Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Mondieu 

January 13th, 2038 5:37am

1 hour from New London

What so false as truth is,

False to thee?

Where the serpent's tooth is

Shun the tree---

Where the apple reddens

Never pry---

Lest we lose our Edens,

Eve and I.

~Robert Browning - A Woman's Last Word

The balmy winter night was clear, as always. The artificial irrigation producing perfect verdancy was shyly hidden, and the city required no rain. Lush garden arrangements exuded an elegant, primal taste into the air: violets, voluptuous rose, lip-red tulips, and the heady transcendence of pine, maple, oak, cherrywood. A whispering breeze carried the scent of something more, something discordant with the moonlit garden: the nauseating metallic rust of blood, the stench of spilt viscera.

In the city of Garden, edenic night lurid with stars and silver fox moon, the blood of two souls mingled and seeped into the earth, their bodies denuded and eyes open wide. And there was evening, and there was night, the first day.

.....

The city bled an efflorescence, golden on the blur of night - a phoenix death, embers until the resurrection of morn, where new creation begins, and begins again. It was a strange thing, a death in undying lands, and the city's edenic appearance burned with a burr of color, a drop of poison dye in crystal water.

The inspector rolled into the city on a stagecoach hearse-black in the funereal palette of night. A land of shadows, everything flickering in surreal beauty: even in darkness the city emit an elegance, a face of perfection.  But the inspector was locked deep in thought, irregular in his introspective ignorance of the passing scene: dewy, white limestone streets; glass and rose-chalcedony architecture, purple saffron exuding a metallic honey scent. 

What were his thoughts, then, the dark-clad man in the long cloak and navy wool scarf, bundled, despite the balmy morning – what were his thoughts? He took a deep drag on a thin-brown cigarette, a relic of the distant past, and considered.

The stagecoach clattered up the main thoroughfare toward a glass sphere at the city’s center. A park surrounded the large sky-dome, full of fruit-bearing trees: plum, peach, pear, apple, cherry, fig, grapefruit, filling the air with a saccharine sweetness in the pre-dawn breeze.

The brief ember glow from the inspector’s cigarette lit his face: shaggy, unkempt beard, hooked nose, a tired baggage of chestnut eyes that gleamed shrewdly, and a nest of raven hair. Alert now, as they neared the scene, the inspector’s eyes scanned his surroundings, missing nothing: a crowd of folks standing around the glass dome in their night-things, whispering curiously as the stagecoach pulled up; well-worn benches underneath the flickering, candlelit streetlamps; the shift in the breeze into sudden stillness, the fruity redolence and the subtle, metallic stain of death; the nervous motions of animals in the trees.

A nervous man approached the stagecoach, and waited while the inspector exited the carriage. The crowd tip-toed nearer, curious to hear what was said.

“Greetings inspector,” the man said, clenching and unclenching his hands at his sides while avoiding the inspector’s eyes.

The inspector briefly gathered in the man’s old-fashioned, almost Victorian uniform: dark blue buttoned shirt; striped cuffs; bobby helmet; navy trousers – an almost ridiculous costume, dredged from some ancient closet, no doubt. The nervous man was beardless and young, not yet twenty and five to the inspector’s eye, with a false moustache perched on his upper lip. He was lean and athletic, though his hairline receded slightly against his forehead, matted with a thin sheen of sweat, whether from the heat of the night, or nervousness, the inspector knew not.

“Garden welcomes you, in this direst of circumstance,” the man continued, extending his hand in greeting.

The inspector removed his gloves with care, and ignored the proffered hand, which the policeman dropped awkwardly. “There is a murder, I’m told. Let us waste no time. Take me to them.”

The policeman’s eyes widened and he nodded enthusiastically, once, thrice. “Right, sir. Right this way, then, sir.” With a wave of his arm and a half turn, the policeman turned and began walking towards the glass dome, an arboretum as the inspector now noticed.

The inspector moved to follow and, after a brief moment, the crowd pressed forward in their wake. The arboretum loomed, a wide glass sphere maybe fifty stories wide, half as many tall, and faintly glowing a pleasant yellow. They walked between an aisle of cherry trees, laden with ripe yellow-red bundles of fruit despite the season, and approached an opening in the side of the dome, a sliding glass door.

