Fearful Symmetries

The police weren’t that gentle, especially with the rifle and the gun on him. All the while, Nohar kept telling himself it was better than being shot. Though, after that victory wore off, he found himself in a bit of a bind. The cops still wanted Nohar Rajasthan for questioning in the Royd murder, and they had a weapons charge on him at the very least, and it didn’t take a signed confession for them to figure that he had something to do with the phoned-in bomb threat.

He was driven to the Pasadena station in the back of a much-too-small Dodge Havier, his hands held behind him by nylon strapping because the cops didn’t have handcuffs big enough for him.

When they got him to the station, they cut the nylon off and dumped him in a holding cell. The cell was a concrete cube with a single steel door. The unpainted walls were swathed in graffiti, and the concrete bench was too low and too narrow for Nohar to sit on. Nohar stood there for what seemed like hours, trying to think himself out of this mess.

All he got out of it was the full effect of an adrenaline crash. In about half an hour he was crushed by fatigue, leaning against the cold walls, feeling his muscles cramp, every joint in his body hurting as if it were grinding broken bones together. His hands felt as if they would be locked into the same arthritic claws Maria was left with. He bled from enough places from broken glass and shrapnel that the cops had handled him with latex gloves. His body felt like one massive bruise.

They led him out of the holding cell, and Nohar tried to walk without limping. Three cops escorted him, and he could smell their tension. He knew if he made a suspicious move, he would probably get a bullet somewhere inconvenient.

He passed lines of desks, and as he passed, the pinks stopped what they were doing to crane their necks and watch the huge moreau walk by. There were a few whispered words between them, and Nohar could pick up an occasional word here or there.

His escort dropped him in a windowless interview room—a featureless place with walls of acoustical tile. There were a few uncomfortable chairs, a metal table, and a mirror running the length of one wall. Nohar looked at the mirror and sat down facing it. There was little else he could do, and it felt good to finally get off his feet.

They kept him waiting for another hour. Long enough that, despite everything, Nohar began to doze off. He suspected they’d been watching him all during the wait, because the door slammed open just when he was nodding off.

Nohar glanced up at the door, didn’t see anyone, and had to lower his gaze until he saw a short man. He was balding on top, and wore a small beard and mustache, as if the hair were slowly sliding down his head. He placed a portable comm on the table between them and looked at Nohar. Even standing, his eye level didn’t reach above Nohar’s chest.

Nohar’s first impulse was to say, “A lawyer,” but he held back because he wanted to hear what this guy was going to say. He just shook his head and looked at Gilbertez and tried to read what was going on behind his impassive face.

“Fair enough,” Gilbertez looked at his comm and flipped open the screen. “Nohar Rajasthan.” He glanced up from the screen. “Don’t feel as if you have to respond to me. Just listen.” He looked back down at the comm, still talking. “Never changed your name. Old-fashioned, or did you just not care?”

“Most of the moreaus we see through here are half your age—most shed the surname. Like the place-origin names the INS handed out, way back when, were some sort of slave name.” He shook his head. Nohar wondered if he ever paused for a breath. “Says here that you were once licensed as a private investigator, but you let that lapse about ten years ago. What’ve you been doing since then?”

“Retired.” The word felt heavy with irony after what he had gone through the past few days. He flexed his hands, they ached, especially at the base of his claws. It felt as if his fingers were still tearing at the concrete outside the Bensheim building.

Gilbertez appeared to ignore the irony in Nohar’s voice. “Yeah, we have records from the State and the Fed. You’ve been on one of the homestead projects. Getting the nonhumans, especially the large predatory ones, out of an urban environment.” Gilbertez looked up. “You know, for all the objections people made to that homestead project, from the hunting lobby to the Native Americans, I think it worked.”

“After they started that project the crime rate in their target neighborhood went down. They say it’s just because the Fed moved the crime out, but the homestead areas haven’t had any crime problems, nothing like the inner city. So what happened to your cabin?”

Gilbertez only paused long enough to look at Nohar’s expression. Nohar didn’t know why he should be surprised. Of course, if they hadn’t known already, the first place the cops would have gone after seeing him at Royd’s would’ve been his last known residence.

