“Later, Titus.” There was still panic in H’lim’s voice, and the aura of Influence he held tightly about himself was like a clenched fist, white-knuckled and trembling. Titus had never felt anything like it. Two feet away, it wasn’t perceptible, not even after they’d shed their suits.
Emerging from the Biomed section, through security and into the main corridors, H’lim turned the wrong way. Titus caught up with him. “Lab’s that way,” he offered.
“I know that!”
Stung, Titus fell silent. He’d never heard annoyance in H’lim’s tone before, nor had he ever imagined a tone that conveyed both annoyance and fear. The two of them almost outdistanced the four Brink’s guards.
At his apartment, H’lim opened the door and paused while the guards glanced inside, hands on their weapons. H’lim never allowed the Brink’s people in, and had proved many times that he could detect unauthorized intrusion, so it was just a ritual. While Waiting, H’lim said, “Titus, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’ve got something on my mind I have to think about, and then I’ll want to talk to you. I’ll call you.”
One of the hardest things Titus had ever done was to reply casually, “All right. Abbot comes on duty in a couple of hours Meanwhile, I’ll be in the gym if you want me.” In his mind, he was already preparing a list of questions he was going to demand answers to. And he meant demand. This time he wasn’t going to be put off, no matter what. H’lim owed him.
H’lim went inside, pausing on the threshold for a moment as if puzzled, but closing the door gently behind himself and not looking back. Titus stood between the guards, rubbing the back of his neck and shaking his head.
One of the guards offered, “You didn’t do anything. He probably just realized he’d been wrong about an equation or such and he’s feeling like an asshole.”
“That’s the impression you got?” asked Titus.
“Scientists are always confident, then crushed. Then they get mad at having been wrong and snarl at everyone.”
“Really?”
“Shut up, Sid. Dr. Shiddehara isn’t like that.”
Titus grinned. “Thank you.”
“I was going to say,” said Sid, “you’re not like that.”
Titus waved a hand. “I haven’t been wrong about this job yet. Between the breakdowns, the theft, the war, and the haste, I haven’t had a chance to do the job right!”
H’lim’s door opened partway and the luren stuck his head out. “Titus. Come in. I need to talk to you.”
Inside, Titus sensed what had disturbed H’lim at his threshold, the odor of human blood-and something else.
“Brace yourself.” He led Titus to the bathroom.
Blood.
The walls, the floor, but mostly the shower stall were covered in blood, puddled, smeared, congealed, blackened, and reeking. Holding his breath, H’lim opened the shower door and Titus staggered back.
An arm clad in a black peignoir sleeve oozed fresh gore from the detached surface of its shoulder. Some legs and a head were stacked on a female torso.
Mirelle!
Titus felt his lips curling and trembling as they shaped her name and the word, “dead.” His gorge rose, and all at once he recognized the other odor. H’lim’s vomit.
Helplessly, he gestured for the luren to close the door, and backed out of the cubicle. H’lim shut the bathroom door. They stood, breathing hard, looking at each other. Titus barely recognized his own face reflected in H’lim’s goggles.
“It was Abbot,” said the luren. “She was dead when he brought her here.” He indicated the clean floor. “But not bleeding. He wants people to believe I did that. I don’t know what to do. Titus, you’ve got to help me.”
Dead humans don’t bleed like that. “Why would he want you accused of-this?”
“He’s deduced that once I discover that humans-and worse yet, Earth’s luren-dream, I will do everything in my power to prevent him from sending any message-especially not with your targeting data, and emphatically not with my too explicit message coupled to this planet’s position!”
Titus’s mind gibbered, Do something. Anything. Fast! He groped for the logic that had to be here, somewhere. “But you were on Kylyd when this was done. You can’t be blamed.”
“Do you think facts will override panic? You know humans, Titus.” He paced a small circle. “They’ll say I fed from her directly. Abbot knows Andre Mihelich discovered the similarity between natural luren enzymes and those of some leeches– hirudin, hementin, orgalase.” As H’lim’s fear grew, he lost the human body language and became truly alien. “Andre dubbed mine orgalentin and wrecked three Sepracor membrane reactors to grow a batch to keep the orl blood fresh. If Abbot stole it and injected it into Mirelle, it could have killed her and made her body a storage sack! That would account for the excessive Weeding after death-no clotting for hours, maybe days, without exposure to air.”
Abbot’s frames stick. He probably framed H’lim for the enzyme theft, too. “We’ve got to think. What would he expect you to do when you found the body? That’s what we must not do This is not at all like Abbot-not in a closed community where he can’t change identities and disappear. What’s driven him to this? What’s his objective?”
“That’s easy,” said H’lim and went to the disused kitchen cabinet where Titus had hidden the transmitter. He brought out the casserole and removed the lid, displaying its emptiness. “Yes I thought so. Somehow, he’s planning to send that damn message anyway!”
Titus blinked. He’d never heard H’lim swear before. “How did you know about Abbot’s probe transmitter being in there?”
“You left your spoor all through this room when you hid it. All I had to do was follow it to discover what you’d planted.”
I thought I was so clever. He lets me in all the time. How could he tell that one time from all the others? But he asked, “So how did Abbot know the transmitter was here?”
As soon as he asked the question, Titus knew. He buried his face in his hands. “It’s all my fault. He tricked me!” The memory, transparent as a ghost, floated through the periphery of his mind: Abbot asking with incisive Influence and Titus babbling out the whole story of his trip to the probe, and his hiding the transmitter. I never should have let him use Influence on me! Not even to fake autonomic responses for the new medical anti-hypnotic conditioning.
“No, it’s not all your fault. He tricked me, too. Not a flicker, not a twinge, but he knew all the time!”
Titus raised his head. “Knew what?”
“That humans dream.”
The whole long list of questions Titus had been concocting moments before came surging back to the forefront of his mind, but what he said made no sense even to him. “Dreaming tent volitional. So it must be genetic?”
“Titus,” said H’lim as if the question were not nonsense, “there’s no time to explain it all right now. Later, I promise. But right now everything’s changed.” He glanced at the closed bathroom door. “That message must not go out, not where Abbot’s going to send it with your targeting data!”
“Because humans dream? My targeting is wrong because humans dream, and that’s why all of a sudden you’re willing to be marooned here instead of getting rich, and of course, logically, Abbot had to kill Mirelle in your bathroom.” My God. My God in Heaven! Titus’s eyes were fixed on the bathroom door, a nightmarish feeling swelling up inside him as the image of body fragments clad in black lace and oozing blood floated before his eyes.
Some oddly detached corner of his mind told him glibly that now he knew how Inea felt all the time she was fighting off understanding of what he had become-had always been.
I must do something fast . . hurry. something. anything! Mirelle’s in there, dead because I couldn’t keep her out of Abbot’s clutches because humans dream. You see, I’m a scientist and all of this makes perfect sense! He was aware that his eyelids were peeled back too far and his mouth was open.