Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (9 page)

Harriet raised a claw up in front of her face.

"The yellow was a mistake, I think."

Just then the
Coin Collector
shuddered, and I realized something large had just docked. I guessed the prador were bringing her reward, and wondered if that might be a cause for regret.

Joel Richards owns Arch Rival Sports, a small chain of athletic shoe stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, and continues to engage in the type of activities the protagonists of this story pursue. Over the years, that includes back packing, judo, sled dog racing, scuba diving, sea kayaking, and marathon running. He tells us, "Perhaps not with as much vigor as in past years, but with at least as much enthusiasm." In addition, the author tutors and teaches at 826 Valencia, the writing center founded by Dave Eggers to assist and advance school age embryonic writers. Although Joel hasn't been writing much lately, a reprint story will be appearing soon in
Future Games
(Prime Books).

Sea kayaking is a great sport. So Tim Marchese had been told, and he was ready to believe it. He had a wife, a former marathoner, rower, and windsurfer, now a class T-6 paraplegic with a bullet-damaged spine. Tim Marchese was going to make sea kayaking the best sport in the world today.

"Today San Francisco Bay and its harbor seals; tomorrow the San Juans and its orcas."

Marilee flashed him her smile. Not the light-up-the arena dazzle that had supercharged his motor from day one of their meeting. This one was low intensity and brief, but the best of the day so far. He'd take it.

Tim stood on the pebbly bottom of the Sausalito shore line, thigh deep in water that would demand a wet suit of a windsurfer. His hands gripped the fiberglass of the kayak's hull. It looked sleek to some, no doubt, but it was a barrel-chested Labrador to the greyhound rakishness of their racing scull. A craft Marilee would never sit in again.

He placed his hands firmly on the coaming and swung himself into the rear seat. Marilee sat paddle in hand, looking at him over her shoulder as he secured the spray skirt.

"What do you think?" he asked. "Check the anchor-out houseboat life or go for the burn and row across to Belvedere?"

Marilee looked over the aquatic scene. Tim focused on the nape of her neck where short strands of tight curls glinted copper in the afternoon sun.

"I need a workout."

Tim dropped the rudder and dipped his paddle to its first stroke.

"Belvedere it is."

Sooner than he thought. Marilee set the pace from the front, and it was a furious one. Beads of perspiration flattened those copper strands to her neck. Tim had plenty of time to see the process unfold. Marilee never looked back, not even to the side at floating grebes or the inquisitive nose of a sea lion close by. Not at the Neptune Society boat on its passage toward the Golden Gate and its ash scattering mission, a never-ending one these days. By force of will Marilee was turning the kayak into a racing scull, or the closest thing her upper body strength could make to it.

Tim went with it. This could have been a laid back, one-with-nature passage. No chance with Marilee's mood. He knew this woman intimately, yet was surprised by the ferocity of her attack on the bay and its heavy chop. Was it anger—the same brand of rage he so often felt, not knowing its proper object? There were so many: an inimical universe, Marilee for shutting him out and leaving him to grope in the dark, himself for unworthy desires and a sense of being unjustly put upon. Or was it a healthy response to a challenge, the aggressive way a pre-injury Marilee had turned herself into a marathoner when the best he had managed was a straining 10K?

He didn't know because he was afraid to ask. So long as Marilee wanted to fight this universe, she wouldn't want to leave it.

Is that false reasoning and delusion?

That he could ask himself, but not answer.

Six months after they married, Tim and Marilee gave up their Telegraph Hill cottage. What had been cozy and intimate in the summer—lived half the time outdoors on a weathered brick patio with nasturtiums cascading an orange stream off its edge to the Embarcadero below—became claustrophobic during rainy season.

They were too young and unencumbered for suburbia and its concerns with top schools and yuppie chic, so they pushed north on Highway 101 through Marin County and took a sharp turn west to the sea. Seven or eight miles down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard they climbed and crested White Hill, leaving suburbia behind. The San Geronimo Valley was open space, peopled by an odd amalgam of unreconstructed hippies, a few remaining working cattle ranchers and a growing population of young business and professional people. They settled in.

