Wrapt in Crystal Read online

  Jovieve frowned. “Well . . . I could go through a list of the charities and the work schedules. Maybe, over a long period of time, all three of them worked at the same places, years apart—something like that?”

  “Something like that. We are looking for any common denominator. Did one person know all three of them, have some specific reason to link them together in his mind?”

  “But the Fideles were killed, too,” Jovieve said. “How could he link three of us and three of them?”

  “I don’t know yet. I don’t know enough to make even a remote guess.”

  “What else can I tell you?”

  He looked at her consideringly. “In some . . . crimes,” he said slowly, “the culprit is found to be some disgruntled employee, someone who has left the organization for some reason, under duress or otherwise. Is there—”

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “ ‘No’ what?”

  “You can interview our employees, of course, but all of them have been with us ten years or more. None have ever left us. All of them are extremely devout and consider working for the Triumphantes to be an honor, not merely a paying job.”

  “That is not what I was going to ask.”

  “What, then?”

  “Have any Triumphantes ever broken their vows? Left the order?”

  She stared at him. “You think a Triumphante—Lieutenant, I don’t think I can even finish that thought.”

  “I don’t know,” he said gently. “Perhaps a Triumphante committed the murders. At this stage, I can’t rule out anyone.”

  “But—as I understand it—well, could a woman have done such a thing? Physically, I mean. Is it possible?”

  He smiled faintly. “In the Moonchild forces, I have seen women with skills and strengths as great as a man’s. I can’t rule out anyone on the basis of her sex.”

  Jovieve shook her head slowly. It was the first time during this interview that he had seen her actually perturbed. “Perhaps. I defer to your greater knowledge. But I will not believe, I will not for a moment entertain the idea that a Triumphante was in any way connected to the crime.”

  “Triumphantes are already connected,” he said, gently again. “We are looking now for who committed the crimes. Have there ever been any Triumphantes who left the order?”

  She looked up at him somewhat wonderingly. He thought that by making her think the unthinkable, he had broken through to her somehow, though whether that would work for or against him, it was hard to say. “Three that I know of,” she said. “In the past twenty years.”

  “We shouldn’t have to go back any farther than that,” he said with a small attempt at humor. “Who are they? What happened to them?”

  “One of them left a long time ago. Fifteen years ago? She was very ill and could not perform her duties, and she left with the blessings of la senya grande.”

  “La who?”

  “La senya grande. The great lady. The—well, she is the head of our order.”

  “All right. And the others?”

  “One of them left more recently—last year, in fact.”

  “Why?”

  Jovieve smiled slightly. “To be married.”

  He looked up in surprise. “In twenty years, only one woman has left the order to be married? I find that astonishing.”

  Her smile widened. “I think I mentioned before that we are not a precisely celibate sect,” she murmured. “There are Triumphantes who have enjoyed liaisons with a single man for virtually the whole course of their existences, but they did not feel that they wanted to leave the church and set up a household with that man. Biancafuego wanted to bear her lover’s children and live in his ancestral home and become a wife. She too left with the blessing of la senya grande.”

  “And she is still alive, I take it?”

  “Yes, and expecting her first child. Ava rejoices.”

  “And the third one?”

  Jovieve was silent. Drake looked at her closely.

  “The third woman to leave the order?” he prompted. “Did she too leave with la senya grande’s approval?”

  “No,” Jovieve said slowly. “No one really knows what happened to Diadeloro or where she is now.”

  Drake straightened on the soft couch, his senses tingling with the sense of discovery. “Diadeloro,” he repeated. “Dolor. That’s a word I recognize. It means sorrow.”

  “No,” Jovieve said quickly. “That is not how the word breaks down. Dia del Oro. Day of Gold. Golden Dawn.”

  “And was she?” he asked quietly.

  Jovieve seemed to grow sad, as if the dolor that did not hover over Day of Gold had instead settled over her. “I was training the novitiates the year that she joined us,” she said. “She was—I had never before seen someone who trailed behind her such a banner of joy. Everything made her happy. She delighted everyone. When she walked into a room you were glad of it, you found yourself laughing within a minute. She was a—a flirt sometimes, and she played jokes on people and she loved to tease but—her warmth was infectious. If she put her hand on your arm, you felt your skin glow. She warmed you straight through to your heart.”

  “And what happened to her?”

  “She was—one year she was beset by heartbreak. Her mother died of illness and her brother died in an accident. She had no other family—except us, of course, except the goddess. I thought she had recovered well enough from the grief, although she was sad, as anyone would be. But later I thought perhaps something else troubled her, something she didn’t tell anyone. One evening she went out on a charity walk, and she didn’t come back. She never came back.”

  “Did you look for her? Notify the hombuenos?”

  “Of course we did. And we watched the hospitals and mortuaries for weeks, thinking—if something had happened—she might be among the unclaimed bodies . . . But she never was.”

  “And you have no clue as to what might have happened to her?”

  “None.”

  “Can you even conjecture?”

