Brother, Can You Spare A Crime?
A Mystery in One Unnatural Act
By Dan L. Hollifield
A Tale of the Mare Inebrium
"One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the
children of imagination, some strange, impossible place..."
Arthur Conan Doyle
I'd been going to the Mare Inebrium since the day it had- I
suppose "appeared" is the best way of putting it -appeared in City of
Lights. I'd seldom gone there on business, however- strictly for social
reasons. As the Immortal's ambassador I found it to be useful to meet
with other species' representatives away from the embassies. After all,
most diplomatic work is really accomplished at cocktail parties. The
business I was referring to is my other job; Chief Justicar- The Reever
of the Immortals. I was in my office in City of Lights- clearing away
some paperwork -when I got the call to come to the Mare. Actually,
there were two calls- First the Mare's owner, then the manager and head
bartender called a few seconds later. My switchboard program flashed up
a notice of an incoming call, one that could not be traced.
"Someone is being killed at my bar," said a voice I recognized as the
Mare's owner. Then he disconnected. Two seconds later another notice
appeared- a call from Max at the Mare Inebrium. "You better come
quickly, we've got a corpse in the main room. Everything has been
sealed, no one has left, and the security systems are on full alert.
I've got to call the boss..."
"He already knows," I said. "He just called me himself. I'll be there in a minute or so. Any suspects?"
"No," replied Max in a shaky voice. "This guy just
wandered in and fell over dead. It just so happened that we had a
roomful of doctors upstairs in one of the side bars- One of them
examined the guy, but it was obvious that he was already dead."
"Oh, what was so obvious about it?"
"Well- the knife sticking out of his back was a bit of a giveaway," sighed Max.
"I suppose so..." I chuckled grimly. "Which doctor was it?"
"You may remember him- Clark ...something, his friends call him Doc..."
"Really big guy, heavily tanned, short hair,
surgeon and inventor... One of his companies was in charge of the
construction of the Mare Tower?"
"That's the one," Max replied. "He's got offices up on the eighty-sixth floor- One of the boss' special friends."
"I hope he'll stay out of the investigation. As I
recall, he has quite a reputation back on Earth, but he may be out of
his league here. Then again, I may need his help. There's never been an
outright 'murder' at the Mare- that I know of..." "That's right," said Max nervously. Tarja did have a permit, didn't she? "A few fights, sure. The odd accidental
death. Some brawls in the Red Dog, those space ranger-types love a good
dust-up. Some contract killers drop in, but they know the rules- 'no
commissions to be executed inside the Mare Tower without a special
permit, signed by you, personally.' They'd rather face Kazsh-ak in
unarmed combat than flaunt that, especially after what you did to that Zerxceries hit-man when he broke the same rule at the Cornavarad embassy. Cousin, that was unfair."
"Yes, " I grinned. "Seventeen point six two seconds. The old D'rrish cleaned you out for a bundle on that. Its your own fault. 'A minute and six tenths' you said. You knew he wouldn't last a full minute against me, yet you still bet high. You didn't even make the spread."
"That'll teach me. Anyway, no contract killings ever happen here without permission. And the Field of Honor..." began Max.
"'Is not legally within the confines of the Mare or its environs.' Yes," I interrupted. "I know. Polios and I worked out special rules for dueling that apply to that side bar alone. I'll just assume that all
the rules are being adhered to... until I find out otherwise. Very
well. Keep everyone calm, don't let anyone else touch the body, and
I'll have a squad there in seven minutes. I'll be there sooner."
"Right. Can do, have done, and we'll be waiting," Max said and then disconnected.
******
Well, no need to hang about. At least I'm in City of
Lights- here I'm free to use Immortal's technology. One of the few
places on the planet that I don't have to operate within restrictions,
City of Lights is a relief for an Immortal. Not as advanced as our city
inside Fort Mountain, but still plenty civilized. I picked up my staff
of office and spoke to the computer built within it. "Arrange transport
to the Mare Inebrium... maximum priority, minimum time. I'll also need
a squad of officers, a homicide unit, and notify the coroner's office
that there's a body for pickup." "Messages sent... Transport ready," it replied,
dilated a portal, and I walked through nothingness to emerge outside
the Mare. Immortal transport systems are a blessing. Three steps
through the portal and I was at my destination. Even if I'd been
traveling halfway around the world, three steps would be all I'd have
to take. I wished, not for the first time, that I wasn't so hobbled by
the High Counsel's rulings.
