Caliban

He wondered if the map was reporting literal truth. What could such a void look like in real life? What would cause it? His curiosity, his eagerness to see this place, was all but uncontrollable. But he held firm to his plan. He must examine the whole city, absorb the whole of the datastore map into his active memory. There could be other voids as well, equally significant. He held to his search pattern, moving south to north, shuttling east to west, west to east.

It took the better part of an hour, but at last Caliban had worked his way across the whole of the map of Hades. Yes, there were other voids, but none of them were even a fraction as large as the first he had found. Yes, there were other unmarked, unlabeled buildings, but he could not see any obvious pattern, no relation to the features on the rest of the map, that told him anything meaningful, or anything at all.

There was nothing left for it but to go and look. Now there was no reason to resist the temptation to see what the great void looked like. Caliban stood up and walked back to the field, using his infrared vision to move easily through the darkness.

The site of the void was a good distance across the city, and the first hints of dawn were lighting the east as he traveled through the semi-arid, half-populated expanses of Hades, imagining what a great emptiness would look like.

But what he saw when he got there was no blank on the map. As the dawn broke full over the horizon, Caliban stood at the edge of where the map said there was only emptiness.

What Caliban saw was a lively oasis in the midst of the fading city. He stood at the edge of a broad and verdant park, dotted stands of trees, great lawns, spraying fountains.

Small pavilions dotted the landscape and seemed to give access to underground facilities, judging by the people going in and out. Caliban walked along the low stone wall that formed the perimeter of the park, until he came to the entrance.

Settlertown,a sign said. Caliban stared at it in confusion. Another mystery. He had no idea what Settlers were, or why they should have their own town. He called to the datastore, but it had no information on any such term.

For some reason, all information regarding both his origin point and this place had been deleted from his datastore.

But why would anyone do that?

DARKNESS had passed, and dawn had come over the horizon, and the morning was well begun. Alvar Kresh paced the room, listening to the routine words of the routine interrogation of yet another routine coworker, one Jomaine Terach. Terach wasn’t normally up and at the lab by this hour, but he lived quite near the lab and all the commotion had wakened him. He had wandered over to see what was going on-or so he claimed. Police officers throughout history had been a little slow to believe witnesses who explained trifles such as coming to work with such elaboration-and Kresh was tempted to uphold that tradition in the present instance. It would be wise to treat everyone as a suspect just at the moment.

Kresh let Donald do most of the work. This night had been a long, hard journey through the darkness to the day. Crime scenes could be grueling.

They had taken over the duty office for the purpose of doing the intake interrogations, taking each worker as he or she arrived. The duty office was designed to accommodate an overnight stay, in case an experiment ran all night. The office featured a large and rather comfortable-looking bed, much better than the miserable cot in the duty room at Sheriff’s HQ. After a sleepless night, it looked more than slightly inviting.

“Tonya Welton claims that Fredda Leving was-is-working; for her. Is that true?” Donald asked.

“Absolutely not,” Jomaine Terach said, yawning mightily. “Fredda Leving has never worked for anyone but herself in her life, and she isn’t likely to start in by oiling up to the high and mighty Queen of the Settlers.” He yawned again. “My God, it’s early. Have you been at it since the attack?”

“Yes, sir. We have been here working straight through the night,” Donald said.

“So she and Tonya Welton don’t get along,” Kresh said, brushing aside Terach’s and Donald’s pleasantries. He sat back down at the table, next to Donald and opposite Terach. He drummed his fingers on the desktop, trying to keep his exhausted mind from wandering. Maybe he should have gone home instead of staying here all night.

Now, where was he? Damn it, his mind was wandering. He was getting fuzzy. He wasn’t going to learn much of anything if he was too exhausted to think. “So they didn’t like each other,” he said again, trying to cover up his overlong pause. “Were they at least polite around each other?”

“No, sir, not in the least,” Jomaine said. “Not anymore. They used to be much closer, real friends, I thought. Now there isn’t much left but the professional relationship.”