So who to talk with? Cheticamp? Festina?
Or should I just think hard? Peacock, I seek advice as your humble petitioner and maidservant…
A voice sounded clearly in my mind. Po turzijeff. Kalaff.
Not maidservant. Daughter.
I damn near screamed.
A blank few seconds after that. Next thing I can tell, I was cowering tight against a cold rock wall, my hand jammed into my carry-bag and clutching the old cold scalpel. I hadn’t pulled the blade out… just grabbed it like a talisman, razor-sharp stability. Made me wonder, was this some blind impulse to defend myself, or to knife my own skin bloody in a lunatic self-aimed panic attack?
Even a link-seed can’t answer some questions.
I quick yanked my hand from my purse and looked around, feeling the hot-guilt blush in my cheeks… worrying someone might have seen me. Tic, Festina — were they wondering what scared me, wondering what I’d been clutching in my bag? No. Not even looking my direction. They were both paying attention to someone new coming up the tunneclass="underline" the medical examiner, Yunupur, flown in from Bonaventure as soon as Cheticamp reported Iranu’s corpse.
You can tell by his name, Yunupur was Oolom… and a young one at that, all hustle-bustle energy. New enough he could still tell you where he kept his accreditation certificate. I’d met him several times — his mother was Proctor Wollosof, one of the Vigil members who’d been scrutinizing Bonaventure since the plague. Thanks to her, Yunupur had grown up in the city among humans, and he’d bought into our culture with bubble and bounce… the roiling breathless enthusiasm only an outsider can muster.
"Mom-Faye!" he cried. "Catch!" He launched himself across the room and made no attempt to slow down as he whumped into me, wrapping his arms round my neck. Kiss kiss, one on each of my cheeks. Oolom lips are stickier than Homo saps. "Looking sexy as always," the boy beamed. "That parka does things for your shoulders."
Festina boggled at the two of us. I muttered, "I know his mother."
"And she wouldn’t be caught dead down here," Yunupur announced, right cheerily. "If she knew this job made me go underground, she’d have a spasm. Old folks, right? They go totally Pteromic over the least little thing." He rolled his eyes, then noticed Tic. "Present company excluded, of course. You look like you’re holding up okay, down here in the dark and squeezy."
"I’m not ‘okay,’ I’m magnificent," Tic answered; but his voice was tight enough to choke. "I also happen to be Proctor Smallwood’s supervisor… which makes me concerned to see her fraternizing unprofessionally with civic officials."
"Ooo," said Yunupur, "chilly. But if you want professionalism, I can give you professionalism." He detached himself from my neck and put on an expression of mock seriousness. "And where is the unfortunate deceased I must examine?"
"How ’bout the guy lying on the ground?" Cheticamp suggested. He pointed toward the corpse.
"Certainly a popular locale for the lamented," Yunupur agreed as he bounced toward Iranu’s body. "I see ’em in beds and I see ’em in chairs, but flat on the floor still wins as the position of choice for those with a love of the traditional. You found him exactly like this? With his hands neatly folded?" Cheticamp nodded.
"Then someone wanted to make a statement." Yunupur knelt beside the body and reached into his carrying bag for a scanning device, much like Festina’s Bumbler. He held the machine a few centimeters above the corpse and moved it slowly from Iranu’s head down to the feet, then back again. "Nothing immediately obvious," he said. "Have you taken all the pictures you want?"
Cheticamp nodded again. "Then let’s start getting personal."
Yunupur produced a small vacuum cleaner and ran it lightly over Iranu’s parka — not that I could see any hairs or fibers that might have come from the killer, but it paid to be thorough. Then, wearing sterile gloves, Yunupur carefully shifted the corpse’s hands enough to clear the parka’s fastener strip. Or at least, that’s what he intended to do; as soon as Yunupur unclenched the hands from one another, Iranu’s dead arms slapped limply to the ground.
"Oops," Yunupur said. "Usually corpses are stiffer than that."
"Do you know anything about Freep cadavers?" Cheticamp asked.
"My med courses covered all the Divian species," Yunupur replied, confident as a rooster. "I haven’t had much practical experience, but still… Freeps advance slowly into rigor over the first twelve hours after death, stay steely for three days, then ease off into something inelastic yet movable." He looked up at Tic. "My professors never said Freeps went totally flaccid."
Tic didn’t answer. His expression showed what he thought of people who blamed their professors for their own clumsiness.
I was thinking something totally different. Something that scared me left, right, and sideways. I prayed rare desperate that Yunupur would find some blatant cause of death — a stab wound through the heart, strangulation marks round the throat.
"Well, let’s keep looking," Yunupur said, still perky. He opened Iranu’s coat to reveal a thick white shirt and red trousers; both looked like normal Freep apparel, upscale but not all the way to obscenely expensive.
No obvious bloodstains.
Iranu had a black knit scarf tied loosely round his throat. Not tight enough to choke, just protection against the cold.
Yunupur undid the scarf. No signs of violence.
"This just makes my job interesting," Yunupur announced. "Where’s the fun if the cause of death is obvious?"
"Can you give us a time of death?" Cheticamp asked.
"A corpse this limp has been dead more than three days," Yunupur replied. "And in this cold, natural processes take longer than usual… including going in and out of rigor. I have to make more tests, but I guarantee this mook’s been dead longer than a week."
"Which puts it before Chappalar’s murder," Festina observed.
"Could it be as much as three months?" Cheticamp asked. "That’s how long he’s been missing."
"Wouldn’t surprise me," Yunupur said. He lifted his scanning device and ran it over the corpse again. "Yeah sure, three months could work. There hasn’t been much decay, but it’s cold, and there are precious few insects this far down the mine. A corpse could stay intact for a long time."
"Considering how cold it is," Festina murmured, "I’m surprised the body isn’t frozen stiff."
"It’s not quite as cold as freezing," Cheticamp replied, "and this far underground the temperature doesn’t change much, no matter what happens outside."
"True," said Yunupur. "Now let’s keep looking for cause of death."
He opened Iranu’s shirt. No injuries.
Ditto the trousers. No obvious damage.
He rolled the body over to examine its back. Nothing unusual.
When Yunupur rolled the body faceup again, the eyes slumped open and the jaw sagged. "He is a limp bugger, isn’t he?" Yunupur murmured.
"Slack," I said. "He’s slack."
I looked around the room. The ScrambleTacs were young; Yunupur too. They wouldn’t remember. Cheticamp was old enough, but maybe he didn’t have much contact with the sick and dying back then. Festina came from offplanet. Tic had fled into the jungle, hoping he’d die before the Explorers found him; then he’d lain in bed longer than almost anyone, never seeing what other slack bodies looked like.
Only I had seen. And from the moment Iranu’s arms slumped like muscleless water bags, my skin had been crawling with deja vu.