Humid air gently breathed out from the inside, suffused with a rich aroma of fruits, pine, hemlock, aspen, cherrywood, and cedar, and a faint metallic taste of rust.

Images assaulted the inspector, a violent vision like a waking nightmare coursed through his head, words, disconnected words: offered a fruit, covered in crimson, hands, feet, pools of blood and piles of the thin-stemmed fruit, a great, deeply furrowed tree, towering and rounded, full leafed in many colors: silver, shadow-green, early-spring green, scarlet, ember-orange, sun-yellow, sulfur, amber, brown. Beneath this tree, they both lie, die, a serpent at their heels, a dark, phantom hovering, holding a clawed weapon like fangs. A breathless whisper on the breeze: oh, how we’ve fallen, fallen. Oh, how we’ve fallen.

The inspector reeled, and the crowd, pressing close behind, gasped in surprise at his abrupt halt before the entrance. The policeman turned with a raised eyebrow, a twinge of fret etched across his features, but the inspector collected himself and motioned him forward into the great, central glass dome. They entered.

Immediately, a strong sense of an older, primal world washed over them. The entrance of the sphere was bathed in a rich, yellow glow, and the temperature was warm, almost hot, and lightly humid.  The path veered in a spiral around the sphere, and a straight-cut path into the central area was impossible. Strangely, as they passed in shortening spirals around the garden, the ambient light changed, so at one location, it was bright as daylight, flowering plants erupting into crimson bloom, and trees budding and dripping with fruit; while in others, wide-eyed nocturnal creatures scampered along the shadowed limbs of towering trees, and the violin twitch of grasshoppers hummed in the night.

No one said a word as the procession traipsed, wearily, as though almost involuntarily pulled, around the arboretum, ever nearer the center. Even the large-eyed lemurs and lethargic sloths, the white-spotted deer, gazed at their passing in unblinking curiosity. An owl swooped into the underbrush with a screech, and then leaped into the air with a prize caught in its fierce talons.

The crowd behind the inspector and policeman slowed, and the inspector felt the tension thick in the air, a sort of electricity. The stench of blood was stronger here, and the birds were silent. The center was illumined as dawn, and the inspector wondered how near to dawn the day actually was. Probably not far off now.

          As they turned the final round into the central glade, they all shuddered at the ghastly scene. Even the inspector, usually emotionally taciturn and controlled, felt a brief shiver crawl up his spine at the grisly image.

          Beneath a giant tree, a male and a female lay, mouths and eyes open wide and laying in pools of blood that covered and stained each of them.  The policeman opened his mouth to speak, stopping ten paces before the slaughtered couple beneath the tree, but the inspector held up his hand, and the policeman stayed silent.

          The inspector approached the scene, surveying everything.

          Two adults, one male and one female, the male formerly dressed in dark spandex-polycotton short bottoms and undershirt, and the female formerly dressed in khaki work pants and a similar shirt to that of the man. Man slightly taller than average, bronzed skin and blue eyes, and deeply calloused hands – the hands of a hard-working man – beardless and sharply muscled, with a full head of raven-colored hair. His face was long and sculpted, like a marble memory of a man, and pallid from the loss of blood. Two tiny bite marks marked the jugular of the man, and from this, it seemed, the blood poured. It was now, the inspector noticed from the state of the wounds, at least an hour since the deaths.

          The woman, also taller than average, though shorter by a couple hands than the man, had a heart-shaped face with full lips and chocolate eyes, and a pointed, obstinate chin. Her hands were also calloused, and muscles firm and toned. She had auburn hair and light skin, and two bites marked her, one on the jugular and one at the heel. The inspector could not discern which bled more.

          Both were naked now, their clothes tossed on either side, and the man and the woman were twisted together in a mess of limbs.

          The inspector beckoned the policeman forward, and the entire crowd closed a few footsteps in unison with the approaching policeman.

          “You called me in for a couple snake bite victims?” the inspector said in a dry, accusatory tone.

          “Sir, we don’t have any snakes.”

          “No snakes? You can’t imagine any just sneaking in?”

          “No, sir, that’s quite impossible.”

          The inspector ignored the inanity of the statement and examined the victims closer. Something about his vivid vision agreed with the policeman’s assessment. Or, rather, he intuited a malevolence about these deaths, a murderous intent. The bite marks were almost like deep gouges of claws, without any tearing, like they were intended to mimic snakebites, but missed some poisonous mark. How did they bleed so much?

