Fearful Symmetries

Nohar talked to Beverly longer than he expected. After sidestepping his personal life, they managed a few hours discussing the way things were twenty years ago, and how the changes since then weren’t all for the best. It was the first real conversation he’d had with anyone in the past ten years. It made him fell a little less alien.

He could identify with Beverly. He had gone off into the woods, but she’d been as much in exile in this apartment, just as isolated, just as alone. Just as lonely.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t free to converse. There was still Bad Guys out there, and there was still Manuel, somewhere.

Beverly had a comm and after they had finished their second teapot, Nohar planted himself behind it and began working on digging out of the hole they had all fallen in.

The line flashed a few times; the screen was distorted and out of focus. Nohar doubted that Beverly had ever gotten the picture properly aligned.

The blue AT&T test pattern dissolved into a shot of an office. Nohar saw the paneled walls and decided that Budget Surplus and his old friend Bobby were both long gone. He was about to cut the connection when he heard a familiar voice say, “Coming . . .”

Nohar was equally speechless. The last time he’d seen Robert Dittrich, his old friend had been confined to a wheelchair—like he’d been since childhood. But there was no question that the man staring blankly at him was the same person, and he was standing.

Bobby pulled up a chair and sat down in front of the comm and shook his head. “And you still don’t put on clothes to talk on the comm. Christ, what’ve you been doing with yourself? What, five, ten years?”

Bobby shrugged. “Got in on the ground floor of a good deal—passed someone on to a hacker acquaintance on the West Coast, and the deal was rich enough for the finder’s fee to set me up for life. Managed to jack the place up a few notches on the respectability scale.”

Nothing remains the same, Nohar thought. “Your legs—” He didn’t quite know how to finish the question.

Not that Bobby needed him to. “Oh, I was still in the chair last we talked.” He stood and slapped his thigh. “Good old American cybernetics—remember when there wasn’t such a thing? But we actually managed to get a project going at the Cleveland Clinic a few years ago, reverse-engineering some old Japanese prewar technology. Finally got it working.”

Nohar shook his head. He had known Bobby since they’d been kids. And even though Bobby had been wheelchair-bound, he’d always been the one who was going to take on the world. Nohar had never thought Bobby might actually win. . . .

“Hey, enough about me. What can I do for you, old friend? He glanced at the bottom of the screen, where the transmit information usually scrolled by. “You’re still in La-la land, I see.”

Nohar swallowed. He didn’t feel quite right about dropping stuff into Bobby’s lap after so long. But there wasn’t anyone else he knew to call. “This wasn’t a social call, Bobby.”

Bobby sat down, and there was a grave expression on his face. Of all the pinks that he had ever known, Bobby had always been the best at reading Nohar’s facial expression. Right now it was obvious that Bobby could still read him like a book. “What’s the matter, old friend?”

Bobby smiled weakly and shook his head. “You’re talking to someone ten years behind the curve. That’s a young man’s game. I do software, but I’m mostly a manger now.”

Bobby smiled. “But there’re perks to managing. I have a half-dozen bright young hackers on my payroll. What do you need?”

“I just have a number off the display from a satellite uplink. I don’t know if it’s an access code, a location, or what—but I want to know who was on the other end of the satellite.”

“You don’t go for simple, do you?” Bobby was smiling. “Give me the number, and the location of the uplink—I might be able to get the skunk works to pull something up for you.”

Nohar passed on the information, and added, “Thanks for helping me out, after all this time.”

“You’re still a friend. And you have no idea how much I owe you. Now, where do I get hold of you?”

Nohar spent another few hours on the comm searching through every local news provider he could access. He started with the story of Royd’s death and worked from there.

It wasn’t encouraging. Not only did the stories have video of him, big as life, taken from the little cop drones. But they had his name, too. “Nohar Rajasthan, ex-Private Investigator” was attached to every story in connection with Royd’s death.

