Haze and the Hammer of Darkness (11 page)

Then he washed up and donned another white shirt and a fresh pair of dark slacks, since the heat limited anything to one wearing before cleaning, at least for him, and then headed out for a day of ostensible errands. He walked up 800 East to St. George Boulevard to catch the tram.

An older couple was already standing on the platform when Roget got there. The man was tanned and had brilliant white hair. The woman's hair was blond, as appeared to be the case with most Saint women. Roget couldn't help but wonder why the older men affected such silver white hair when standard hair treatments allowed people to retain their natural color throughout their lifetime at minimal cost.

“Good morning,” he offered pleasantly.

“Morning,” replied the man. “Must be new in town.”

“Relatively,” Roget admitted. “I'm Keir Roget.”

“Mason Bradshaw … my wife, Leitha.”

Leitha inclined her head politely.

“Pleasant weather we're having right now,” said the man. “Enjoy it while you can.” He turned as the tram pulled up to the platform, then stepped forward into the tram car once the doors slid open.

Leitha scuttled after him, every movement an apology.

Roget followed but took a seat farther back in the car.

Two young men hurried in after him and sat midway between him and the couple, but on the opposite side from Roget. For the short trip to the center station, none of the other four said more than a few words.

Once the tram came to a stop, Roget waited until the others exited, then took his time leaving. He paused at the top of the ramp leading down from the platform, looking southward at the single St. George branch of the Deseret First Bank, located on the southeast corner of Main and St. George Boulevard, just south across the boulevard from the electrotram central station platform. Like most financial institutions, DFB was global in scope. Unlike most that had originated out of the WestEuro culture, its clientele was largely based on sectarian affiliation or—in a place like St. George—local residence. Roget walked down the ramp, taking in the building, a two-story Navaho sandstone structure that, like much in St. George, was a replica of an earlier historic edifice, except for the solar panels. William Dane's office was there, but Roget doubted Dane would be in on a Saturday. Even so, given the screen-based banking services, no customer ever saw bank officers except by appointment. Roget didn't have a plausible reason for requesting one. Not yet, and his superiors would be less than pleased at any immediate obvious outreach.

Roget's first “errand” was to stop by the art gallery in History Square. In some places, local art galleries revealed more about a place than weeks of talking to locals might. In others, they were merely commercial outlets. He waited at the boulevard for several electrocoupes and a lorry to pass before he crossed, then turned west and crossed Main Street in turn, grateful for the single patch of clouds that momentarily blocked the bright desert sun.

The redstone-walled gallery was on the northeast corner, and the door and windows were trimmed in a deep green. The sign on the dark-tinted front window read Glen-David's. Roget opened the door and stepped inside, finding it comparatively cooler than most other shops. For a moment, he wondered why. Then it struck him. Certain establishments, like art galleries and medical facilities, had higher energy limits before geometric pricing kicked in.

“Good morning, sir.” A silver-haired and slight man stepped forward. He smiled politely, but not warmly. “Are you looking for anything special?”

“No. I haven't been here before. Someone at work suggested I should.” Roget returned the smile.

“You should indeed. We do have images or prints of most of what's on display. We can size them for whatever space needs you have.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

“Just let me know if you need anything, sir.”

Roget nodded politely, then turned his attention to the various works.

The art displayed was in a wide variety of media—hololight images, multishifts, pastels, watercolors, oils, and even a charcoal portrait. Most if not all of the subject matter was definitely local or Saint-derived.
The Flight of Nephi
was a multishift, an imposition/transformation of images flowing from that of a boy in ancient Israel to a man amid the jungles of Central America.
The Destruction of the Temple
was an angular and stark oil rendition of the Salt Lake Temple in the brilliant blue light of a focused nucleonic disrupter beam just at the moment before it turned to ashes and dust. That temple had never been rebuilt, not with the crater, now an extension of the Great Salt Lake, where much of the center city had been.
The Long Walk
was a pastel that depicted people in old American pioneer garb pushing carts along a trail flanked with prairie grass and bushes. Roget didn't doubt its general accuracy, even if he didn't know the historical context. One seemed slightly out of place, a portrait of a younger man in some sort of flight gear with a hazy combat aircraft that Roget did not recognize in the background. The card beside it read, “Original Not for Sale, images available.” The portrait was good technically, but not outstanding. There was no indication who it depicted.

Then, there were the landscapes—Kolob Canyon, the Patriarchs, the Gorge—and the portraits. Some of the names were familiar, but most were not.

A handful were terrible. Most were good. Some were better than that. Few of them appealed to Roget, and only one was good enough for him to consider buying even as an image. He wouldn't ever have considered it, had someone described it to him. It was simply an oil of a small black dachshund sitting on the cushion of a blue velvet sofa. On one side was a knitted afghan of maroon and cream, disarrayed almost as if the dachshund had been sleeping under it and had just darted from it. The sun poured across her—the dog had to be female, although there were no obvious clues—from an unseen side window, and she looked expectantly out of the canvas, as if her master or mistress had just entered the room. Yet the skill—or love—of the artist was such that the dachshund was alive. She almost leapt out of the ancient canvas.

“The sunshine dog,” Roget murmured, in spite of himself. He turned away and took several steps. Then he stopped and returned to study the painting again. He couldn't say why, but just looking at the image made him feel better.

After several moments, he shook his head and walked toward the front of the gallery where the proprietor sat behind a small console. “How much for an image of the sunshine dachshund?” Neither the original nor prints would do. Not as often as he would be shifted around.

For a moment, the proprietor frowned, as if he didn't understand why Roget would want the portrait of a small dog. “Full density image is 117 yuan, with tax.”

“That's fine. I'll take it with me.” Roget held his CredID before the scanner, then tendered his datacard. “Do you know the dog's name?”