          “Tell me what you know,” the inspector said sternly.

          The nervous man wrung his hands and shrugged, staring at the ground to the side of the gruesome scene. “Sir, I’m afraid we don’t know much of anything at all, sir. The gardener-”

          “Where are the police? Where are the investigators? Why isn’t this section cordoned off and the public shooed home?”

          The policeman paled. “I am the police, sir. Or, our city has no need of police, and since we needed a police tonight, I was instated as the policeman, sir.” The man stammered quickly. “There are no investigators. That’s why we called you, sir.”

          “What’s your name, lad,” the inspector said, pulling out another cigarette. This was looking to be a long night.

          “Seth, sir. If-” started the policeman.

          “Not you,” said the inspector, striking a match against his cloak and lighting his cigarette, puffing gently. “You.” The inspector pointed to a young man with golden hair and stunning marine eyes. His complexion was light, but his eyes bright and cheekbones high, which gave him a cheerful, shrewd look. He was athletic, and stood, in a sharp stance, a little separate from the rest of the crowd, sneaking forward to glance more closely at the bodies.

          Without even a start, the man turned toward the inspector and looked him in the eye. “Simon Temple, sir.”

          “Very good. You may call me Inspector Mondieu. Do you know where to fetch a doctor?”

          The man thought for a moment, and then nodded.

          The inspector looked at him up and down, evaluating, and then motioned him away to find a doctor, and returned his attention to the couple.

          “Now, my lad, tell me what you know,” the inspector said, kneeling to rifle through the clothes of the victims. “Who are these two? Do you know of them?”

          “Sir, yes, of course. Mr. Addam and Ms. Lilya. He-”

          “They were not married?” interrupted the inspector.

          “Well, no sir, not exactly,” replied the policeman, turning red. “But sir-”

          “Mondieu, if you please. Was there any reason anyone might desire the death of these individuals? Any enemies or angry mistresses?”

          “None, whatsoever! They are not married, but they’ve been together for quite some time. They have kids, and everyone cherishes the work they’ve done for this city. There hasn’t been a murder here ever, sir.”

          Why is everyone so convinced this is a murder? Why am I so convinced this is a murder?

“Interesting. Tell me, then, who were they? Everything you know.”

          “Mr. Addam worked as the horticultural inspector for the arboretum and parks. He tended the plants, made sure the trees received enough sunlight, the flowers bloomed. The woman, Ms. Lilya, tends to the animals in the arboretum and around the city of Garden. She makes sure they are eating enough, reproducing properly, and no sickness threatens their populations. In addition, each is tasked with the caretaking of the life tree,” at this, the policeman motioned at the tree towering over their heads.

          The inspector studied the tree for the first time and was shocked to discover it was the same tree he’d seen in his vision on entering the garden. How was that possible? Psychic emanations? What was that vision anyway? Such vivid imagery, and so closely tied to what he now saw. Had he been here before?

          Closer, and in reality, the tree was magnificent. Silver veins lined the underside of each leaf, and thinly veined tendrils of silver climbed up and down the main stem. The branches and leaves seemed in various stages of seasons: plum colored leaves on one branch, red-yellow on another, like sugar maples, or the rich-butter yellow of quaking aspen, or the many shades of green, summer leaves: dark maple, light birch.  The tree towered over them, its lofty branches nearly rubbing the glass-globed ceiling.

          Peach-colored fruits hung from long-limbed branches, almost caressing the grassy ground in places, and beneath the tree, a layer of colorful leaves and fallen fruit formed a rich blanket over the earth. Fascinating.

          “How, exactly, do they take care of the tree?” Mondieu asked, turning back to the policeman, who shrugged.

          “Mostly just harvesting the fruit, I guess. And clearing away the brush or leaves and checking on the tree’s health.”

          “Are they the only caretakers of the tree?”

          “No, Mondieu, sir. A different couple harvests the fruit each night.”

          “Interesting. And who knew this particular couple was to harvest the fruit on this night?”

          “Everyone, sir. Tuesday is their night.”

          “Thank you very much, that will be all for the moment,” the inspector said, turning away from the policeman. “Actually, one more thing,” Mondieu said after a moment’s hesitation, with his back still turned. “If I need find you, for whatever reason, where might I find you? What name shall I call upon?”

