Heroes - ch4
News Bulletin - official report into the death of Gramard Henton says “Death by misadventure”! The Henton family are said to be “extremely upset” by the findings of the investigation carried out by Slummer police. Sources close to the family have indicated that they are planning to consult their lawyers on the best way to proceed. It has been suggested that they will request a “proper investigation” headed by Citadel Guards. Whatever action they do decide to take, it is clear that questions remain concerning the death of the young socialite, who stole a top of the range personal care android…
Grenge Luxley, a particularly expensive Citadel lawyer, surveyed the faces in front of him. In the middle sat Lisden Henton, the usually unruffled interior designer to the rich and famous, who now looked as if he had not slept in a week. On his left sat his wife, Callipe, who had been looking forward to some peace and quiet away from politics, but instead was facing life without her younger son. The couple’s remaining son, Dryfe, paced up and down behind their chairs, whilst their daughter, Tellie, sat white faced and tearful on her father’s right.
‘Can’t you do anything?’ Dryfe Henton demanded, pausing for a moment to throw the question at the lawyer for perhaps the fifth time in their half hour interview.
Luxley spread his hands in what was probably meant to be a soothing gesture. ‘As I have explained, Mr Henton, the official report has been published with the full backing of the Citadel Guard.’
‘How can they just publish that… that garbage?! Those Slummer police don’t have a clue, clearly! They just about managed to work out where Gramard and Lizzeth left the service lift, and where Lizzeth blew up. What they did for nearly a full day in between, who they met, where they went… There isn’t a single word about any of that!
‘It’s labelled “The Official Report of the Investigation into the Death of Gramard Henton”, but there seems to have been precious little investigating done by those clowns! Who is this Sergeant Shale, anyway? At the very least, she should be demoted, preferably even removed altogether. No wonder the Slums are in the state they are in, if that’s the type of person they employ in their police force.’
He drew breath in order to continue his rant, and Luxley took the opportunity to step in. ‘Mr Henton, please sit down, and try to calm down, too. The Citadel Guard have been over the report produced by Sergeant Shale most carefully. They are satisfied that everything possible was done by the Sergeant to attempt to discover your brother in order to apprehend him for the theft of the android…’
Dryfe snorted derisively at the word “theft” but made no further comment, so Luxley continued, ‘…to, as I said, apprehend him for the theft of the android, which was the lawful property of Uncle. The Slums do not have the type of security system that we take for granted here in the Citadel, and, therefore, have no way of tracking an individual person through the streets.
‘It appears that proper questioning of potential witnesses was begun too late in the circumstances, though, since nobody could be expected to… um… anticipate the eventual outcome, no later than in any similar investigation. The questioning, when it was done, was done in as professional manner as anyone could wish, and completely failed to turn up any… um… leads as the security forces put it.
‘Given all of these circumstances, Mr Henton,’ and here Luxley looked directly at Lisden, ‘I can only… um… advise that you accept the findings of the report. So little remained of the android that analysis into how or why it exploded is impossible. Without that information, there is really nothing to pursue.
‘Thank you for coming to see me, and please accept my deepest condolences. I am only sorry there is nothing more that I can suggest.’
He held out his hand to Lisden, and the interview was, apparently, over. Lisden shook the offered hand, his face a mask. Callipe and Tellie, both with tears in their eyes, also shook it, but Dryfe had already left the office, striding away on his long legs. The others caught up with him in the street. Tellie was now weeping openly against her mother’s shoulder, and Lisden looked like a man whose whole world had just ended.
All of the words Dryfe wanted to say died on his lips as he looked at his family. They were shattered enough, he decided. The only thing that kept him from joining them in their pit of misery was the anger that burned within him. Something about the whole situation smelled bad, and it was not just the report. It was clearly based on fact, but the facts disguised something rotten, he was certain of it. What was that saying about the best lies being ninety per cent truth? Nothing in the report, absolutely nothing, could actually be disputed, but that did not make the report true.