“I'd guess it was Hildegarde. That's what she said the title was—Hildegarde in the Sunlight.”

“Thank you.” Roget thumbed the scanner to authenticate the charges, then took back the datacard. “It's a good painting.”

“It's not that expensive. You could have the original for six hundred.”

Roget shook his head. He wished he could, but he could take the image with him, and he couldn't take the original, and he'd end up having to give it away, and no one he knew would see what he saw.

After watching the proprietor load the image into his personal flash monitor, he smiled and left Glen-David's. Once outside in the warm sunlight, he walked uphill a block and turned west, stopping after about a hundred meters outside the picket fence surrounding the summer home of the Saints' great second Prophet and Revelator. It was closed, but he read the brass plate on the pedestal outside the gate. When he finished, he tried not to frown. According to the plate, the dwelling was the actual original and not a replica, as he had thought. When the first War of Confederation loomed, a dedicated group of Saints disassembled the dwelling and stored it in a hermetically sealed cave in the mountains to the northwest of St. George. When it was finally reconstructed, a nanitic covering was applied to the wood to prevent further deterioration.

Roget had his doubts about the explanation on the plate, for many reasons, but it wouldn't be wise to voice them. He turned and walked eastward in the direction of The Right Place. A slender blond woman was sweeping the sandstone slabs that constituted the walkway from the gate in the picket fence. Her back was to him as she swept around a redstone sculpture of a heavyset bearded man who wore a frontier-style coat. Roget assessed the sculpture as moderately good, but not outstanding.

The woman faced the front porch with its deep overhanging eaves and the low sandstone wall on each side of the stone steps up to the porch. Somehow, she looked familiar.

As he walked nearer, he recognized Marni Sorensen. There was no reason she shouldn't be sweeping the walk to the guesthouse of her brother, but it bothered him.

The front door opened. Another blonde stood there. “Marni! It's Tyler.”

Marni did not look in Roget's direction, but hurried inside, barely stopping to lean the broom against the stone pillar on the left side at the top of the porch steps. The door closed with a
thunk
clearly audible to Roget.

Were energy/comm costs so high that the locals didn't even use direct personal links? Or were they privacy obsessed the way the survies were? Or was beautiful Marni part of the reason why he was in St. George?

While he took his time, Roget kept walking, past The Right Place and then downhill and back toward Main Street and the electrotram station. He waited in the shade, his eyes straying to the white of the old Temple and the western edge of the Genealogy Center, most of which had to be underground, until he could take the tram west to Bluff Street. From the station there he made his way south until he arrived at DeseretData, the only EES the directory listed in St. George. That was doubtless correct. Most people got their entertainment through direct-links, but there were always a few specialty and local shops for the material that didn't have enough of a customer base to pay net access charges or for material that didn't meet Federation standards, either technically or in terms of its content. Not that all that much content was banned, mainly prurient material aimed at underage children and direct or indirect religious or secular incitements to armed revolt, but there were always a few individuals who seemed to want to press the limits, no matter how loose they might be.

Even in fall, the day was warm, and Roget was glad to step inside the shop, although it wasn't that much cooler.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” asked the fresh-faced young man seated on a high-backed stool behind the short and narrow counter just beside the door.

“Do you have sloads about the history of the area?”

“If you take the end screen and key in ‘color country,' that will show most of what we have that's not on the FedNet.”

“Thank you.” Roget walked to the end wall console and flat screen and entered the keywords. He expected perhaps twenty sloads, all of them short. There were close to a thousand, some dating back three hundred years, another reminder that he was dealing with a culture that not only respected its history, but wallowed in it. On top of that, few of the sloads were short. It took him over an hour to select ten that he hoped would prove helpful—not about the history, which he knew, but about the slants and views of the local institutions that had scripted and produced them.

When he walked back to the front counter, it took a minute for the young man to look up from the screen in front of him. “Oh … yes?”

“You related to Brendan?”

“No, sir. Not really. Brother Smith is a friend of my parents. Did you find anything?”

“I left ten of them on the queue.”

“Let me run the charges.” After a moment, the clerk nodded. “If you want all ten sloads, it will be three hundred.”

“I'll take them.” Roget let the scanner take the CredID codes, then added his thumbprint before handing over his flash monitor.

The clerk inserted it in the loader, then handed it back. “There you go, sir.”

“Thank you.”

On his way back from DeseretData, Roget stopped by the supply store—Smith's—where he picked up a replicator supply pak. He chose the full-range version, expensive as it was. The apartment replicator needed all the assistance it could get. He also picked up a few local apricots … three—at ten yuan each.

By the time he returned to his apartment, he had already decided which sload he'd scan first—
From Deseret to Federation District.
It purported to be a history of the area, produced almost a century ago. The production company was Deseret Documentary. The others were more recent, and all had been done in the local district by Saints.

Then he'd have to see exactly what steps he'd take next.

 

11

17 MARIS 1811
P. D.

Roget did enjoy the shower, although he hurried through it, and some of the toiletries supplied were not what he would have picked. As Lyvia had indicated, there were indeed two singlesuits, one in tasteful deep gray and one in dark green, as well as two pairs of underwear and socks as well, plus what looked to be short pajamas. Although his systems could detect no overt snoops built into the clothing, he had no doubts that they contained nano-level locators, and probably a great deal more.

More of concern was that the singlesuits fit so well that they seemed tailored to him personally. How could they have been? He hadn't detected any radiation or any active energy fields around him. Nor had he detected any direct comm links from Lyvia, and he hadn't been around any Dubietans except in the last five hours or so. All the little details of those hours were providing him with a picture whose outline he didn't like at all, and he'd scarcely begun to look at Skeptos and Dubiety.