Wrapt in Crystal Read online

  “Semay,” Drake confirmed.

  “Give my respects to Ava,” the little man said. “We do not worship her on Fortunata, but she has always been a favorite of mine. A happy goddess.”

  “Then you must pray with the Triumphantes,” Drake said.

  Reed smiled at him. “Any reasonable man would,” he replied.

  * * *

  * * *

  Drake escaped from his dinner companion after a bit of graceful lying. Once Reed realized that the Moonchild would have a twelve-hour layover in Fortunata, he offered to put him up at one of his hotels (apparently he owned several in the shipping district) or even his own home. Drake was not in the habit of making lifetime friends out of chance traveling companions, so he said that arrangements had been made for him back on New Terra. In fact, he planned to spend the night in one of the Spartan rooms set aside for transient Moonchildren at the local base on Fortunata, but he was sure Reed would not understand why he would prefer such a bed to the luxury of a hotel.

  They were only about eight hours from planetfall and Fortunata had become the biggest thing in the night sky. Drake spent more than an hour, solitary in the observation room, watching the violet planet grow closer and more distinct. He did not, on the whole, find the approach to civilization as miraculous and absorbing as his intent expression would indicate. He preferred the vast intervals of unsettled space to the comfortable harbors of the colonized worlds.

  He could, by turning his head, still gaze on the limitless miles of spangled night that sprawled out behind the moving ship. It was a sight that never failed to intrigue him, no matter what his mood or mission. He was not a particularly literate man, but they had all been forced to memorize the Essex Bounty poem that had, centuries ago, coined the name Moonchild, and some of its lines inevitably occurred to Drake as he watched the night fold back.

  She had called the vast expanse of untamed stars “the midnight prairie miles of space,” a phrase that had seemed apt enough when he first heard it. Not until he had spent a month on the agricultural planet called Kansas did he fully understand what the poet meant. Drake was a transgalactic traveler; he was used to distance and he knew how to conquer it with machines. But on this serene, quiet, undulating world of flat plains and heavy crops he had learned to appreciate distance when it was measurable only by time and human effort.

  He had taken a horse and ridden for five straight days across a plain almost untracked by a man’s foot. For two days, he had seen no other living soul; the last buildings he had sighted, without stopping, had been tumbledown homesteaders’ shacks where young families were trying to prove up their acres of land. At night, he built his own campfire and cooked his own food and heard about him the mysterious singing of the prairie insects; and he felt, as if it were a tangible force, every mile of that land pressing in on him from long, unimaginable distances.

  Essex Bounty had lived on Old Earth in the days before space travel, but she had known a metaphor when she saw it; and she had captured for Drake exactly the way he felt about the silent, watchful, living tableland of the stars.

  * * *

  * * *

  Fortunata’s main port, Drake felt, gave ample evidence of its two main concerns. It was one of the busiest ship harbors he had ever seen, and its control tower admirably directed the landings and takeoffs of thousands of vessels a day. Drake identified the markings of every major planet in Interfed as well as a few small, fleet ships that could only belong to independent mercenaries or outlaw dealers in the most dangerous of goods.

  As for the prison inmates, it was Drake’s guess that many of the newly released convicts—now presumably rehabilitated—took up jobs in the port hauling cargo and unloading ships. He had never seen such a collection of disreputable faces and defiant eyes. No wonder the pirate ships queued up docilely at Fortunata’s main gate; unloading stolen goods, no doubt, and hiring on new help.

  His single night on-planet passed without incident, and the next evening he boarded the shuttle that would, finally, take him to Semay. The inconclusive schedule of the days had begun to wear at him; he felt as if he had been traveling aimlessly for months. During nonsleeping hours of the thirty-six-hour flight to Madrid, he prowled moodily around the shuttle, much smaller than the commercial liner, until he happened upon the tiny gym intended for use by the crew. His Moonchild wristbadge won him entrée, and he spent a good three hours working out, pushing his body to the limit on the weights and pulleys. He felt cheerful and almost relaxed as he toweled off after a shower and dressed in his regulation whites. Back in the passenger lounge, he pulled out a recorder, connected his earplug, and played one of his language tapes the rest of the day.