The Henton family walked home in silence, Tellie supported between her parents, who also managed to cling to each other, whilst Dryfe stalked behind them. Dark thoughts brooded in his mind, ways of finding Sergeant Shale, and of dealing with her when he finally came face to face with her. What reason she might have for covering up the death of his brother he could not imagine, unless it was either sheer incompetence, or jealousy of his Citadweller lifestyle.
Something about that last thought stuck in his head. Gramard was clearly running away from the Citadel, so why would the Sergeant be jealous of him? How could she be jealous of a person who was rejecting the luxury of his life? If she was not jealous, then, she must simply be incompetent! The most basic elements of any real investigation appeared to have been ignored, or carried out too late to be of any good. The report, and its ridiculous conclusions, must, therefore, be her way of covering her back.
That did not work, either, when he thought more carefully. The omissions, errors, and sheer lack of imagination and intelligence in compiling such nonsense were obvious, even to him, a lay man. Surely, her superiors would have spotted them? And even if they did not, then the Citadel Guard must have done.
He was still brooding on this point when they arrived at their home, a large villa set back from the street in its own grounds. They used the side gate to avoid having to walk all the way round to the main entrance. A stone flagged path led them through the grounds, though none of them really appreciated the graceful trees, or quiet fountains that usually gave them so much pleasure.
Their butler, Raston, met them as they entered via the rear entrance, and informed them that lunch was ready. They all went dutifully into the dining room, but none of them had much of an appetite. They sat around the real wood table, with real china plates, and real silver cutlery in front of them. Raston served them, before withdrawing silently from the room, his feet making no sound on the deep carpet. They all made an attempt to eat something, but after toying with their food for a while, they all left the room and went their separate ways.
Dryfe started to head for his own room, but then he had an idea and walked into his father’s study. The copy of the report into Gramard’s death that Luxley had given them was lying on the desk. Lisden was nowhere to be seen. Tapping a quick message in to his mobile-com and sending it to his father as an explanation, he picked up the thin report and left the house by the front door.
The house he was making for was only a few streets away. It stood in a row of tall, narrow houses, each originally identical to its neighbours, though with one door painted green, another blue, and another orange, they were all now slightly dissimilar. The door he arrived at was a pale yellow, and the curtains behind the less than perfectly clean windows were fuchsia pink. The young woman who opened the door in answer to his ring suited the house perfectly.
Her fine hair was dyed in three different shades of blue, and she wore sparkly blue contacts that glittered at him beneath over sized navy blue eye lashes. Her perfect pout was outlined in silver, and coloured baby blue. She wore a gossamer fine tunic that hung delicately from her shoulders, its navy fabric covered with silver stars. The hall way behind her was dim, but a shaft of sunlight from the open door way outlined the left side of her body, showing that she was naked beneath the tunic.
‘Dryfe, baby!’ she cried, throwing her arms around his neck. The feeling of her body against his was far from unpleasant, and he hugged her back, breathing in the scent of her hair, enjoying the soothing words she murmured in to his ear.
After a moment or two, she drew gently away, but only enough to reach behind him and close the door. She then resumed her former position, her gently yielding chest apparently glued to his. Dryfe asked himself for perhaps the millionth time in his life how in the name of all that was holy their relationship had remained platonic for so long.
Before he could seriously contemplate how to finally change that situation, she broke away, took his hand and led him towards the back of her house. In the kitchen, she poured out a cup of fresh coffee and handed it to him. The light from the window lit her body as she passed backwards and forwards across it, and he watched her with undisguised pleasure. Eventually, she led him in to the sitting room, where she settled gracefully on to the pile of cushions under the window, patting the cushion next to her.
When he was comfortably settled with his head on her shoulder, she asked, ‘So, how you doing, baby?’
‘I’m falling apart, Gloria,’ he admitted, sipping the slightly too hot coffee to prevent himself from giving way to the tears that threatened to spill.
