What are you doing in my home?"

  "Investigating a death." He raised his midclaws fractionally to emphasize his authority. "Why did you attempt to trap me?"

  "Ah, that." Ak-Ron-Bar gestured dismissively. "A variation on the entrance enigmas practiced by the intelligencia."

  "You trapped me in a pit."

  "Yes." Ak-Ron-Bar sounded disappointed. "The intelligencia are seldom to be found among the Peace Service."

  "The fact remains --"

  "The fact is that you were unable to conquer the enigma I designed and to enter safely."

  "Why would such an enigma be necessary?"

&
nbsp; "Intelligence," Ak-Ron-Bar said. "Those among the intelligencia continually test each other in such ways."

  Ek-Lo-Don considered this for a moment. "And have you recently tested Lak-Do-Sil?"

  Ak-Ron-Bar waved a claw of disdain. "He was not worthy of the title Intelligencia."

  "And why is that?"

  "His reasoning was shallow, his knowledge catalogued rather than intuitive. His victories at intelligencia finals can be ascribed to deception rather than ingenuity."

  A thought struck Ek-Lo-Don. "You speak of him in the past tense."

  "Indeed. He is dead."

  "This fact has not been widely publicised. How is it that you are aware of it?"

  "You are investigating a death. You asked about him. The logic is so simple that I demean myself by explaining."

  "And how recently did you visit Lak-Do-Sil?"

  "Two days ago. He had no enigma prepared."

  "One of his intelligencia trophies is missing."

  "Let me explore your logic," Ak-Ron-Bar said, "to save you time. Several years ago, Lak-Do-Sil won a trophy that I feel should have gone to me, therefore I visited his apartment, killed him and took the trophy for myself."

  "Did you take the trophy?"

  "Yes. It was rightfully mine. Lak-Do-Sil could not contest the logic of my argument."

  "And did you kill him?"

  "There was no need. His pitifully addicted condition made it barely worth arguing with him. I gained no satisfaction from the victory."

  "And you left no potentially deadly puzzles for him to solve?"

  "He would be incapable of solving anything I might design."

  "Then you could be sure that he would die after you left his apartment and returned home."

  "Of course. Should I have the inclination."

  "You seem unconcerned at making yourself sound suspicious."

  "Inspector," Ak-Ron-Bar sounded weary, "there is no logical reason for me to kill Lak-Do-Sil."