          “Seth, sir. My house is south of the central garden, on Wattson Street.”

          The inspector nodded and said nothing more.

          Mondieu rubbed at his chin and looked around for a place to toss his cigarette butt. Nothing. He capped it and tucked it into his cloak, kneeling down beside the couple.

          Questions roiled in his brain, and the muddied waters stayed unsettled. A city without a police? What sort of city was this? Who was this Seth? Why was he chosen as the designated policeman? What was the importance of this tree?

          The inspector picked up a nearby lying fruit, a bite removed – probably the couple’s last taste of life. It had a peace-fuzz to it, but the guts of a grapefruit with tiny, multi-colored seeds. He brought it to his face: a light, tangy citrus smell, like orange-mango. A light breeze wafted past with the scent of rose: where did the breeze come from?

          A slight tinkling, like that of bells, sang in the tree as the breeze passed through. Mondieu immediately felt his nerves soothed, weariness of the morning passing. He checked his timepiece and saw it was just shy of eight, just before sunrise. Already, a crimson stain might be tingeing the skyline, the warrior birth of sunlight in winter.

          Mondieu rifled through the couple’s pockets briefly, finding nothing, and turned back to the corpses. No earrings, jewelry, watches, wallets, or items of any sort on their persons or clothing. A robbery, then? Or were they simply not carrying anything? What about keys?

          Over near the tree, he noticed their baskets of fruit, already over half full. What was special about this tree?

          The pattering of footsteps sounded on the path behind, and the inspector turned around to witness the new arrival. Mondieu tucked his questions away for later.  A crowd of people still hovered on the edge of the central glade, whispering shyly amongst themselves. The footsteps, it appeared, belonged to Simon, racing down the path with practiced ease. Not the running, it appeared, of frantic emergency haste, but merely practical quickness. 

          Simon jogged the last paces up to the inspector, slowing gracefully to a halt. “The doctor will arrive in a few minutes. He is not so young, nor prepared for the morning as I.”

          “Then let us await him here. Mr. Temple, I’m instating you as go-between in this investigation.”

          “It is an investigation then, is it?” Simon replied with a sigh, not at all short on breath.

          “Yes, it seems so. Is there some way I can call upon you? Cell? Telegraph? Pigeon?”

          “No electronics of that sort here, I’m afraid,” Simon replied with an easy smile. “If you require me, I’m staying on Cherry Street, just south of Wattson where the policeman lives.”

          A quarter-hour later, the sound of steps, light and at a reasonable walking pace, approached along the path. The doctor rounded the corner with a tired, beaming smile. Reaching the inspector, he held out his hand. “Mondieu, I presume? <name>. Sorry to keep everyone waiting. I’m none so young as once I was.”

          The doctor’s voice was well modulated, as a singer’s, and not left to the entropy of age. And age, though apparent in the doctor’s steps and bearing, leaning more favorably over his left side, affected the doctor little. He had round-rimmed glasses; a full head of brown hair, parted on the left side and a little unruly at the front; a long face with only tiny wrinkles around the eyes and lips – a man fond of smiling then – shorter than the inspector, but by no means short.

          He walked with a swagger and a little waddle that intimated a cheerful entrance, as though the doctor was used to beaming and blessing others upon arrival. At his sides, the doctor’s hands were carefully still, no twitch of nervousness or tiredness there: a surgeon’s hands. His clothing was conservative, a spare white shirt and pants, and a surgical mask hanging around his neck.

          “Mondieu, indeed. Welcome Doctor. Seth, our friendly policeman here, will detail you on the happenings. If you would be so kind as to inspect the victims.”

          “Well,” said the doctor with a deflated sigh. “I can say for certain, even from this distance, that they are dead. Likely from exsanguination. What, precisely, am I looking for? Sadly, I’m trained as a midwife, pediatrician, and light surgeon, not an autopsy pathologist.” As he spoke, the doctor slowly pulled a pair of sterile white gloves from a bag, and pulled them over his hands.

          “I’m not certain, yet. Anything of note will do. Just inspect everything as carefully as you may. Where may I reach you for this information?”

          “I live in Lucille Manor, on the Southeastern corner of Garden,” the doctor replied, kneeling to examine the victims.