******
"You're here," said Max in a relieved tone of voice. "Good, we've um... We've had another one."
"What?"
"Clark says that this one was shot in the back," sighed Max. "But the weird thing is that its the same guy."
I looked at the two bodies, side by side on the
polished hardwood floor. Max was right, they were alike enough to be
twins. Plus, they were wearing identical clothing. Something screwy was
happening. At the sound of the lobby doors opening, I looked up. A
humanoid walked in, rather stiff-leggedly. He wobbled his way up to the
bodies, said "I'm so very sorry," and fell across the other
two. Dead as a doornail- I could tell from the way he flopped down so
limply. The sun-bronzed doctor rolled him over and checked for a pulse,
then shrugged. He sniffed the air above the freshest corpse once and
looked at me.
"Cyanotic acid," said Clark quietly. "This man has been poisoned."
I looked at the corpse. It was the same man. The door
opened again and my detectives strode in followed by the squad of
uniformed officers. "What the hell?" the older detective said.
"Larrye," Max called out. "Clean-up on aisle five!"
******
By the time my Peaceforcers had gotten all the Mare's
customers off to the side and begun taking statements we had five
bodies on the floor. All were the same being, as far as we could tell.
My detectives had checked the IDs on them all. One Rupert P. Coltrane,
late of Chicago, USA, Earth, 1935 AD, had expired five times, from five
different weapons, on the floorboards of the Mare Inebrium.
Perpetrator? Person or persons unknown, as yet. I'd stationed an
officer outside to see where the victims were coming from after the
fourth one had entered, but the fifth one had gotten by my man somehow.
It was as if they were coming out of thin air. I noticed a low,
trilling noise that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once
and looked over at Clark. The hair on the back of his neck was standing
up as he frowned over the growing pile of bodies. A sixth had just
added himself to the heap.
"A quite singular occurrence," he said. "Some unknown
phenomenon is playing with the laws of probability. This isn't normally
possible, therefore something abnormal must be happening."
Number seven made it all the way to the bar. He was
asking a shocked Larrye for an Helcorin Fizzwater when he fell over
with a knife sticking out of his back. Larrye shivered, shrugged, and
placed the drink on the bar where the victim had stood. Then his eyes
rolled back in his head and he slid to the floor in a faint. Blanche
caught him before he could crack his head on the floor.
"Glad to be of service..." Larrye mumbled. "That'll be two credits, please..."
Max was making his way toward the comm-unit when
number eight walked in. Trixie eyed the soon-to-be-dead man for a
moment, then I caught her looking towards the ceiling, thoughtfully.
Before Max could get to the comm, it chimed, signaling an internal call
from one of the Mare's side bars. Blanche answered it. She listened for
a moment, looked at Max, asked for a repeat of the message, and then
shrugged.
"Its from the Pantheon Room," I saw her whisper to
Max. "Elvis says that Thor and Zeus just busted a tabletop-
arm-wrestling again, Isis is doing a table-dance for a bunch of Picts,
and could you approve a tab for a guy named Hammett?" Max groaned and
took the call. This was getting too strange. My detectives had been
reduced to making tic-marks on a notepad, there were now eleven
dead bodies on the floor, and the Mare's patrons were as confused as I
was rapidly becoming. They were not going to be able to give us any
information. It was time to appeal to a higher authority. I instructed
my staff of office to place a call to the Mare's owner.
"What," I asked Polios when he answered, "in the seven hells is going on here? I've got a freighter-full of dead clones bleeding all over your imported teak floor, Larrye fainting from fright, my detectives reporting that the Mare's own security AIs are claiming that nothing is wrong and that we should all remain calm and have another drink... and an insurance adjuster that I'm about to shoot, myself.
He's giggling about an 'act of god' and how his company won't have to
pay off on your policy. I want all the security recordings of the front
door, the street outside, the lobby, and the bar's main doors, stat!
What are you trying to pull here? This is not covered in our contracts,
you know that. Do you want to lose your license?"
"Young man," replied Polios- I'm over thirteen
million years old and Polios is the only person besides Dad and Gramps
that I'll allow to call me 'young man'. "Young man, this is none of my
doing. I simply warned you when it started. As for the securi-cam
views, they show nothing that you haven't observed with your own eyes."