Somehow, the death of Charles Royd was linked to a shadowy moreau terrorist group that someone had labeled “The Outsiders.” These “Outsiders” had apparently taken credit for Royd, and the bombing at Alcatraz. The attack on Pastoria Towers was being billed as an antiterrorist raid to uncover a cabal of these “Outsiders—” That’s how the press played it, even though no Fed agency was admitting anything to do with the raid, and a few said they were investigating it.

A small news agency out of San Francisco, the Nonhuman News Network, had a different slant on things. They took the tack that the “Outsiders” didn’t exist, and were a cover for covert actions by the Federal Government against the moreau community. The news was paranoid, involving everything from death squads to biological warfare. It seemed all too plausible from Nohar’s vantage point.

Nohar couldn’t find anything about Manuel in the public corners of the net. That didn’t surprise him. If his theory was right, and the Bad Guys were looking for Manuel, they would have been watching the comm for him, too. They probably were a lot more sophisticated about it, too, judging by the hardware their grunts carried. There wasn’t even so much as an acknowledgment that the cops were looking for a missing person of his description.

He also couldn’t find any news about a shootout in Beverly Hills last night, or even something about a Mirador crashing to a halt. However, there were reports about Henderson’s disappearance. Nohar wondered who had reported it, since the story’d come out about an hour before Henderson was due back at work.

Whatever the reason, the police wanted her for questioning in relation to Royd’s murder. Strangely, Nohar didn’t find any equivalent stories about Maria. Nohar wondered about that. The Bad Guys weren’t cops—at least they weren’t the cops—but they were certainly able to use the cops. Why not have them looking for Maria as well as Henderson and him?

Unless they were trying to keep the whole thing with Manuel under wraps. They didn’t want the cops looking for Maria or Manuel, at least not publicly.

The last thing he did at the comm was patch in his old digital camera so he could get hard copies of what he’d been looking at the past twenty-four hours. He slowly managed to enhance a picture of the Mirador that had ambushed Henderson, but that was little use other than to see how they’d managed to obscure the ID tags on the car. He didn’t even have a clean shot of the attackers’ faces. That was a dead end.

There were a few other pictures. The only one that had much promise was a wide shot of the copter that had landed in the Pastoria Towers parking lot. The copter was unmarked, but he had a good shot of what the machine looked like, and it might give him a lead on who might own some. He also had a good shot of a few faces. The most promising one was the face of the first man out the door, apparently the leader of the raid.

He was a standout. Even with the glow of the IR view, Nohar could make out his face. He was tall, with Negroid features and a long jagged scar across his cheek that showed on the display as a cold spot. There was something deep and painful in that face, even at that distance and with the distortion of the heat patterns. Nohar thought he saw the eyes of a hunter there. . . .

Nohar spent an hour studying Scar and the rest of his boys—the ones whose features he could make out. He wanted to be sure he could pick these guys out of a crowd if he came across them. He would have felt better if he could catch their scent and the sound of their footsteps as well. Then he’d feel as if he knew these men. Just by sight, he’d only be good within a few dozen meters.

Beverly brought him lunch as he worked on the comm. This time it was an actual piece of meat, not something that had been mechanically processed into something the consistency of gelatin packing material.

Nohar stretched. The comm was in a corner of the living room, and all he had to sit on was a small stool. He had been bent over it, and all his muscles ached. “Everything I expected to find.” Nohar stood and slipped over to the couch, taking Beverly’s offered lunch. His head knocked a dangling fern, setting it swinging.

“I need to see this clinic Manuel worked at, talk to his coworkers.” Nohar looked down at himself. He suddenly found the whole idea of clothing an annoyance.

“I took some liberties,” Beverly said and walked over to the door and picked up a package and handed it to Nohar. Nohar put down the plate he’d been eating from and opened the worn plastic. Inside was a whole new outfit.

“I slipped out while you were working. There’s an ursine I buy my tea from, and he had some old clothes I borrowed.”

“Thanks,” Nohar said as he pulled out the shirt. It was a giant tank top with an embroidered yin-yang symbol on it. With it was a pair for running shorts. He had to manhandle his tail through one of the leg holes. Not something your average ursine had to worry about.

It was enough for him to go out in public in. He took the old plastic box and put what was left of his possessions in it. “Thanks.”