          “Excellent.” Mondieu glanced at the ceiling as though expecting some indication of the time through the glass shield, but only saw the same warm glow. His eyes were heavy and he scarcely suppressed a yawn.  

          Briefly, he watched the doctor work, skeptical as to this town’s skilled workers, but the doctor was efficient, careful, and deliberate.

          Mondieu beckoned the policeman over and instructed him to catch the doctor up to speed, and then joined Simon on the edge of the glade.

          “What do you think?” asked the inspector, pulling out another cigarette - his third, already? He hadn’t smoked this much in as many months.

          Simon let out a deep, long breath. “I’m not sure. It’s a bit grisly for the early morning mind to grapple. Murder?  But why?”

          “I’m not certain, yet, Simon Temple. But I intend to find out. Do you know where I might spend my stay here?”

          Simon shrugged helplessly. “I’m not from around here, so I can’t help you there. I’ll ask around and see what is available.”

          Not from around here. Noted. “I’m grateful. I’ll be seeing you again soon.”

          Simon nodded, and the inspector began his spiral journey out of the garden.

          An interesting night indeed.

          In the morning light, the curtains of night pealed back, and Garden was created new. If truth is beauty, here was a great truth, indeed. On entering the city, the inspector saw only the dim outlines of vast, crystalline and glass structures, rosy beneath the bone-white glamour of the moon, a twilight icy pallor. Now, in the stillness of infant dawn, the air clean as a mountaintop’s, though warm, a wholly new territory was unveiled.

          The early sunlight showered the glassy structures, burnishing them into shields of gold. The inspector wandered around the central dome, gathered in a cursory glance of the city. To the north, a marketplace sprawled, the food center of the city. Shops and booths lined the streets, and farm rows grew shrub-fruit along the edges.  To the west, houses and some larger buildings sparsely populated a lightly forested zone. South it seemed consisted almost entirely of houses and east contained many of the larger buildings.

          It was the east that most intrigued Inspector Mondieu. The buildings were rarely taller than five stories, and even more scarcely taller than ten. The buildings most frequently consisted of glass, with a few wooden structures. The fascinating aspect, to the inspector, was the immersion of floral life. There was no separation of buildings and plants: trees incorporated themselves into the structural nuance of each building; vines clambered up along the glassy sides, running into and out of windows; berries and flowers sprang up in the eaves and drooped over the rooftops; and, from inside, plants butted against the windows, pushing open the glass and drinking in the sunlight. If the mirror buildings composed the gilded heart, the plants were its veins.

          The buildings were rarely uniform or square in their design, but elegant emergence of organic life, a symbiotic mingling of creation and creative. One in particular caught the inspector’s eye this morning.

          Just east of the central dome, near the outer rim of the city, was a building taller than many of the others. Instead of an organic shape, it was almost ordinary, rectangular and nearly twenty stories tall.  Around the outside of the building, no plants climbed or draped, and no trees huddled nearby the outer edges. The glass was double-paned with a gap between the layers of several paces. In the gap, a whole host of green plants grew, and the outside layer of the building possessed a ramp that wrapped all the way around the building, consisting of layers of plants in a greenhouse that spiraled around the building. Herbs and grasses grew at the base, flowers on the next level, strawberries, blueberries, beans, and other vegetables next, and taller shrubs near the top. On top of the building, a fountain was barely visible, and its waters dripped over the sides in runnels that dripped into the greenhouse and irrigated by an intricate dripping process.

          The most fascinating aspect of the building, however, was that when the inspector squinted, he thought he could make out wires and blinking lights in the building – the first sign of any semblance of technology.

          He glanced at his timepiece and assumed he had at least an hour or so before Simon Temple might need to update him. That gave him plenty of time to do some snooping. Is it strange, finding this city more intriguing than its murder? Or perhaps it is that the piece of the city is at odds with such a violent act. What was missing?

          As Inspector Mondieu approached the greenhouse structure, he glanced around at the streets around him. The general populace was awakening, and the streets filled up with passersby, all curiously staring at the inspector. He perused for any suspicious stares, but found everyone smiling and timidly waving in his direction.

          He lowered his head, pocketed his hands, and picked up his speed. What an uncanny city.