Tim Marchese was a cop, soon to become a homicide detective. Marilee North was an aerobics instructor, soon to become a personal trainer. Tim made the daily commute to San Francisco. Marilee found a large and affluent clientele in the North Bay.

The years went by and first brought Facebook, Twitter, and, later, a myriad of even newer ways to interconnect current lives. Then came the Hunt-Trachtman process and its incorporation into the world view of past life memory retrieval. Science transmuted to societal shift. Death as a finality became an instantly demolished concept, and Tim's work, and that of all law enforcement professionals worldwide, got exponentially tougher. There was no haven from the desperate and the reckless, not even low crime Marin County where Marilee worked, ran, shopped until the day she was shot in a bank robbery gone wildly violent and awry. Two people lay dead, though not the robber who had gambled his throwaway life for a shot at a big score. Perhaps he lacked the guts to kill himself and needed the police to do it for him. He had begged them to do it. They hadn't obliged.

He had also left Marilee a paraplegic with an incomplete dural lesion at the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. She'd have no voluntary control of her body below the waist.

Then there was the good news, they were told by the earnest young doctor who was seemingly delegated to break all news, good or bad. He went about it professionally and without inflection, as though delivering a case study to a symposium of colleagues rather than to real people impacted by the subject under discussion.

The injury was high up enough on the spinal cord so that the loop between voluntary and involuntary nerves remained closed. The sensory nerves could communicate with the controlling nerves, though the brain wouldn't know what was going on or feel the sensations. Marilee wouldn't be able to control her sphincter muscles, but her bladder was stuck in the closed position. She wouldn't be incontinent, but she'd have to empty herself with a catheter every four hours. She wouldn't feel genital sensation, though she could likely achieve reflex lubrication, arousal, and possibly an autogenic orgasm.

Marilee wasn't thrilled by these tidings.

"Sounds like being able to lick the ice cream off the spoon but not taste it."

Dr. Thal looked at her, took off his glasses and polished them on his lab coat, then put them back on his nose and looked again.

"Leave that to me," Tim said. "I'll do the licking."

Dr. Thal's lips turned up. Perhaps his first smile of the day.

"Somehow I think you'll do just fine, Ms. North."

"So am I ever going to feel anything down there?" Marilee persisted. "I don't now."

"You might. Since the spinal cord wasn't severed, some of the nerves might reroute a bit on their own. There's also some newer work aimed at getting sexual response signals to the brain via the vagus nerve. That's an alternate pathway directly to the brain stem via the abdomen and chest cavity, without utilizing the spinal cord. But whatever our approach, it's not going to happen tomorrow."

"Okay," Marilee said. "I'll settle for next week."

Monday morning, and Marilee had a client to meet. Tim stood by the car while Marilee lifted herself in with a swift vault, then reached over to remove the wheels from her Quadra Ultralight and throw them and the frame in the back seat. The muscles of her arms and shoulders rippled fluidly. Her workout had begun.

She turned to him with a firm set of her chin and her lips upraised for his kiss. He closed the Volvo's door to that sound of reassuring solidity and watched her manipulate the controls that backed her down the driveway.

No van with a lift for Marilee. No solid-tubed hospital wheel chair. A Volvo to get her places, but a state of the art and pneumatic-tired chair to move when she got there.

Marchese strode over to his Porsche—once Marilee's—for the drive over the bridge to his urban jungle. The first part—getting to and through the city—was easy. The last block leading to the Hall of Justice was a bitch.

Heavy duty protests to the point of stopping traffic. Another killer to be sentenced—what else was new? What was new was the left wing-right wing turnabout. The death penalty activists were banging signs and throwing rocks at the Lifers Forever. Tim didn't need their signs to tell them apart. The right wing conservatives with their demands for lifetime incarceration, preferably in sensory deprivation solitary chambers if they were really vindictive, wore coats and ties and held a cohesive formation of sorts. The scruffier pro-death penalty activists—why did Tim think
anarchist?
—scurried forward, threw their rocks and yelled their slogans as individuals. Either way, they were a handful for the riot police, and a tough gantlet for Tim to run before he made the safety of the underground lot.

Tim's seat-activated message center beeped him the moment he eased into his office chair. He hadn't even settled his full weight onto the sensors.

