Chapter 1
A strong tempest swirled in as my railcar approached Valdegeld University Platform. I was coming back after a short holiday and eager to get back to my rooms and my studies, so I watched the approach of the storm with annoyance. I could see it long before it caught us in its tendrils, the pressure changes tinting the fog orange, then pink, then fierce red, deepening as it closed with our ring, the famous 1°02' that stopped at Valdegeld’s main station as well as at Trubrant and Giant’s capital, Yaste. It had taken me three changes to get back from my parents’ farming platform on a much less traveled ring, and I was weary. Our carriage slowed as the first ráfagas of wind shuddered it on its single rail. Then someone must have calculated we were better off risking a rush to the station rather than waiting it out sans abris, and we accelerated, speeding even past the point where the signals suggested a lenten approach to the station. I braced myself for a hard brake, but Valdegeld platform is exceedingly long, and the railcar found a stopping point with only a bit of sharpness.
The carriage continued rocking even after we stopped, the storm bullying into the platform station and shoving railcars, fog, and, from what I could see through the windows, pedestrians. I stared for a moment, enjoying the dramatic view: the fast-moving fog of the massive perturbation fit the romantic, gloomily august image of Valdegeld, an image that still entranced me long after I had officially become a resident. I gathered my atmoscarf, slung my satchel, made for the door.
There was a small cluster of faces on the andén—like petals on a branch, my Classical training interjected, even if I could not visualize petals with exactitude—but I wasn’t expecting anyone to be waiting for me, and I gave them no more than a cursory glance, turning immediately towards the Avenue Supal exit. Storm-driven miasma curled reddish around hurrying travelers, the blank door to the waiting room, the wheeled tea kiosk, and then a face looming suddenly out of the dimness.
“Hullo, Pleiti.”
I smiled automatically, then stared. For a moment I felt myself back in time, a student again, greeted by my closest friend after a short absence, but no: I was a Classics scholar, a plum position that after two years still seemed almost unbelievable luck, and I hadn’t seen this face in half a decade.
“Mossa? What are you doing here?”
“Ah. Well.” Mossa looked around. “Perhaps we could talk somewhere more private?”
I had almost forgotten we were standing in the middle of one of the busier stations on Giant. “Come along, then.”
I led her up Supal, which hadn’t changed much since Mossa and I were students: the typically curlicued lanterns; the tea shops designed for every taste from quiet to rowdy, basic to exclusive; the prayer booths in a range of denominations; the quaint bookshops in every specialization. Shops offered every need of the scholar, from magnifying eyewear to artificial lighting, tactile enhancement, containers of various stimulants, auditory recorders, atmospheric mufflers for every part of the body, hypnotic hummers, erudite guides to the university, plated reminder mechanisms. The uneven paving of the street creaked somewhat underfoot, aged and familiar, and rose steeply away from the station, allowing for the many unsightly functions of platform life to take place below the walking level. That wasn’t necessary on more recent platforms, but when Valdegeld was constructed, heating, to take one example, was propounded through vast mechanisms of steam and turbine, many of which still clunked along below the quaint buildings lining the way, emitting drifts of vapor that mingled with the motley planetary fog.
The roof that covered the station had extended up to this point, shielding us from the worst of the tempest and containing a hint of warmth, but a rush of chilled yellowish fog ahead signaled the shift to the university proper. Even Mossa, always so contained, grimaced at the sight of the storm playing out across the high steeples of Valdegeld. We dashed across the open plaza, the perturbation churning gaseous clouds above around and through, and delved into the narrow alleys of the university.
The streets there were crooked and uneven, burrowing among high buildings constructed in the sinuous style of a century and a half earlier, a fashion that, though outmoded, still held a powerful enough grip on the popular imagining to thrill me every time I looked up at them. I took us up Potash Lane, a slightly less direct route to my rooms but more sheltered. I searched, as always, for the almost unnoticeable seam where inconsistencies in the surface of the platform traced the plating of an ancient satellite, snagged from its orbit and hammered flat. I loved Valdegeld’s quaintness, its details of salvage and bricolage, unlike the newer, uniform platforms pressed in enormous pieces from asteroid metal. A glance at Mossa, however, told me she was feeling the cold more than any architectural appreciation or, for that matter, nostalgia, and I hastened to lead her to my rooms. We cluttered into the archway entrance, I called a quick halloo to the porter huddled in the warm lodge, and then we were up the stairs and piling into my own scholar’s suite.
Automatically, I banged the switch for the fire, and cheerful blue flames leapt into existence. “Vile out,” I commented, unwrapping my atmoscarf and holding my hand out for Mossa’s so I could hang it up. She handed it to me and started a slow circuit of the room, examining the furnishings and accoutrements, lingering over the reproduction of a Classical atlas, the tiny cubical qibla astrolabe, the engraving of an antelope. I watched her, not without a quick internal reassessment of my decorating and comfort choices.
“Well then,” I said, to distract us both. “What are you doing here?”