  They landed on Semay at mid-morning by that planet rotation. The passengers exited onto a runway and stepped onto a conveyor belt that fed them into a large, cavernous hangar where heavy luggage and goods would presumably be unloaded. The brief moments on the unprotected runway left Drake dazed and reeling from an excess of fearsome heat and incredibly white light. Semay was a desert, but somehow he had expected it to unfold itself gradually, after he had been there a day or two and had time to adjust. He clung to the narrow rail that followed the moving sidewalk, and blinked rapidly to regain his bearings.

  He had just stepped off the belt inside the port hangar when a thin, dark-haired young man pushed himself away from a wall and approached him. “Lieutenant Drake?” the boy said in hesitant, oddly accented Standard Terran. He was dressed in nondescript khaki and carried himself like a soldier; Drake guessed he was an hombueno, one of the so-called “good men” of the local police force.

  Drake stopped, automatically assessing the young man. He did not look as if he would be much trouble in a fight; by Moonchild standards, he could hardly be called a threat at all. If his brother officers were built along the same lines, no wonder the local law enforcement agencies had felt unequal to the task of investigating this crime wave.

  “I’m Drake,” he said. “Are you with the local cops?”

  The boy smiled, a rueful, disarming smile. “Please?” he said carefully, and Drake realized his Standard Terran was recent and poorly learned. “Will you come—with me?”

  Drake had traveled with two heavy duffel bags, both of which he had carried onto and off the shuttle; they were now slung over his shoulders. “I’d like to go to the base first, if you don’t mind,” he said. “The Moonchild base?”

  “Please?” the boy repeated, still smiling. “Will you come with me?”

  Drake resettled the bags and tried again. “Could I go to the Moonchild base first?” he said, spacing the words slowly. “Could I leave my bags?”

  This time, the young officer seemed to grasp the import of Drake’s words. At any rate, he shook his head. His eyes took on the fervency of a man with important news. “It is—urgent,” he said, proud of himself for remembering the word. “There has been another—” He paused, and spread his hands as if hoping to pluck the word from the air.

  Drake sighed and nodded. “Asesinato,” he said. “Murder.”

  Chapter Two

  The heat inside the squat wooden shack was suffocating, and it was intensified by the five or six men who moved carefully around the interior, writing notes and taking impressions. The body had been covered with some kind of treated sheet—treated, Drake guessed, to slow decomposition in this most unforgiving of climates. There was a small pool of dried blood spread out below the end that appeared to be the head. The rest of the hut was entirely barren, empty of furniture, items of clothing, pots, pans, food or any other indication of human habitation.

  “Like the rest,” said a small, sandy-colored, well-built man who appeared to be directing operations. He was speaking to a younger man who was writing down observations in some kind of brisk shorthand. “She appears to have been brought here without a struggle, for no reason except to be killed. Doesn’t look like this place has been inhabited for at least a year.”
/>
  Drake’s guide pushed his way up to the speaker. “Capitan,” he said, the only word that Drake recognized from the spate that followed. Nonetheless, the capitan instantly looked in the Moonchild’s direction and came over to introduce himself.

  “Benito,” he said, leaving Drake to wonder if that was a first name, a last name or a title. His fair skin looked as if it had been exposed for more than fifty years to the merciless desert sun. In fact, everything about him looked bleached, exhausted, several degrees past maximum efficiency. But his eyes were a hard, compact brown, and his manner was quietly authoritative. Neither Drake’s greater height nor inherent Moonchild reputation seemed to impress him unduly.

  “Cowen Drake,” the Moonchild said, shaking hands.