          Arriving at the building, he saw his initial inspection was correct: wires and blinking lights were readily apparent behind the windows. Somehow, despite the lack of sunlight streaming against the outer edges of the western half of the building, it still gleamed with a brilliant, silver light, like a mirror pond standing tall and unrippled, cold as winter ice. He should have seen easily into the building’s interior, but the light still somehow masked much of the building in a blinding sheen.

          Walking around to the eastern side, he found the door, already opened wide. No locks, or even a place for locks.

          The inside was not as expected. Instead of twenty or thirty stories, it was a single, vast room. Wires, monitors, cables, platforms, metal constructs, blinking lights – a cacophony of whirring, humming, juddering, ticking electrobuzz in a static storm of incomprehensible machinery. Computers were stacked: chassis onto chassis, monitor onto metallic outcropping over monitor, wires forming rivers and waterfalls in every cranny between, and hammers, screwdrivers, flashlights, screws, and every tool imaginable strewn all about, haphazardly as though thrown. The stacks of computers spanned from floor all the way up to the roof of the building.

          Around the outside of the room, a double-helix of ramps crawled upward against the wall, connecting as they reached the ceiling. This gave access to both the towering stack of computers as well as the windows into the greenhouse which butted up against the inside windows of the structure.

          The most fascinating aspect, perhaps, was the nature of the computers: they were all ancient. Forty, fifty year old computers, all compressed into a single building - controlling, what? What does a city like this even need in the way of computing?

          Inspector Mondieu’s inner dialogue was interrupted by an angry shout from above, followed by some invectives and a flying hammer, crashing down the ramp and bouncing off the glass windows – stronger than they seemed – and coming to a rest near the bottom of the ramp.

          “Hello?” called the inspector. “Do you require assistance?”

          “What? Who goes there? I say, I was not expecting visitors at such an hour,” a gruff voice replied.

          “Inspector Mondieu. I was intrigued by-”

          “Inspector Mon Who? Never mind. Just bring me the damn hammer. Where is my wrench? This infernal thing won’t stop spitting up nonsense.”

          The inspector wandered over and grabbed the hammer – a rusty, fifteen pound beast – and walked up the ramp. The ramp vibrated in proximity with the machines, and the inspector held onto the rails to steady himself. About halfway up, the inspector bumped into the mechanic.

          Halfway buried into the machines, with only legs sticking out over the ramp, the mechanic was cursing and hammering at something the inspector couldn’t see in the jumble.

          “Here’s the hammer, sir.”

          The mechanic popped out with a grunt, and took the hammer gratefully. He was a larger man, widely built and not tall. He had a large bushy moustache and wore denim overalls and a wide shirt with a beer mug imprinted on it. Tattoos snaked along his arms in images and words the inspector couldn’t begin to recognize, and his blue eyes were milky and red-rimmed, likely from drinking, and his face was gruff.

          He had very pale skin with a reddish hint that implied he got little sun, but probably burned walking from home to work. His curly red hair pressed out from beneath a baseball cap, sprawling in all directions.

          He was, surprisingly, smiling with a jolly beam, and slapped Mondieu on the back with a loud clap, nearly knocking Mondieu off his feet.

“Not just any guest, but the city’s special guest. Here to investigate the murders, huh?”

          “Murders? How do you know they are murders?”

          The mechanic waved off that question with a grimy hand, and wiped his forehead, leaving a stain the color of ash.

          “Everyone knows they are murders. What can I do for you?”

          How did everyone know they were murders? He tucked the question away. Eventually, he would get to the bottom of this.

          “What is all… this?” the inspector motioned towards all of the towering computers.

          “This? Why, this is a pile of junk! A bunch of lousy, old ingrates speaking in mumbo-jumbo. Nothing worth seeing, anyhow,” replied the mechanic with a grin. The mechanic offered a hand. “Turnings, the name. But you may call me, Bill. Never much liked the name Turnings. C’mon, I’ll show you around.”

          The inspector followed Turnings down the ramp toward the base.

          “So what is this place for?” asked the inspector impatiently.

          “Ah, now that’s the curiosity, isn’t it? Not an electronic component in the rest of the city, but here. And what a pile of junk,” the mechanic began, reaching the bottom of the stairs and stopping. “Ah, what a beauty she is. An incomprehensible, devil of a beauty.