  Jovieve spread her delicate hands. “Lieutenant, I had thought I was in her confidence, but clearly I was not. If there was something in her life she did not want me to know about, she concealed it so well that I never did know about it. I can’t even guess for you.”

  “Do you think she still lives on Semay?” he asked.

  She had dropped her eyes. “I think she’s dead,” she said softly.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because Deloro loved the goddess. Her faith was central to her existence. I don’t think she could have left the temple and continued to live. If she was alive, she would have come back to us.”

  “How long ago did she leave?”

  “Five years ago. Five years and three months and four days, to be precise.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Then, if she is dead—But she could hardly be the first of the killer’s victims, not with a five-year time lag. And yet—”

  “I do not see a connection,” she said, her voice cool.

  “I am forced to look for the most unlikely connections,” he reminded her. “Eventually I’m going to need to talk to the families of the women who were killed, and I’m going to want to look up this Diadeloro’s family, if there’s anyone left. I’ll want a photograph of Diadeloro, too. In fact, I’ll want photographs or holograms of all the murdered women.”

  “I don’t have any,” she said.

  “Any what?”

  “Any photographs. Of Deloro or any of the others.”

  “Well, surely someone—”

  “There are none. The Triumphantes do not believe in preserving their likenesses. The goddess knows them, and their friends will always recognize them, and vanity is considered one of our few sins. There are no photographs of any Triumphantes.”

  He sank back into the sofa, irritated and amazed, though he hid both reactions. “That makes things
a little more difficult,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “The pictures just don’t exist.”

  He turned off the recorder and tapped the stiff fabric of the sofa with his hands. Quite suddenly, he felt the physical drag and exhaustion of his long journey to this place. He remembered that he had been traveling since the day before. He was not sure what else to ask the Triumphante at this moment.

  “What I need to do next,” he said, thinking aloud, “is go to the Fidele temple and speak to someone there about the women they have lost. And then I need to try and discover a link between their women and yours.”

  “Will you need to see me again?”

  “Yes, often,” he said without hesitation. “Or someone here who speaks Standard Terran.”

  “I have the best command of the language.”

  And you are very intelligent, he thought, but did not say. “Tell me,” he said. “You must have given this some thought. What do you see as the common link between the Fidele murders and the Triumphante murders? Is there anything that the two orders share? Is there some place, some charity, some devotional rite—some place the killer could have seen all six women?”

  Jovieve shook her head in bewilderment. “We each worship the same goddess,” she said. “And each of us spends time on charities that help the homeless and the hungry. Our women and theirs are often in the barrios, distributing food and medicine to the poor. But other than that, there are no points of similarity between us. We are as different as night and day. As sun and shadow. As joy and grief.”

  “The Triumphantes coming down hard on the side of joy,” he prompted.

  She nodded. “We believe that Ava is a goddess of richness and light, who put us on this planet to seek happiness. All our rituals are celebratory, all of our hymns are triumphal. We believe there is nothing more sacred than the act of love, and any act of love is considered holy and consecrated by the goddess.”

  He had not meant to get into this, but he found himself asking her anyway, the questions he had asked himself more than once in the past eight years. “How do you then account for all the grief in the world—the small unkindnesses and the great brutalities? How can a joyous goddess allow those?”

  “Those are not committed by the goddess, Lieutenant,” Jovieve said.

  “But she permits them. Or they occur. Wouldn’t a truly loving goddess prevent them?”

  She watched him with her dark eyes, looking deeper into his skull than he would have liked to permit her. “You speak as one who questions his own faith.”

  “It’s your faith I’m asking about.”

  “I said the goddess was all-loving, not all-powerful,” she replied. “All she can do is teach us the way, guide us toward the light. She cannot force us to live lives that we do not choose. She cannot reach down a celestial hand and intercede—direct the actions of a single man or a whole city of men. She does not cause mountains to erupt or storms to destroy the wicked.”

  “You do not believe in miracles, then?”

  Jovieve shrugged. “Semay is a planet that was colonized by men who traveled thousands of light-years from their homes. If that is not a miracle, what is? But we have been taught that it is science, and science will also explain the mountains erupting and the storms that sweep down from the hills, and the apparitions, now and then, that trouble the devout. No, the Triumphantes are not much disposed to believe in miracles.”

  Only half-joking, he said, “What’s the point of following the goddess, then?”

  Jovieve gave him her warm smile. “The point is a happy life, Lieutenant. The point is, the goddess informs all the small marvels of science that we call ‘life.’ She causes the crops to grow and the babies to be born and the cycle of life to turn and turn yet again. She shows a man how to love a woman and a woman how to care for a child. She rejoices in the sound of singing, and she loves to watch a dancer perform. Beauty delights her, and by offering her music and art and poetry, we hold her attention and receive her bounty.”

  He smiled a little stiffly. “Seems simple enough,” he said. “And what if some men or women don’t believe? Do they go to hell? Are they punished?”