Gloria stroked her silver painted nails through his hair. ‘Want to talk about it?’
‘About losing Gramard? No. At least, not yet. Later, when I’ve solved this bloody mystery, then I’ll talk about him. First of all, though, I have to find out exactly how and why he died.’
‘I thought that was all sorted?’ she said, her voice slightly puzzled. ‘He stole an android from that Uncle dude, managed to hide from those useless Slummer slugs for a day, and then got out into open country where the android exploded.’
Dryfe sat up and looked directly into her eyes. ‘Have you ever met one of Uncle’s androids?’
‘Met an android? Dryfe, baby, what are you taking these days? They’re just machines!’
He shook his head, vehemently. ‘No, Gloria, not the ones in his house. They are as much people as you or I, I swear to you.’
Her eyes revealed her disbelief far more clearly than words could have done, and he wondered how to explain the experience of discussing art, music, or politics with such a “machine”. How to make it clear to her his surprise in finding that the woman he had been chatting to was in fact made of wires and metal and plastic. The horror he had felt when Uncle used a remote control device to make the android move in ways he chose, rather than the way she chose. The pain he would swear he saw in her eyes as Uncle’s other guests laughed and clapped at his petty display of power.
But if he had been horrified, Gramard had been livid. He had also been convinced that they had been enjoying a cultured conversation with a young woman made of flesh and bone. Discovering that she was one of Uncle’s personal care androids did not diminish the admiration he held for her, indeed it made what he saw as her humiliation even more distressing. That was the moment he had fallen totally head over heels in love with her.
News Bulletin - a spokesperson has just released this statement on behalf of Lisden Henton, and his family. “My family and I all completely endorse the findings of the report produced by the Slum police into the death of our son, Gramard. Whilst we are left with questions about why he was in possession of an android belonging to Uncle in the first place, and exactly how that android exploded, these are questions that are now beyond answering. The investigation by the Slum police was as thorough as it could possibly have been under the circumstances. We will be taking no…”
Dryfe strode quickly across the room to where Gloria stood next to her holo-player, jabbing so viciously at the off switch that he almost knocked the machine off its shelf. Lost in his thoughts, he had only gradually become aware of exactly what the news bulletin was about.
His companion had been hunting through her music collection, completely oblivious to the news bulletin that had been coming from the machine. She looked at him with a startled, and slightly wary expression on her face.
‘Hey, baby, cool it! That little baby set my daddy back a few credits, you know?’ she said, a slight waver in her voice.
He took a deep breath, composing his mind, feeling his heart slow down, and his anger ebb. ‘I’m sorry, Gloria. I just couldn’t listen to any more of that rubbish! There’s no way Papa wrote a word of it.’
‘It’s OK, baby. You’ve got a lot on your mind. This will calm you down,’ and she waved one of her discs at him. ‘A bit of chill-out music, and a little Smoke, eh?’
‘I’ll say yes to the music, and a drink, if you’ve got it. I’ll pass on the drugs, tonight, though.’
She pouted her pretty blue lips at him. ‘Going square on me, baby?’ she asked, peeping out from beneath her outlandishly long lashes.
Laughing, Dryfe threw an arm around her slim shoulders. ‘The gods forbid, Gloria. I just need to think this whole thing through, and I think better if my brain isn’t floating in Smoke. It’ll be bad enough sharing a room with you, without sharing a joint. So, anything stronger than coffee in the house?’
Mollified, she slipped the disc into the holo-player, and disappeared to find him a drink. She was back in a few minutes, carrying a glass filled with clinking ice and something green and sparkly. In her other hand she carried a single Smoke stick, already lit.
He had returned to the cushions, and she handed him the glass before snuggling in close to him. Somehow, his arm settled around her, and her head came to rest on his shoulder quite naturally, as if there was no other position they could possibly have adopted. She made him feel protective rather than aroused, that was the trouble. There was no way she could possibly doubt her body’s effect on most of the men who willingly fell at her feet. She was certainly no innocent - he had watched her practically seduce Gramard in front of him - but she had never turned any of her considerable charm on him.
