Tag: snippet

Starting to finally figure this one out.

“I’m sorry to say that Marcin was rather good at puzzles,” Lillian told him. Tobias had decided that reading her into the situation was safe enough; he trusted her, Asenath trusted her, and there wasn’t anything else for a lunar geologist to do right now. Besides, she knew Marcin from Dee Station.

“He enjoyed working out old collisions from the asteroid tracking data,” Lillian went on. “He always said it helped him quiet the part of the brain that kept him from painting. He was good at those, too. Not a master, mind you, but he could have made a go at it if being a lunar researcher hadn’t worked out.”

“Was he one of the, ah, interesting ones at Dee Station?” Tobias asked her as he studied what images existed of Grabinski’s work. He had been a neo-graffitist, so most of his work obviously was back at the abandoned British facility.

“Interesting-interesting, or interesting-barking mad?” Lillian shrugged. “The former, I’d say. He had his little ways, like the rest of us, but he would sit with people at meals and come to parties. I think he had a fellow, back on” — she waved up, all the while keeping her eyes resolutely anywhere but in the direction of Earth — “You Know Where. I know he took it hard when everything happened. Even when we still talked about it, he chose not to talk about it. I suppose he never saw the point.”

Skating around the issue!

Tobias could dimly remember a time when he liked to be proved right. Those days were as dead as… a lot of things. Anyway, he found figuring out the right answer considerably less pleasant when all of the potential answers had been horrible anyway. He also purely hated making Abbie have to process the impossible. It felt like a betrayal, or possibly even an attack. But what could he do? Gravitational and environmental anomalies were an engineering issue. Somebody would have to deal with this intrusive mess.

He told himself later that it could have been worse. Abbie didn’t vomit, have a panic attack, or start bleeding from the nose or ears. She just wouldn’t make herself look at the anomaly, once she had worked out the exact dimensions of the effect. She also stopped bothering to use her scanner, after its first attempts to analyze the area produced nothing but feedback and cacophony. “Forget about shutting it down, sir,” she told him. “I can’t know how.”

Tobias understood her word choice perfectly. He was already restraining himself from giving the room another long look, or visit. Or maybe he would just move in, and ignore the universe until it finally got around to killing him. Keeping his distance was the smartest answer. “Understood. Is the effect, ah, fluctuating at all? Getting bigger, getting smaller?”

Lack of art!

He looked around, blinking unconsciously at the strain of standing up suddenly. Grabinski kept a neat room, even by the standards of the increasingly resource-starved lunar colonies. He had a bed, a perfunctory shower/bathroom combination stripped down to the fixtures, and a desk. There were no personal touches. Not even a toothbrush.

There was also no art. “Check me, Asenath,” Tobias wheezed. He could feel his entire upper respiratory system loosening up under the sudden humidity, only it wasn’t actually pleasant. “No sign of Grabinski drawing on the walls themselves, right?”

Correct, Commander. Do you see the discolorations on the wall?

“Yeah. Grabinski must have been hoarding sticky tape.” He bit down on the sudden spike of white-hot, murderous rage the thought had triggered. “Or maybe he had something else. Anyway, either he didn’t do any painting here, or he took it with him when he left. When was the last time he was here?”