Mossa, I was pleased to see, looked a little ashamed. “I thought you’d suggest a café or something. But I’m glad to see your rooms. The scholar suites are—”
“What. Are you doing here?”
Mossa looked even more uncomfortable. “It’s work.”
I considered that. “I haven’t done anything bad.”
Mossa rolled her eyes. “Was looking for your help.”
“Oh. With what? Wait. My help? What kind of help?”
Mossa sighed, loosened her jacket. “May I sit?”
I frowned at her, but she was just as chilled and damp as I was. “Oh, very well. I suppose you want tea, too?”
“And scones? I’ve been thinking about the university scones from the moment I turned in this direction.”
I frowned more, but again, same. I touched the order buttons. “Well then?”
Mossa looked like she really needed that tea. “Something’s happened that we’re having trouble understanding.”
“And you think I can help?” Mossa lifted her eyes to my stare. “Something at Valdegeld?” But there were many people at Valdegeld; would she really come to me first? “Something happened related to the Classics faculty?” I was a scholar, yes, but with only two years I was a very junior one. “Do you need an introduction to one of the University administrators? The dean of the Classics faculty, or the University rector, perhaps?” The Investigators could have gone directly to any of those people, but Mossa might prefer a more oblique route.
“Maybe.” Mossa stood again, and started pacing.
Perhaps it wasn’t the university. “Or,” I tried, “there was a problem with the mauzooleum?”
She winced. “Please tell me you don’t call it that.”
“I’ll tell you you best not call it that when we’re speaking with the Chief Preserver, if that’s who you need.”
“Hardly a preserver when they were all already dead,” Mossa commented, and I glared.
“You’re going to argue the finer points of linguistics with me?”
“Why not? I thought,” her voice perilously gentle, “that your job was mainly numbers.”
Fortunately, at that moment, the bell rang, and I went to retrieve the scones from the dumbwaiter. “Less time than it takes for a plate of university scones,” I said, setting them on the low table before the fire, “for us to quarrel.” I fetched my sugar, cinnamon, cocoa, and garam masala shakers, and the pot of honey, and added them to the table. Mossa said nothing, though she did not immediately snag a scone, either. I sighed, and settled myself on the cushions to one side of the table, gesturing her towards the other. “Any word, if there’s a problem with the mau—with the Koffre Institute for Earth Species Preservation, isn’t that more important?” I took a scone, and after a moment Mossa did the same.
The requisite chewing delayed our conversation for a few minutes, which was probably a feature. The fire crackled, crumbs melted against my tongue, outside the gases furled and unfurled and the vast planet turned its swift rotation. At last Mossa, having ingested the entirety of her scone, picked up her tea cup, drank, and put it down again.
“A man has disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“He was seen on a remote platform yesterday morning, and very thoroughly gone from it after an interval in which no railcars, communal or private, arrived or left.”
“Radiation and recombinants!” I exclaimed, startled into the epithet. “Are you saying he threw himself into the planet?”
Mossa had taken advantage of my interjection to claim another scone and dust it with cinnamon, and she regarded me with raised eyebrow as she chewed her first bite. “An exuberant verb you’ve chosen. But yes, the assumption is he stepped, leaped, or—”
“Was thrown off the platform,” I said, putting down my own half-finished morsel. I remembered that she was here for a reason. “Did I know him?”
She shot her eyes at me again but, unsurprisingly, did not answer. Mossa would tell the story in her own way; it was part of her method. “He told someone on the platform, before he went over the edge, that he worked at Valdegeld.” There was a speaking pause.
“Pleased with himself, was he?”
Mossa acknowledged this with an angled, noncommittal nod. “We checked for missing scholars here—he was old for a student—and got a description from those who saw him, on the platform and on the railcar he took to get there. We’re fairly certain of his identity.” A dismissive gesture. “Hardly difficult; there are very few eager to visit the platform whence he disappeared. But he didn’t go there from Valdegeld. His journey had originated at the Preservation Institute.”
I waited through her pensive silence, then said, “That seems a bit thin. You wouldn’t have come to me based on that, so I suppose I know him.”
Her eyes flicked at me, and I wondered what elaborate potential storylines had distracted her from my presence. “He arrived at the Preservation Institute directly from here,” she said, brisk now. “He is employed at Valdegeld, in the Classics faculty; yes, I imagine you know him. Bolien Trewl.”
My recollection of the melancholy reason for referring to him did not arrive in time to contain my habitual response to the name.
“Know him, and dislike him,” Mossa stated.
I attempted a dismissive gesture, then gave up on it as a bad job. “Nobody likes him—I should say, none of my friends like him. He has his own crowd, I’m sure.”
“I hope so,” Mossa said mildly. “I would like to talk to them. But first tell me why you and others do not.”
“Ugh, you know the type.” I grinned at the impatient expression on her face, which said I will, as soon as you tell me which it is. “Self-important. Believes his own research is the most important consideration in any circumstance, except possibly his own comfort, preference, and consequence.”