One day, he would have to ask her why. Perhaps today, when she was completely Smoked out…
He sipped his drink, enjoying the slight burn at the back of his throat. The alcohol soon relaxed his body, but the burn kept his mind more or less alert. Gloria took a deep drag of her Smoke, and then stubbed the joint out in her ashtray.
‘Smoke’s no fun on your own,’ she said, as she moved behind him, and began to massage his shoulders.
‘Now, baby, tell Auntie Gloria all about it,’ she murmured huskily into his ear.
Well, she was not high enough to answer questions about not seducing him, he decided, finishing his drink in one gulp. ‘OK, this whole thing with Gramard’s death… None of it makes sense, Gloria.’
‘Well, I’ve heard the official findings, and it adds up to me. What am I missing?’ she asked, her hands slipping under his shirt collar to ease the knots in his neck.
Putting the glass down on the carpet next to him, he ticked off the points on his fingers. ‘First of all, my brother is not a thief. Lizzeth went willingly with him, I’m sure she did. In fact, it was probably more her escape than his. After all, without her, what did he have to escape from? He was due to start working for Papa in a few weeks, to find his own niche in the firm.
‘The second thing is, androids don’t just blow up! Nobody would buy them if they were unstable. Something made her explode, something external. You can’t “press the wrong button”; programming androids doesn’t work like that.
‘And the last thing, for now,’ he gave a wry grin, ‘is what were they doing for a full day between arriving in the Slums and leaving? I don’t believe nobody saw them. Lizzeth was beautiful! She would have caught someone’s attention, even if Gramard didn’t.’
He tipped his head back so that he could look in to her eyes. ‘Am I making sense, Gloria, or am I just ranting?’
She pursed her lips, thoughtfully. ‘Now that you put it all like that… you’re right, the official version doesn’t make so much sense. Or rather, it does, but it’s so full of holes! It’s like you said before, the bare facts are there, but there’s nothing holding them together.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, gazing gratefully into her eyes. ‘I was beginning to think it was me that had got it all wrong!’
‘Hey, any time, baby, you know that,’ replied Gloria, giving him a cheeky wink. She continued to knead his neck and shoulders, and he leaned forward, slipping his shirt off so that she could reach further down his back.
He sighed with contentment as she dug both thumbs into the tense spot just above his right shoulder blade. ‘So, how do we fill in the gaps?’ he asked. ‘Knowing where they are is one thing, but that statement was right about one thing - with Gramard dead, it’s going to be damned hard to get any answers!’
‘Don’t give up, just yet, baby,’ she answered, and he could hear the reassuring smile in her voice. ‘We’ll find a way.’
News Bulletin - in entertainment news, don’t forget that you can still get tickets to the biggest concert of the decade by entering our competition. That’s right, folks, we here at the Pleasure Channel have managed to lay our hands on a shed load of front row tickets to the concert being performed by Rock Highway next week. They may not be the youngest act on the tour circuit, these days, but they can definitely out-perform just about anyone. Their live act is one not to miss. We are giving away pairs of tickets in our free to enter competition. All you need to do is answer this simple question…
Someone, probably Tellie, had left the holo-player on in the main sitting room of the Henton’s house. Dryfe switched it off, and then went to stand by the open, full length windows that looked out over the garden. It was night, but not dark. It never got properly dark in the city. There were lights along every street that made it bright as day, and some of their light leaked out even over their back garden.
The night breeze ruffled his hair, and the scent of night blooming flowers drifted to him. His ears caught the gentle plashing of the fountains that were never turned off. Leaning against the window frame, he felt, just for a moment, completely at peace.
Gloria’s face floated in his mind’s eye. Tonight, a vision in blue and silver, she might have stepped out of his parents’ night time garden. They had talked and talked, before dinner, over the meal, and for ages after. Now, he thought, they had exposed every hole in the official report, poring over the document that he had taken with him for just that purpose. They had so many questions that, if they had been written down, would have taken up more paper than the report!
