Ten blocks walking, winding down curved rain-swept streets, under the steady drip of the trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds, vague clusters of eaves and gables and lighted windows high on a hillside, remote and inaccessible, like witch houses in a forest. I came out at a service station glaring with wasted light, where a bored human attendant in a white cap and a dark blue windcheater sat hunched on a stool, reading a screen. I started in, then kept going. I was as wet as I could get already. And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a taxi. And taxi drivers remember.
I made it back to Geiger's house in something over half an hour of nimble walking. There was nobody there, no vehicle on the street except my own rickshaw in front of the next house. The rickshaw robot looked as inert and dismal as a moorland granite outcrop. I dug my bottle of rye out of it and poured half of what was left down my throat and got inside to light a cigarette. I smoked half of it, threw it away, got out again and went down to Geiger's. I unlocked the door and stepped into the still warm darkness and stood there, dripping quietly on the floor and listening to the rain. I groped to a lamp and lit it.
The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of embroidered silk were gone from the wall. I hadn't counted them, but the spaces of brown plastic stood out naked and obvious. I went a little farther and put another lamp on. I looked at the robot recording machine. At its foot, beyond the margins of the pink rug, on the bare floor another rug had been spread. It hadn't been there before. Geiger's body had. Geiger's body had gone.
That froze me. I pulled my lips against my teeth and leered at the blasted cameras on their slender stalks. I went through the house again. Everything was exactly as it had been. Geiger wasn't in his flounced bed or under it or in his closet. He wasn't in the kitchen or bathroom. That left the locked door on the right of the hall. One of Geiger's keys activated the lock. The room inside was interesting, but Geiger wasn't in it. It was interesting because it was so different from Geiger's room. It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood-effect floor, a couple of small throw rugs of classical design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man's toilet set and two black candles in quarter-metre high candlesticks. The bed was narrow and looked hard and had a maroon batik cover. The room felt cold.
Part 1