  “Sorry to drag you off the shuttle that way, but I thought you might want to take a look at this,” the hombueno continued. “Found her just a couple hours ago. Murder apparently was committed last night. We were alerted a little after midnight, when she didn’t come back. Took us a while to find her.”

  Drake glanced around the room again; literally nothing left behind to speak of a personality or motive. “I take it all the murders have been committed in different places?”

  “Different places in the same place,” Benito replied. “All in the barrio.”

  “The barrio?”

  “This part of town. The slums.”

  Drake nodded and edged toward the body. “Could I?” he asked.

  For an answer, Benito crouched down beside the shrouded figure and pulled the sheet back from the woman’s head. Through the film of blood, which was everywhere, Drake identified a young woman’s face and short blond hair.

  “Her throat was cut?” the Moonchild asked.

  The hombueno nodded. “Wire,” he said. “A—what’s the word for it?”

  “Garrote,” Drake guessed.

  “That’s it. Slices right through the jugular. They’ve all been killed that way.”

  “He do anything else to them?” Drake asked.

  Benito drew the sheet back even farther, to display the still body dressed in a severely plain gown. This was a Fidele, Drake guessed. The woman’s hands were tied together with what appeared to be a festive necklace, a gold chain hung with jeweled charms. The largest among them was an elaborately faceted oval of white crystal which even in this dim light glowed opalescent.

  “What’s that?” the Moonchild asked.

  “A Triumphante rosario,” Benito replied.

  “Rosario?”

  “A—well, a necklace of sorts, something all the priestesses have,” Benito said. For the first time he seemed to be at a loss for words—not that he didn’t know, Drake realized, but that he didn’t know how to explain it. “It has holy associations. It is hung with an ojodiosa—a goddess-eye crystal.” He briefly touched the white quartz charm that had already caught Drake’s attention.

  “And this one belongs to a Triumphante? But this woman is a Fidele, isn’t she?”

  Benito looked faintly impressed. “Yes.”

  “So—where did this rosario come from? The last Triumphante who was killed?”

  “That’s been the pattern so far. Only the first woman to be killed—the first Triumphante—didn’t have her hands tied like this with someone else’s rosario. It’s one of the more peculiar aspects of the case.”

  Drake glanced again at the young woman’s face, but she had no secrets to tell him. He came to his feet. After carefully rearranging the shroud over the victim’s body, Benito followed suit.

  “It would be more comfortable to talk in my office,” Benito said, and the two men left the scene.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Six murders may not sound like a lot to you,” Benito said, although Drake had made no such observation, “but they have put Madrid into a virtual state of shock. This is like—I don’t know how to compare it to something that you know. As if all your top Moonchild officers were being assassinated, one by one, and you had no idea who was doing it or why.”

  “I know very little about the particulars,” Drake said, stretching himself out in a chair and accepting a glass of ice water from the capitan’s hands. It was hot at the hombueno headquarters, but Drake had expected nothing else. “What can you tell me?”

  “I’ve got the files recorded on a visicube for you. To summarize . . .” Benito seated himself behind his desk, paused a moment to look at some bleak internal vision, and sighed.

  “Six murders. All committed in the late evening hours, by the method you saw today. Three of the women were Triumphantes, three were Fideles. Two were blond, four had dark hair. Two short, one tall, three average. No physical similarities, in other words.”

  “Time frame?” Drake asked.

  “Between murders? Right around three weeks, give or take a day either way.”

  “That’s something, at any rate,” Drake murmured.

  “There have been scraps of clothing, spatters of blood—hairs. They’ve been analyzed every way we can think of, tested against all our criminal records. Nothing. No one living in the neighborhood has seen anything, either. We have nothing even remotely approaching a description.”

  Drake had half-closed his eyes, listening. “Tell me about these necklaces,” he said. “These—rosarios. Do they all look like the one I saw today?”

  “Triumphante rosarios do. Fidele rosarios are much plainer. They’re usually just cords hung only with the ojodiosa.”