"Don't give me that," I hissed. "You know very well
what's going on here. You've got to! You see everything that happens in
here. Plus you have 'special sources' of information that I need. Why
are there thirteen copies of this idiot bleeding on your bar's
floorboards? Fourteen... Fifteen... I want some action, or I'm going to
take this to the Counsel and ask for your deportation! Sixteen..."
"Yes," Polios replied after a long pause. "I could go back and look at what happened at the beginning of all this, or
take you to visit yourself at the point where you solve it on your own-
or even to the point where you finally corner the villain. But what good would it do you?
You'll still have to figure this all out for yourself, you know. I'd be
doing you no favors to hand it to you on a silver platter. I," he
added, "am not allowed-"
"Crap," I snapped, "allowed, my ass! You're
here on Bethdish for the sole reason that you refused to acknowledge
your own government's authority over you. Don't give me any excuses,
you're a wanted fugitive on your own planet for 'refusal of
compliance' to your government's rules. Don't think I'll let you hide
behind those same rules now." I was watching the room as I spoke. The
body count was now at twenty and the door was opening again. I noticed
Trixie and Max huddled together, whispering. Max glanced up and shot me
what could only be described as a 'significant look', then he and
Trixie began walking toward me. "All right Polios," I said in a calmer
voice. "You've never refused my requests before. I'll do you the favor
of believing that you have a good reason. But I'll want to hear it when
this is over, do you hear me?"
"Of course," He replied. "Whenever you wish. What I can
tell you right now is that this is a singular event. By that I mean
that it is happening on one timeline, and only that one, out of all of
the infinite levels of probability that my instruments are able to
scan. The Mare is a stable point in all of the probability lines of the
multi-verse, which means that it is accessible from every possible
timeline. Something- or some one -is mucking about with the structure
of the Mare itself. That's where your multiple copies of Mr. Coltrane
are coming from- I'll answer your other questions later, when you've
learned enough for my answers to make sense. By the way, Sarah is
asking me to invite you over for tea."
"Tell her that I accept," I said, "when this is over. Remember, you have some explanations to make, old man."
"By the time that this is 'over', young man, you won't need
explanations," he replied. "I'll tell Sarah to put the kettle on." He
disconnected. By this time the body count was at twenty four and number
twenty-five was sliding into a booth and signaling for a waitress.
Blanche went toward him. Max and Trixie reached me and Max looked grim.
"Trixie's sussed it," Max said. "We need to go upstairs to the Pantheon."
"Why?" I asked heatedly. "Some deity is yanking our chain? I don't believe it! The security fields in the Pantheon prevent any deity from using their powers anywhere except inside that one room."
"Worse," said Trixie sadly. "Its much worse..."
"Don't you see yet?" Max asked. "There's a writer in the house!"
"Shit," I said eloquently.
******
We three stood outside of the Pantheon to plot a bit
of strategy. Given our situation, perhaps plot wasn't the best choice
of words. Still, it felt like plotting.
"How do you want to handle this?" Max asked.
"You can't just go and lock him up," Trixie added.
"It might surprise you both but I agree," I said.
"This has got to be done carefully. This man is extremely dangerous in
one sense, but entirely innocent in another. But, he cannot be allowed
to keep on endangering the people downstairs."
"Yeah," Max said. "I've been hoping he wouldn't write
in a slew of gangsters with automatic weapons since Trixie told me what
was going on. All right, Elvis has been clued in. He's given everyone
free drinks at the bar. Most everyone except our man has left their
tables and are distracted. He's alone, so all we have to do is go over
and explain matters to him."
"You hope," I replied as I pushed open the door and
walked inside. The room was big, I'll grant you that. I suppose that it
wouldn't seat more than a million people, but that would crowd the
dance floor somewhat. I realized that most of it was an illusion- a
very good illusion. Crossing the floor felt like moving in
fast-forward. We covered twelve strides for every one we took. Our
target looked up at us as we approached. I noticed his gaze lingering
on Trixie. A familiar gleam I saw in his eyes told me that he was male,
human, and didn't belong in a rest home. A wolf in cheap clothing, I thought to myself. Maybe there's something to work with here.
"Well," he said humorously. "Does it take all three of you to approve my tab?"