  Her dark eyes were fixed on him again, once more seeking the personal motive in the question. “The punishment is in the terrible aloneness of being unloved, Lieutenant,” she said softly. “Those who worship Ava feel her comforting presence always beside them, in their most wretched hours and during their most grief-stricken days. Those who do not . . . have only the spare solace another human heart can offer. I love my fellow men and women, but I would be poor indeed if all I could rely on was their faith and affection.”

  He was silent a moment. “Have you traveled much?” was his next question.

  She raised her eyebrows at the non sequitur. “A little. Not far. Not often.”

  He sat forward on the couch and spread his hands to form the outline of a large ball. “I have been to more planets than I can count. I was brought up on a world with several fanatical sects, and I have seen the pastors and the practitioners and the victims of more religions than I can remember. And each of them was convinced that his gods and goddesses were the right ones, the true ones, the only ones. How do you reconcile those faiths—those beliefs, equally as strong as yours—with your faith, which is so different? Are you right and they all wrong? Or is there a possibility that you are wrong as well?”

  “Science again intrudes upon religion,” she murmured, “because thousands of years ago, before space travel, one would not have been able to ask that question.”

  “There have always been opposing religious groups,” he reminded her. “Even on Old Earth, men went to war over their dissimilar gods.”

  “I can only tell you what I believe,” she said. “And I believe that the goddess has many faces. On Semay, she has chosen to array herself as Ava, a nurturing mother-goddess. On Old Earth, she was Yahweh and Jehovah and Buddha—and who knows, possibly Jove and Juno and Athena as well.”

  “You are well-versed,” he said.

  “I have studied. I believe there is some—power—for good, for creation, for life, that informs the entire universe. Perhaps each race makes this divinity over into its own image—perhaps, and this I often believe, each human being devises in his or her heart the picture of the perfect god. I think that individual interpretation actually proves the existence of the goddess, for what except a deity could be so adaptable, could be so many things and yet still be the same thing? To me, that divinity has been revealed as Ava, and were I to travel to the far ends of the universe, I think I would find Ava in some form on every rock and plant on every world I visited. And in every human being—and in every alien race.”

  She spoke calmly, but there was the passion of conviction in her voice. Drake spread his hands again, this time palms up before him, and he smiled. “Don’t evangelize,” he said lightly. “I’m a poor prospect for conversion.”

  “On the contrary,” she said, smiling back. “A lapsed believer is the best prospect for conversion.”

  He widened his eyes at that, but declined to take up the challenge. Instead he rose to his feet, and she stood next to him, quite small against his height.

  “You have been very helpful,” he said, his voice somewhat formal as the interview drew to an end. “Is there any time it would be inconvenient for me to return, when I have more questions?”

  “No. If I am busy, someone will come for me. If I am not here, someone will bring you to me. You are my priority, Lieutenant—or rather, the work you do is my priority.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  She took his hand. “I have faith in you,” she said.

  Chapter Three

  Drake took a public cab back to the hotel, leaning back on the scarred leather upholstery with his eyes closed. It was early evening and the air had cooled noticeably. Perhaps by the time he went to sleep, he would need a blanket over him. But
he doubted it.

  At the hotel, he found his room and checked cursorily to make sure his bags had been brought up. It was much as he had imagined it: whitewashed, high-ceilinged, with a low bed under a slowly turning fan. In the bathroom, the water from the gold faucets was tepid.

  He had stripped to his waist and begun to run his bath water when a firm knock caught his attention. He turned off the water before going to the door. In the shadowed hallway stood a young woman dressed in civilian clothes but standing like a soldier, and he knew instantly that she was one of the three Moonchildren assigned to this far-flung post.

  “Drake, right?” she said cheerfully, holding out her hand. He clasped her hand and dropped it, smiling back. “I’m Lise Warren. When did you sneak in? I had your room under surveillance.”

  She hadn’t given her rank but a quick glance at the silver quarter-moon earring in her left ear told him that she was a sergeant, several grades below him. However, Moonchildren didn’t believe in showing an excess of respect for anyone.

  “Dropped off my bags earlier,” he said, stepping aside so she could precede him into the room. She sauntered in, glancing around quickly to see what luxuries his room might offer that hers did not. “Had a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Hot ground,” she said. “Don’t worry, after the first week or so you actually do get acclimated. Though I think I’ve sweated off fifteen pounds or so.”

  She did not look like she’d needed to sweat off anything. Even the casual clothes could not disguise the power in the lean body; just the way she balanced on her feet proclaimed that she was absolutely fit. The Moonchild posture. They all had it.

  “I was just going to clean up,” he said, gesturing toward the bathroom. “If you give me twenty minutes, I can be ready to go for dinner. Is there someplace to eat around here?”

  She nodded and settled herself into one of the wicker chairs near the open window. “Sure. Lots. We usually go to a place down the street.”

  He shut her out with the bathroom door, but shouted loudly enough for her to hear. “Are the others here? They coming with us?”