It was from his boss, summoning him to the holo room at 0930. No surprise there. Subject: the Dennison case.

That was a surprise. The Dennison murder was buried history. Seven years, though Tim remembered it with the vividness of this morning's breakfast. It had been one of his early assignments, in a very junior role. Telegraph Hill sexual assault and murder. Plenty of DNA evidence but no match with the database or the first and only suspect—an estranged husband. He also had an alibi.

Tim looked at his watch. 0910. Twenty minutes to bone up on the details. He called up the computer file and walked through the VR reconstruction of the murder scene. He picked his way through overturned furniture, felt the crackling shards of broken lamps and sculptures underfoot. Every bit as bloody as he remembered it.

He closed the file, got up, and strode towards today's reality in the holo room. Quite a few people were there before him.

Frank Garrety ran the homicide department and would for another six months. The prospect of imminent retirement had slowed him down. Most of these days he looked drawn and tired. Every intake of air was a breath of caution. But today he was the first out of his chair when Tim entered. Hansill, his successor-designate and a forensic cop, remained seated, his arm stretched lazily over his chair back. A man and a woman, unknown to Marchese, rose in a gesture of politeness seldom seen at the Hall of Justice.

"Tim, this is Detective Christian Juul of the Copenhagen Police Department, and Ms. Bente Flindt," Garrety said. He turned towards his guests. "Detective Tim Marchese."

Christian Juul was a big man in his thirties, broad shouldered and well muscled but with no sign of a stomach. His blond hair was thinning, though perhaps it was simply that fineness that many Scandinavians had from birth. Bente Flindt was lithe and attractive, wearing little makeup and dressed in a navy two-piece suit with a plain white blouse. Around her neck was an antique silver chain and setting that held a polished but irregularly shaped piece of amber. She moved fluidly, and Tim guessed at muscles every bit as developed as Juul's, but longer and not as bunched.

"Good to meet you." Juul's voice was deep and resonant, seeming to well up from the depths of his chest. A tough fullback to get past on a soccer field, Tim thought, and a hearty companion at the brew pub after.

"We hope we can help you in your investigations," the woman said. High cheekbones and a warm smile. "And that you can help us."

"Is there a Danish crime involved?" Tim asked as they settled in their viewing chairs, an oval table before them and past that the hologrid.

"Miss Flindt is the Danish equivalent of our clinical social worker." Garrety said. "She's with the Copenhagen Department of Social Services. Or the Danish Department of Social Services in Copenhagen. The jurisdictional distinctions are a little unclear to me. Perhaps she can better explain."

A seated Frank Garrety seemed far more weary and confused than the chief detective who had leaped up to usher Tim in from the door.

"That part doesn't matter," Ms. Flindt said gently. "Helping each other does. I think that we can help you solve a murder case and make an arrest. You can help us in another way."

"Perhaps we can get on with it, then," Hansill said from the depths of his chair.

"There's occasionally time for social niceties, Paul." Garrety turned towards Hansill with some asperity. "Even in our line of work."

"Yes, there is," Tim said. "Particularly when our guests have come from some distance. You were saying, Ms. Flindt?

"Yes, I can use your help for one of my clients. That requires my presence at the arrest and possibly arraignment. I do understand that this is a criminal matter on your side of the ocean. It is something else on ours."

"But Detective Juul is with us," Tim said.

"I am more or less a middleman," Juul said. "What you call a conduit, I think. Ms. Flindt came to us with something we had not seen before. Perhaps I should let her explain."

Bente Flindt turned to face Marchese.

"We have been working with a disturbed child. She is, among other things, a disciplinary problem and exhibits some uncommon symptoms. Quite a list, in fact. She startles easily and has nightmares and flashbacks that seem out of the range of her experiences. More than that—she seems possessed by a sense that she won't live long. These symptoms are all characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder, yet our investigations turn up no environmental causative trauma that can be addressed. In fact she comes from a loving and tolerant middle class family. We've tried hypnotic regression, and that turned up nothing concrete, though it did hint at something impalpable, too deep to reach." She paused. "We can, of course, treat the symptoms, but with unpredictable results. We'd like to get at the root of the problem. So, as part of an experimental program—and with her parents' support—we tried the Hunt-Trachtman process."