“Have to eat,” Nohar said. The shifts in this guy’s conversation were giving him a headache. Gilbertez was wired, always moving, gesturing, talking. He had yet to sit down.

“Don’t we all. And being that they gave you land without any income—Anyway, they found the buck you got last, all dressed up. Too bad the fire torched the carcass. Shame of a waste. Only had venison a few times in my life, but seeing those pictures made me want to cry. Which I guess brings us to Charles Royd.”

Gilbertez started pacing in front of his comm. “Royd was another waste. Did a lot of good for this town for some asshole to torture him to death. He didn’t go easy, you know—though I suppose you do, seeing the body and all. The Mayor, the DA, and the entire nonhuman population of this city want his murderer’s head on a plate. Now I’m a nice guy, but I would really like to oblige them.”

Gilbertez turned and leaned on the desk. With almost any other two people, the gesture would have him looming over his audience. As it was, he had to look up into Nohar’s face. “Now I wonder if you feel the same way? We have the records from Royd’s office, and you were up there, looking for him the same day. Weren’t you?’

“Then, after all that bullshit at Royd’s residence, you turn up calling in bomb threats to the Bensheim Foundation. You’ve been very popular lately, and I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I’ve been the local boy assigned to this case.” Gilbertez pushed away from the table. “You should consider yourself lucky you got me, too. I’m going for some coffee, want any?”

During the wait, it began to sink in that Gilbertez hadn’t accused him of anything yet. Nohar couldn’t help but think it was probably some sort of trap, but he began to wonder if he had gotten hold of a cop who might listen to his story.

Gilbertez returned with a cup of stale-smelling coffee. He set down his comm, leaving it closed on the desk. He gestured with his coffee and said. “You’ve had a little time to think. Do you want to contradict anything I’ve gone over?”

“Let me tell you about my day. Middle of the afternoon—I haven’t taken my lunch break yet—I find out we got hold of this tiger that everybody and their brother in Fedland is looking for. Case falls in my lap, and shortly after, so do a bunch of Fed agents talking about nonhuman terrorism. Now I could hand you over and have lunch, but I don’t like overbearing Fed agents, so I send them to the local judge, who’ll spend at least forty-eight hours to decide if any of the antiterrorism acts cover the crap you’re accused of. Then I bone up on all the records we have of you, and what you seem to be involved in.” Gilbertez drained the coffee.

“FBI. Though every black Agency claims to be the FBI when they interfere with a criminal investigation. If they were FBI, they were FBI through some special forces branch. One guy had a unit tattoo on his wrist and the other had a big scar on his face—”

Gilbertez looked over at the mirror and said, “Like why someone torches their own house after going to the trouble of hunting down and dressing a buck deer. The story we have from the antiterrorist people at the FBI has you blowing the place to hide evidence of bomb-making equipment, or it blew up when one of the devices malfunctioned. Now they have the site, can’t get local boys there, but they did loan us some holos of the scene, which was enough to get my curiosity going. I mean there’s the carcass right in the middle of the ruins, and then there’s all the bullet holes.”

“Or some frigging huge termites in the trees around your house. I got one pic I blew up that has a pretty good view of a forty-five-cal hole in a cinder block that used to hold up your cabin.” Gilbertez finished off his coffee. “Then we got this story that you’re supposed to have killed Royd as some terrorist act. Set aside for the moment that I’ve never bought these Outsider people as moreaus—their targets, except for Alcatraz, have been humans who were working with nonhumans. Bankers who do business in Moreytown, folks who set up shop to market to moreaus, factories that have liberal hiring policies. The whole Outsider manifesto about species separation never carried much weight with me—”

“I suspect they’re some radical humanist organization bent on creating hostility at any point where humans and nonhumans seem to work together. They claim to be moreaus just to make it worse for the nonhumans, calling down all these antiterrorism acts on them. Anyway, that’s all beside the point. You’re supposed to be involved in Royd’s death, and then, three days after the guy’s killed, you visit his office looking for him, then return to the house with the body. Just as you’re in there, somebody calls the Beverly Hills cops to report an Outsider hit squad in Royd’s house.”