"Oh no sir, there's no problem with that," Max began, "but there's been some trouble downstairs."
"Oh? I wouldn't know. I've been here all afternoon. I didn't notice anything. Are you from the police?"
"I am," I said. "Its a simple matter that I hope we
can clear up shortly." I again noted his approval of Trixie's short
skirt. We needed a diversion- something to stop him from working until
we could control the effects. As much as I hated to presume on the
child, her legs were our best weapon so far. Upon further reflection, I
decided that any human male that couldn't be diverted by Trixie had probably already been buried. "Actually-" I began.
"Are you a writer?" Trixie cooed. "I just love creative men."
She saw the situation, sized it up, and grabbed her chance. Capable woman,
I thought. I spared a glance at Max and lifted an eyebrow. He gave me
the barest of shrugs in reply and then turned his brightest smile on
the writer. "I'm the manager," he said. "I'll just go speak to
the bartender about your tab. Then the 'policeman' and I will have to
go back downstairs and straighten out our little problem. Would you
mind terribly if I asked you to look after my friend here? She's ever
so much interested in literary matters."
"Not at all," he said. "I'd be delighted. I really
need an office to work in, I'm afraid. I was having the worst time with
this chapter I was working on..." He'd already forgotten that Max and I
were here. I watched as he absently put away an innocent-looking
notepad and shut down the laptop- table-top actually, since it was
built into the table itself -that he'd been using. Max and I stepped
back a few paces and started breathing again. Trixie, looked up at us
once and waved us away, then tapped the computer with a fingernail too
many times for it not to be a message. I turned to Max and started to
ask him what she could have meant.
"Office space, he said it himself," Max remarked
cryptically. "I'll have to talk to Clark and ask if there's something
with extra safeties already built into a room- or even a whole floor.
Hammett was using that table-top communicator pad as a word processor-
That's how he managed to create those copies of the unlucky Mr.
Coltrane downstairs. The com pad is networked into all of the Mare's
computer systems- Hammett was using the systems that maintain the
special environment rooms to alter the reality of the bar -but if you
or I did the same thing with the same systems, nothing would happen.
It's a loophole in the Mare's internal security- something's got to be
done about it. Come on. Trixie'll keep him out of trouble while we try
to make the Mare safe from re-writes."
"She'll be safe?" I asked.
"She's no safer than the rest of us unless we find him
someplace else to write. Look, for now he's hooked. He's not going to
get another word written until she lets him get back to work. While she
buys us the time, we'll have to find a way to make it safe for him to
write. "
"And what if he suddenly has an inspiration and wants to jot down a few notes?" Frankly, I found that idea a bit frightening.
"He won't. That's not the kind of idea that's going to
occur to him until she turns off the charm. Don't underestimate her,
she can charm the pants off of him"
I gave him my best deadpan look. At least he had the grace to blush.
"I should re-phrase that," he began.
"Never mind," I said. "You should be used to the taste
of your own feet by now. You wanted to talk to Clark about a safe
office?"
"Yeah, once that's taken care of you can go to your
tea party. No gentleman of your quality would keep Miss Sarah waiting.
I heard the end of your conversation with the boss."
"Not until the customers are out of danger," I replied. "Let's just go see what Clark has to say."
******
"It was Dashiell Hammett," I said as Mistress Sarah
poured me another cup of the fragrant tea that she enjoyed. I was
sitting at a small table with her and the Mare's owner in their home.
"The author of 'The Maltese Falcon' on Earth in their year AD 1929. He
was revising a draft of his next novel. I thought that the Pantheon was
restricted to gods and goddesses only."
"World-builders- or destroyers," sighed Polios in
return, "Any entity that is creative on a god-like level. Writers are a
special case, beyond deities... Far too creative to be controlled.
Deities? They will at least restrict themselves to one particular
world. But writers? Bah! The Mare attracts them- Damnation! Half of
them don't even realize that they've managed to access the Mare from
their own world-line, but usually the security AIs can prevent them
from acting on the quantum level, as Dash did. Hammett is one of the
more powerful writers- and much too much so for the safeties. Be glad
that it wasn't King- or Harlan. You'd have been out of your league,
youngster. Reality would have been twisted completely out of
recognition."
