Old Poison by Joan Francis Page B

he was making a fool of me
but knew better than to say so.
    He laughed as he read my expression. “You
make stories that can be remembered and retold generation after
generation. Within those stories can be buried memories and history
for our children’s children.
    And as strange as it seemed then, creating
stories is what I have done now, for twenty-two years. But today is
the end of my story. The memory coils that carry the stories of our
people and our destruction are now complete. We hope that they will
tell someone, someday, where and how our geneticists have hidden
the cell patterns of many of the plants and animals that have
disappeared from our world. Will anyone ever find these frozen
treasures and learn the secrets of restoring our lost world? No one
knows. I know only that like my dying planet, I must carry out my
last task, and die with hope.
    I will deliver this diary and the last of
the memory coils to a safe drop. They will be given to the Hidden
Ones who will carry our coded stories to the new home on Atland. A
second set of coils is hidden in the great pyramid, and a third is
interred with the ice crystals and genetic codes. It is my private
joke that the safe drop is in the old astrological gardens at
Nautical University. In the burrocity scientific knowledge has been
withheld from the people, so my pursuers will not understand the
significance of the great granite spheres that chart the stars and
planets. But someone among the Hidden Ones may know enough to get
my joke. I leave my last information buried beneath the sphere that
represents Atland. Thus, in a way I am the first to get to the new
planet.
    A totally different set of memory coils are
embedded in my scalp where the Enforcers can easily detect them,
and be misguided by them. I can hear their combox voices behind me.
It is time to bury the history coils and this diary, and give my
pursuers a lively chase. If I tire them, they will act in hasty,
thoughtless rage and slice off the top of my head to get the memory
coils. It will be a merciful and instant death and give me no
chance for betrayal. Dear Red Beard, dearest Ober, I carry my love
for you to whatever may lie beyond. Antia

    From my last experience, I knew better than
to hit the down arrow, so I tried to save the file. Once again the
letters dissolved into meaningless symbols and the damn screen went
blank. Nothing we did could get it back.

    * * * * *

ELEVEN

    Before Sam left that night we brain stormed
two complex searches for Yeabot to work on. In the first search we
incorporated every fact, opinion, date and description I could
remember from my talks with Borson. Then we asked Yeabot to search
for a true identity and location. In the second search, we fed
Yeabot everything I had found on Evelyn Lilac, including her video,
and asked him to see if he could find her current location.
    The next morning I opened a second client
trust account to keep Borson’s money separate from the rest of my
client funds. I then put an ad in the Los Angeles Times personals that read, “Mr. Borson, assignment declined. Please
contact me for return of retainer. DH.” I doubted that Borson would
respond, but at least I could prove my legal attempt to reject the
assignment and return his retainer. I had an awful feeling I was
going to need it, either for a criminal trial or a Bureau of
Security and Investigative Services inquiry regarding my license.
As it turned out, what I would need it for was an FBI murder
investigation on the Navajo Reservation.
    Yeabot’s searches produced nothing useful on
Borson, and all the information he found on Lilac was old. I had no
funds of my own to chase a wild goose to Costa Rica and had no
client to pay me to do so. The case went into the dead file.
    For the rest of the week I worked hard and
tried to forget all about Red 19, polluting Martians, and Evelyn
Lilac. It was amazing how many reminders would pop up: I couldn’t
pick up a newspaper or magazine or listen to