  “Where does this goddess-eye come from?”

  “There is an order of monks in the Montanas Blancas. They mine the crystals, and that is the only place on Semay they can be found. Every follower of the goddess Ava—the Triumphantes, the Fideles, the monks and all of the lesser orders—every one is given a goddess-eye when he or she is called to serve.”

  “Sounds like a hot commodity,” Drake observed. “Can these crystals be purchased?”

  “For very large sums of money. Only the very wealthy and the very devout carry ojodiosas.”

  “Black market?”

  Benito shrugged. “For inferior grades of crystal. The priests have absolute control over their sales, and they have never been robbed or had the mines ransacked. The goddess protects her own.”

  “Not always,” Drake said dryly. “But if the killer left the crystals behind . . . Was anything stolen from any of the bodies?”

  “The Fideles don’t carry money. And nothing was taken from the Triumphantes as far as we were able to judge.”

  Drake reviewed it all in his mind. “The key,” he said, “seems to hinge on whatever it is the two sects have in common.”

  “Almost nothing,” Benito said.

  “The goddess they worship,” Drake said mildly, “and the crystals. Those at least.”

  “That’s about it,” Benito said. “I don’t know how much you know about our faiths, Lieutenant, but the two sects are so separate as to be almost entirely different religions. A man believes in one or a man believes in the other, and he follows that way his whole life. If you’re having a dinner party, you think carefully before you invite a couple who worship in the Triumphante church and a couple who take their sacraments from a Fidele priestess. The differences are deeper than I can explain to you. Only the goddess holds these two sects together—and she holds them as far apart as she can, one in one hand outstretched and one in the other.”

  “All right,” Drake said gravely, “but someone else has tied them together with these murders. Does somebody have a grudge against the goddess? Or one of her priestesses? Someone who was turned away? Someone who wanted to join one of the orders?”

  Benito shrugged. “I could almost accept that if the killer attacked only Triumphantes, or only Fideles. It would be one or the other. A woman might try desperately to be accepted into one order but she would not turn from the Triumphantes to the Fideles, or from the Fideles to the Triumphantes. It would be
as if you had always wanted to study medicine. All your applications to all universities had been rejected, so you decided to study engineering instead. Wouldn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe I’ll understand it better when I’ve talked to some of your priestesses,” Drake said. “I’ll need to interview the women in both houses, of course. Are they expecting me? Who should I ask for?”

  “Amica Jovieve at the Triumphante temple and ermana Laura with the Fideles.” Drake had learned enough of his Semayse to decipher those titles: amica meant friend and ermana meant sister. “Those are the two with the best command of Standard Terran. Are you planning to go today?”

  “I’d like to. I thought I’d go to the Moonbase first and drop off my baggage.”

  Benito looked slightly puzzled. “Moonbase? I think the Moonchildren who are already here are staying at the Santa Ana Hotel in the center of town.”

  Drake started laughing. “Of course,” he said, when Benito showed surprise. “I have just never been—usually, Moonchildren are stationed on planets where they have a whole base, their own landing field, their own barracks—but never mind. If someone could direct me to the hotel?”

  Benito nodded and touched a buzzer on his desk. He spoke into the receiver in a liquid, attractive language that seemed much smoother and much less comprehensible than the solemn, slow speech on Drake’s practice tapes.

  “I’ll have you driven to the hotel,” he said to Drake, switching to Standard Terran. He seemed to want to say more and hesitated. Drake, who had foreseen this problem, waited peaceably.

  The hombueno capitan spoke slowly. “I notice you are wearing a weapon,” he said.

  “Several, actually,” Drake said, “but only one gun. Late-model Hawken laser, stun-kill. Standard Moonchild issue. Also three knives.”

  Benito nodded. “You realize of course that all handguns are illegal on Semay. Even the hombuenos do not carry them.”

  “If I am hunting a killer,” Drake said, “I would prefer to go armed.”