"Be that as it may," I said irritably, thinking that
reality was pretty damn twisted to begin with. "The fact remains that
you need to expand the security for the Pantheon- and the rest of the
Mare. If I hadn't bought off those reporters that were in the main bar,
your secrets would have been plastered across the newsnets of a dozen
worlds by now."
"What happened to all the dead bodies?" Sarah asked.
"They all faded away when Max and I convinced Hammett
to shut off his laptop. Of course, the fact that Trixie wanted to sit
in his lap was the clincher... Hammett snapped that thing off and put
it away fast enough to scorch his paper scratch pad when she started
batting her eyelashes at him. That girl ought to have to have a license
to peddle that stuff," I smiled. "I thought that Max was going to split
his head in two, he was grinning so widely."
"He and Trixie are mated for life," said Sarah, "like
swans. They have a connection, and a very close one. There's a good
reason why Max is in love with her. She's a very smart girl, indeed.
She knew the best way to end the parade of corpses was to distract
Dash. Max just picked up on what she was doing before you did. She even
beat you to the punch. Don't be mad, no one was actually harmed. From
what I understand, the corpses weren't really real to begin with. So there's no real harm done."
"Only because Max and Clark put their heads together and found him an empty office to type in," I replied. "After Hammett and Trixie went to dinner, I might add."
"Yes," mused Polios. "Triple reality-locks
concentricked- I like that word 'concen-tricked.' Perhaps 'nested' is
more precise, but 'concen-trick implies the trickery involved with the
engineering. Three reality-locks concentricked inside each other and
then inside an uncertainty dampening field, itself inside of a dampened
probability field. Its costing me Terrawatts of energy each second that
Dash is working. I'd be bankrupt already if the whole suite of rooms
weren't located on a different time axis. Days- there -are seconds
-here. Oh, I thank my lucky stars I decided to major in para-temporal
design when I was a young lad at university. Perhaps I should rent out
that suite to other writers when Dash is through with it. I could make
a tidy little sum off of it."
"You're sweet dear," Cooed Sarah as she got up and
gave Polios a hug. "Maybe you should use the same arrangement on a few
honeymoon cottages." Trixie wasn't the only capable female I was
acquainted with, I observed. I was willing to bet upon by whom the
first cottage would be used. "I should be going," I said.
"So soon?" Sarah sounded disappointed, but I could see her wink at me. "Whatever shall we do now, darling?" she asked Polios.
"Yes," I lied. "Somewhere, there is a crime happening.
I must go." As I prompted my staff of office for transport I had
another thought. I interrupted the romance, before it got prurient,
long enough to ask if Polios had given thought to designing vacation
resorts. I could use a century or two at the beach to relax... It would
be even better if I could get back to the office the same day I left.
Polios shrugged in reply.
"I'll get back to you," he said, with Sarah in his arms.
I can wait, I thought to myself as I took three steps and entered my office.
THE END
© 1999 - 2007 By Dan L. Hollifield
Bio:  Dan Hollifield, Aphelion's Senior Editor and Publisher, was born in 1957 at almost the same moment that Sputnik II was launched. This seems to have warped his point of view in the fact that he has always been rather a nut on the subject of spaceflight. A life-long SF and F reader, he began scribbling stories for his own amusement and for schoolwork back in the 1960s. His oldest surviving work, carefully preserved by his Mother, is a two-act play about four children finding hidden treasure in a haunted house. He began composing his first attempt at a SF novel in 1987. This manuscript led directly to his "World of Bethdish" short stories and novellas, his "Collector's Museum" series of stories, and the "Mare Inebrium" shared universe series. After having been drug online, kicking and screaming, in 1995 by noted Filksinger and Web-Guru Robert Wynne, he joined Dragon's Lair Webzine as a frequent contributor and later as Assistant Editor. His first e-published story was a Horror short in Dragon's Lair. His fiction has been published in Dragon's Lair Webzine, Titan Webzine, Steel Caves, The Writer's Club, and Aphelion Webzine. He lives with his wife in a tiny brick house near his parent's farm in the howling wilderness that is rural Madison County, Northeast of Athens, Ga. USA. He is an avid collector of firearms, swords, knives, books, and music- both vinyl records and CDs. An amateur musician, he also composes music, lyrics, and Filk as well as having been an artist all his life. One of his oil paintings, done on commission for a local fan, is soon to be featured in a book on Elvis Presley Fan-Art that will be published in England.
E-mail: vila at america dot net
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