“But his research is important to him? Or only a means of making himself important?”
“Let me think. I’ve never wanted to spend this much time analyzing him before.” I took another bite, chewed, swallowed, and drank some tea. “I think his research is vestigially important to him; that is, I think he chose his area because he believed in it, but by this point it’s important because he believes in it, rather than the other way around. And he is truly unbearable on the subject, far more than in other conversations, although he does like his own opinion about even the most trivial things.” I tapped the plate between us. “The first time I met him, in my first week back here after—when I came back for the scholar post, he told me that the prickly pear scones were the best, I would be sure to like them the most, none of the others were worth trying.” Years ago Mossa would have rolled her eyes in appreciation of this comemierdería with me, perhaps spouted some devastating critique; now she nodded distantly, understanding but not participating. I found myself deeply disliking her professionalism.
“What was his research area?” she asked.
I took another scone in compensation for emotional distress. “Altitude, he believed altitude explained everything there was to explain in organism distribution. Ugh, he could go on for hours. And I will say,” I added around my crumbly bite, “that while he must have considered others and chosen it out of some reasoning, at this point it is all to his greater glory and I don’t think he could hear the import of a word against it.”
“What else?” Mossa asked. “You worked with him?”
“Thankfully, no. It would probably have happened at some point, but I’ve managed to stay on different projects. I did see him every once in a while. He was in another hall, but sometimes I would be there for dinner with a friend or I’d notice him at the table here. Or at the station, here or at the Preservation Institute—Tempests! I saw him five days ago!”
Mossa did not jerk upright, as I really thought she might have, just raised her eyelids a bit. “At the station?”
“In effect,” I said, a bit disgruntled to be so drawn in. “And do you know, I thought at the time he looked a bit odd? But I was in a hurry, on my way back from the Institute, about to leave for the farm.”
That got her at least shocked enough to pick up her cup of tea, and then put it down again and lift the pot to refresh us both. And her voice was sharp. “In what way odd?”
“Looked harried. I caught his eye—not on purpose!—and he turned away, wanted nothing to do with me. Oh stars, he was off to do something desperate, wasn’t he?”
“Very probably,” Mossa said. “But what?”
Chapter 2
Mossa submerged into her own calculations, playing out different storylines I supposed, focused and silent except for distracted slurps of tea. I refilled her cup once, and for a time lost myself in my own thoughts: a possible new configuration of the data from my current study; a film I had requested from the library for comparative purposes; how long Mossa might stay.
“Well.” I stirred. “What will you do? Are you planning to stay here and speak with Bolien’s friends, or are you going straight on to the Preservation Institute?”
Mossa’s eyes were on the blue and yellow flames of the fire, but I felt observed nonetheless. “Would you be so good”—I glanced at her sharply; such stilted courtesy was unlike Mossa, at least in her dealings with me—“as to accompany me to speak with his friends and colleagues? I would undoubtedly miss the nuances of the academic community without your assistance,” she added apologetically, as I glanced first at the inclement weather vibrating the window and then at my desk, laden with notes that I hoped to subsume into a data set, and that (someday!) into recommendations. “If you are not too overcome with work. I will buy you dinner, naturally. That way we can have a chance to catch up as well. I promised myself a meal at Slow Burn while I was here.”
In truth, I could hardly have refused her; not only our desiccated friendship, but also the responsibility of assisting as I could with the inquiry into a colleague’s sorry end—and a bit of curiosity forthwith—required it. I had even been telling myself that a chat with Bolien’s colleagues might be useful for my work; while we were both in the Classics faculty, that prestigious discipline was enormous, with many subfields, committees, and convoluted relationships, and I could use a refresher on his area and their latest findings. Still, it cheered me disproportionately that Mossa was allocating time for a more leisurely conversation with me (even then, I did not imagine that said discussion would be work-free).
“Oh, very well,” I said, hoping it sounded good-naturedly put-upon rather than ungracious. “Let me just look—” The university directory was on my desk, a hard laminate in the shape of the university’s convoluted footprint itself, with notches for each of the buildings and overlay lenses that could flip on and off showing different types of data. I found Bolien’s assigned laboratory. “Ah. Silahvet. Not too far from here.” I glanced again at the window, but there was no help for it. “We can go ask whoever works near his desk and go on from there.” I checked his supervisory committee while I was at it.
“Do you know anyone in the geography department?”
“Of course,” I said, running through my acquaintances there in mind. “Perhaps—”
“Not Classical geography,” Mossa interrupted. “Modern.”
I stared. “Modern geography? Even Bolien’s theories weren’t that outlandish.” I smiled at my own pun, but Mossa, usually enamored of such wordplay, was distracted.
“Perhaps it won’t be necessary,” she murmured.
“I daresay I can find someone if you want,” I said doubtfully. “But you know as well as I do that the Classical and Modern sides don’t mix much. I know more people in Speculative than in Modern.”
“No matter.” She swept her atmoscarf around her. “Shall we?”
Copyright © 2023 by Malka Older