But of answers they had not a single one.
Except, perhaps, one. He doubted, now, that the Slummer Sergeant who had written the report was either corrupt or incompetent. If she was either, the report would never have been published; instead she would have been the subject of an investigation herself, by now. What that meant, however, was that the Citadel Guard were involved in the cover up.
He was not much interested in conspiracy theories in general, although he knew that Gloria just ate that stuff up. Beneath her gullibility, however, she had a keen mind that often made connections that he would never have seen. As soon as he had realised that his family were not ready to discuss Gramard’s death as anything except a tragic accident, he had known Gloria was the person to speak to.
She had not disappointed him. Starting with his own initial doubts, she had begun spinning ideas of her own. The concept of an android in love with a human really captured her imagination. She saw Lizzeth as a tortured soul, imprisoned in a way that would be impossible for even the most cosseted young miss in the Citadel. Created to ensure the pleasure of others, yet programmed to think for herself. Whether she had also been programmed to feel, or whether that was simply a side effect of everything else, neither of them knew. Either way, it added to her mystique.
For Gloria, this was now an investigation into two deaths. The added tragedy of Lizzeth’s demise was that, officially, it had not happened. She was now the unofficial, and only, champion for android rights in Alexandria Citadel. If she had not known Gramard personally, Dryfe doubted that she would now be interested in his death at all!
The problem of the android blowing up without apparent cause was something neither of them was in anyway qualified to answer. Instead, they had searched amongst their acquaintance for someone who might know. Ironically, Uncle would have been the natural person to turn to, or at least, one of his employees, since neither of them knew the great man personally. However, this was clearly an avenue of enquiry that they could not pursue. They had briefly kicked around the idea of approaching one of the techs employed by the Citadel Guard, but they were worried about getting a stranger in to some kind of conflict of interest situation.
How to find out what Gramard and Lizzeth were doing, and where they were hiding, in the Slums was also apparently insoluble. They could visit the Slums easily enough; there was always at least one gate whose security system was broken, after all. The problem was how to get people to talk to them, when, apparently, they had not shared any information with the Slummer police.
Gloria guessed that they had met someone who had helped them to hide and, eventually, escape. The investigation report mentioned a search of the streets being carried out, though it did not seem to have been carried out either very systematically or thoroughly. However, in their Citadweller clothing, they would have stood out easily against the Slummers. Even the dimmest plod must surely have been able to see them.
Surely, also, some of the residents must have seen them, whether they had passed that information on to the police or not. Talking to any security personnel, whether Citadel Guards or Slummer police, was certainly out of the question. The problem they kept coming back to was their total lack of access to anyone who could really throw any light on these issues.
He was left with mixed feelings about his visit to Gloria, quite apart from the frustration of being so close to someone so attractive with barely any clothes on and not even wanting to remove what there was. On the one hand, he felt no closer to the answers to any of his questions than when he had left the house earlier. On the other, just talking everything through with Gloria had reassured him that there really were questions to be asked. However, they had reached a point where they were simply talking round and round in circles. They had agreed to sleep on it, and meet up again in the morning over breakfast at one of the ‘little places’ Gloria was so fond of.
He shivered, suddenly, and realised that it was growing quite chilly outside. Stepping back, he closed the windows and drew the curtains against the night. Enough light came through the door from the hall to allow him to cross the room without falling over anything and reached the stairs. At the top, he had to walk past Gramard’s room, and he stopped by the door for a moment. The door was slightly ajar, and he could see the chaos of clothes, magazines, and music discs that his brother habitually lived in. They would have to go through it all, and soon. No point in leaving it like that.
In his own room, he undressed slowly, shoving his clothes into his laundry bin. Naked, he slipped into bed, enjoying the feeling of his clean sheets against his skin. Instructing his lights to switch off, he settled down, and was soon asleep.