          “The bottom floor works as a weather manager. Each of these-”

          “A weather manager? What do you mean?” interrupted Mondieu.

          “It’s the middle of winter, and you never questioned the balmy, pleasant weather? The perfect sun, the cloudless day, the flowers blossoming everywhere? Here is where we control that.”

          “How?”

          “Ah, it’s a complicated magic, to be sure. And well beyond my expertise. Much of the actual technology is below-ground for that sort of thing. These computers display diagnostics and heighten or diminish the temperature and control the real machine that controls the wind. Whatever the means, we have sunny temperatures year round, a clear patch fifteen miles wide. Pretty fancy, huh?” Turner finished with a wink.

          “Amazing.” The inspector had heard of the technology, but why here? Why such incredible technology in what was otherwise a backwater agrarian city?

          “The next level,” the mechanic began, leading up higher into the building, “controls the irrigation. The entire design relies on underground pipelines, since it never rains. There are no sprinklers, no aboveground indication of watering, yet the greenery of the city speaks for itself. These consoles control the timing for watering each section of the city and the routing of the necessary quantity of water. A simple switch and the entire city could be flooded in hours.”

          “Seems dangerous. What do you do in case of emergency?”

          “Oh, we have backups. These systems are foolproof. And I mean, it might take a real genius to understand anything in this junkyard. Not any kid with a sledgehammer could flood the city or change the weather.”

          “Right. A real smart kid then,” drawled the inspector skeptically.

          The mechanic beamed. “The very cleverest. But why would anyone want to flood the city? The point is moot. Next, and highest, is miscellaneous: data, town information, graphs, emergency notifications, odds-and-ends. It’s something of a monitor over the monitor, if you catch my meaning.”

          As they reached the top, the inspector saw that the middle all the way down to the base was nearly hollow, with a ladder running down the insides. Clever, being able to work from both edges.

          “Well, that’s the top. Any questions?”

          “Not at the moment. Can I get to the roof?” replied the inspector.

          “Right over there,” the mechanic pointed to a ladder in the corner. The inspector walked over and climbed up onto the roof. The fountain was a mother-of-pearl water-spout, covered in reliefs of creation from different cultures. The creation by snake gods, from the tree or the carving out of a giant’s body, or the creation of the world in a series of days – different religions placed in different terraces on the fountain. Around the fountain grew a low grass with geraniums and nasturtiums, and a bench looking over the city.

          Just as he moved to sit down, the trapdoor behind him opened, and Simon Temple crawled onto the roof.

          “I’ve been looking all over for you, Mondieu.” Simon Temple appeared to wait for the inspector’s permission to continue.

          “First, there is a place to stay. You can stay in the hotel on Cali Street, free of charge. They also serve breakfast, and you are welcome.”

          The inspector nodded thankfully.

          “Simon Temple, before you leave, may I ask who discovered the bodies this morning?”

          “Why of course, inspector. It was Horten, the gardener.  It was he who found the clues as well.”

          “Clues?”

          “Yes, of course. Everything was predicted yesterday: the murders, the place. Everyone thought it was a hoax and ignored it.”

          “What?” the inspector said, standing up. “Why didn’t anyone inform me of this earlier? What were the clues?”

          “Hell if I know,” replied Simon, shrugging. “Something about a snake bite and fall of man, and death. Horten will know.”

          That explains why everyone immediately assumed it was a murder. Because everyone already knew it had been predicted. But no one had taken it seriously. Why? Now, two people were dead because an entire city hadn’t believed a mysterious clue.

          “Excellent, Simon Temple. And where might I find this Horten now?”

          “I’m not sure, sir. He works grounds, I hear. I suspect he’ll be somewhere around the central dome working at the park. I’ll find someone to bring you to him.”

          “Excellent work, Simon. You may go.”

          As Simon crawled back into the building, Mondieu sat to survey the city glistening like dewdrops of light beneath him. The central dome and park loomed on his western side, and the houses and trees looked like a neat rows in an elaborate garden beneath him. The sun soared into the sky, never getting very high in the throes of winter, though the inspector was quite warm, almost sweating, in his long coat.

          A clue, then. Perhaps this was not a simple murder and robbery after all. Things were getting interesting. A city untainted, beautiful in every imaginable way, now stricken with death.

          Yes, it seemed the game was afoot. The inspector rose to meet the challenge.