That brought up an additional question; now it wasn’t only How, but Why. Imagining a motive looked to be just a bit difficult.
Of course, I didn’t really have to imagine a motive, because the person who was killing off all these other people was a human being. That meant that he could easily be even crazier than I thought he had to be, and crazy people, it has been noticed, do crazy things. Perhaps voices in his head told him to kill off people who liked classical music, or people who nodded their heads in time to classical music. Or, in fact, anything at all—voices in one’s head don’t have to meet even minimal standards of plausibility, as judged from the outside.
With some relief, I stopped wondering about why within hours of the word’s arrival in my head.
How was the vital word, and how was going to be tough enough.
The difficulty was that why wouldn’t go away. It was going (it promised me faithfully—and inaccurately, as things turned out) to help define how; what was being aimed at was going to tell me something about the thing doing the aiming, so to speak.
For instance: was it supposed to cause death, to cause severe disablement (with death as an unfortunate side-effect), to cause death of a particular sort… ?
Why would anyone want to kill (or severely disable) a group of people who had nothing in common except their season subscriptions to the Williamson?
Or (a wildly old-fashioned light bulb went on over my head) did they have something else in common? I hadn’t really looked at that.
That question, though, was a job for an army, not a single inquirer. On another world this may not have been so; most of the Comity worlds, and some of die others, are technologically well-supplied. But Apelles has never taken to computers except in the way of computer art and the like; basic records exist on computer because where else would you put them, but, for anything more than the bare basics, computer records simply aren’t there. (Artists tend to want to play individual little games with their computers in any case; while I was there, Apelles was much taken up by arguments over the identity of the person loading extremely rude poems about a famous novelist—no names, please—into all the bookstore catalogues, the programs of three dance companies, and the inventory list of a chain of shoe stores.) On Apelles I was going to need that army—so I went back to talk to Marietta again.
Apelles does have a murder rate, and a police force; what it doesn’t really have is a private detective. There is not much in the way of industrial espionage, for one thing—dance companies (for instance) do spy on each other, and viciously, but the work is handled by amateurs. Capable amateurs, even fiercely dedicated amateurs, but still…
And the divorce rate is very low on Apelles—possibly because the marriage rate is also very low. People do get married, but getting married on Apelles is like coming down with Bell’s Palsy: some people do, but not too many, and nobody ever expects to.
We had only one army, and Marietta had to be persuaded to use it. She felt strongly that we shouldn’t tell anyone about the deaths—murders, I was now calling them—and 1 had to point out several times, as gently as possible, that continuing to keep things as quiet as that was the sure way of continuing to keep things.
With many sighs and protestations… well, a preSpace poet named Byron something-or-other (or something-or-other Byron, possibly Lord) said it best, though like many poets he was talking about sex at the time: “…swearing she would ne’er consent, consented.”
Marietta, swearing she would ne’er, agreed to meet me at ten-thirty the next morning in Petrarch Hall, along with her army—the Williamson, of course. I spent the night hard at work, I’m afraid, making up lists and checking them twice, and by morning I was ready.
I had one hundred and fifteen musicians, and a list of one hundred and fifteen names. Given a very brief course in question-asking as applied to census records, neighbors and shopping lists, I thought I might just possibly get eighty or ninety musicians to fill a basket full of facts about one dead subscriber each—if I got all the hundred and fifteen I’d be well ahead, and seventy-five was acceptable.
I have no idea what, if anything, this means, but brass players were the most reluctant to volunteer. The orchestra in general took the news with some shock and some argument (“Couldn’t it just be a coincidence?” was a favorite question, and the proper answer was No, but I went into a lot of graceful detail), but they were truly fond of Marietta, and I ended with ninety-one investigators, including a terribly serious-minded bassoonist, and a startlingly lovely cellist—and cellists do seem to run to lovely quite a lot.
Each was cautioned to keep quiet about the murders, and to find another reason for inquiries, and I invented a towering pile of such reasons. The session began at ten-forty in the morning, and ended—with short breaks for meals, for reassuring wives and husbands and SOs and children, and so on—at eleven that night. (Apelles has a twenty-three-hour day, if you care about such things, plus eight seconds each hour.) What had originally been scheduled as a three-hour rehearsal session for the Moross, without the vocal trio, never reached the musical stage of things at all.
I now had an entire eight-day week in which to think of other things to do while facts were being collected. And the only thing to think about was how.
I put the back of my head to work on the puzzle—it’s much brighter than the front of my head, but it works its own hours—and enjoyed Apelles for a while, looking in on galleries, visiting bookstores and pay-screens, and smiling through a jazz concert in the Dome. I didn’t go to concerts in Petrarch Hall, or to symphony concerts at all—not that I had any real reason to avoid them, but they didn’t seem just the thing to do, somehow.
And in eight days, the back of my head had either gone on strike, or fallen terribly ill (without bothering to phone in an excuse) or else was still working hard to no result—because there was no result.
I did have a large pile of facts, and I used what influence Marietta had with the hotel to work with their large-sized computers during the slow hours (for them, nine in the evening to one A.M.). Checking every fact against every other fact was a little too daunting a job for those rigs, but I tossed out a lot of cross-checks that seemed highly implausible (how many people who jog once a week also use Cute Az Buttons Shampoo?) and got matters down to something the computers could digest.
And there was, again, no result. If the subscribers had anything in common, beyond their tickets, and at least some faint interest in classical music, it was beyond me to dig it out.
Which meant that the season subscribers were being killed simply because they were season subscribers. The only other tie, an interest in classical music, was shared by too many others in the audience. And in other audiences.
All right, I said to myself sadly—because I dislike throwing myself straight lines, it is not useful work—all right, who hates season subscribers?
The answer was, of course, immediate. Business managers for other attractions hate season subscribers. There is a limited amount of money and time in circulation, so to speak. Money being spent on season tickets to the Williamson is money not being spent at concerts of Syrian music. Or at circuses, dance recitals, bookstores, comweb share groups—or for that matter fancy groceries or lacy underpants.
But this, though a fair if wordy response to a straight line, was not an answer I could use. If several such groups had been targeted, I’d have looked into it—and looked hard at some of the groups not targeted. But no one would be odd enough to try to increase his own market share by killing off subscribers to only one other market out of hundreds—unless that market were doing a perfectly fantastic amount of business.