Pat Cadigan - True Faces

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 37.99KB 10 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Pat%20Cadigan%20-%20True%20Faces.txt

True Faces

Pat Cadigan

1992

"I told you I wasn't in the mood for this," Stilton whispered.

I gave him an elbow in the ribs without looking away from the body of the woman lying on the floor

of the large room. I'm never much in the mood for a strangulation murder myself, but it didn't pay

to advertise. Not in this company. History, I thought; I'm looking at history, in the making right

there in front of me. People had been strangled before, and they'd get strangled again, but this

was the first time one had ever been strangled in an alien embassy. The first alien embassy, no

less. Two firsts. And we were the first law enforcement officers on the scene, so that was three

firsts. The day was definitely running hot.

On my other side, the tall man in the retro-tuxedo swallowed loudly for the millionth time. He'd

said his name was Farber and given his occupation as secretary to the dead woman. I wasn't sure

which was more striking, his old-fashioned get-up or his noisy peristaltic action. I'd never met

anyone who could swallow loudly before-did that make it five firsts? I shoved the thought aside.

The room was so quiet, I probably could have heard him digesting his food if I listened closely

enough. The Lazarians either observed quiet as a religion, or they were as much in shock as the

human employees, who were all huddled together on the far side of the room, too spooked even to

whisper to each other.

There was only one Lazarian on this side of the room. The rest were gathered in a semi-circle

around the corpse. There were about twenty of them and the grouping had this very odd formality to

it, as if they'd all gathered there to seek an audience with the woman.

I turned to Farber, who reacted by swallowing again and then blotting his forehead with his

sleeve. "One more time?" I gave Stilton another jab in the ribs.

"Ready," Stilton said sourly, moving so that I could see he had the interviewer aimed.

"Migod, I always thought it was just in the hollies that the police made you tell a story over and

over," Farber said, glancing at the 'viewer's flat lens in a furtive way. I didn't make anything

of that-the only people who never got nervous about having a 'viewer trained on them were dead or

inhuman. Of course, it was hard to tell with the Lazarians-they looked a lot like scarecrows and

I'd never seen a nervous scarecrow, or even an extraterrestrial facsimile.

"You can give us the viewer's digest condensed version," I told him. "The third recording doesn't

need as much." Farber swallowed. "Fine. I came in here and found Ms. Entwater just as you see her

now, with the Lazarians gathered around her. Just as you see them now. The other human employees

were elsewhere in the building but the one Lazarian rounded them all up, brought them in here, and

hasn't allowed anyone to leave since. Then I called you. From here. Since I'm not allowed to

leave, either."

I glanced at Stilton, who nodded. "And you say that Ms. Entwater's relationship with the Lazarians

was...what?" Swallow. His adam's apple bounded up and down above his collar. "Cordial. Friendly.

Very good. She liked them. She liked her work. If she had any enemies among the Lazarians, she

never told me about it and she told me close to everything."

"Care to speculate on what she didn't tell you?" I asked.

He thought about that for a moment, swallowing. "She didn't tell me there was a Pilot in the

building."

"Why not?"

"Either she didn't have a chance or she didn't think to." Swallow. "It's hardly necessary for the

secretary to be updated hourly as to who drops by for a social visit and who doesn't."

"You're sure it was a social visit?"

Swallow. "Pilots come by all the time to visit the Lazarians. The Lazarians trained them in

Interstellar Resonance Travel, so they feel a certain kinship to them, much more than to other

humans, I think."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"Because they seldom have any interactions with any of the humans here. Except for Ms. Entwater,

who sees them in and sees them out again." Swallow. "Saw them in. And out again."

"She always did, personally? Isn't that more of a job for a receptionist or a secretary?"

"Dallette or I would see to other visits. The Pilots Ms. Entwater always saw to personally."

"Then she wouldn't have had to tell you in so many words that a Pilot was in the building," I

said. "You'd know by whatever she was doing."

Swallow. "If I knew what she was doing. I was busy with press releases for most of the morning, so

I was in the translation room."

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Pat%20Cadigan%20-%20True%20Faces.txt (1 of 10) [10/16/2004 4:46:52 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Pat Cadigan - True Faces.pdf

共10页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Pat Cadigan - True Faces

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: