Seventeen students and staff members have disappeared from Valdegeld University—yet no one has noticed…
Investigator Mossa and Scholar Pleiti reunite to solve a brand-new mystery in The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, the sequel to Malka Older’s science fiction cozy mystery The Mimicking of Known Successes—out from Tordotcom Publishing on February 13, 2024.
Mossa has returned to Valdegeld on a missing person’s case, for which she’ll once again need Pleiti’s insight.
Seventeen students and staff members have disappeared from Valdegeld University—yet no one has noticed. The answers to this case could be found in the outer reaches of the Jovian system—Mossa’s home—and the history of Jupiter’s original settlements. But Pleiti’s faith in her life’s work as scholar of the past has grown precarious, and this new case threatens to further destabilize her dreams for humanity’s future, as well as her own.
Prologue
People went missing on Giant.
People stumbled or jumped or were pushed through atmoshields and fell off platforms. They took dares to walk a portion of ring between platforms and lost their balance even if they remembered not to asphyxiate. The entire planet yawned there, an endless gaseous void into which bodies disappeared irrevocably.
Mossa was not alone in the railcar; transport on the route between Sembla and Valdegeld was (as Mossa had cause to know) frequent and brief enough that there had been no reason to vouchsafe her use of the Investigators’ private railcar. She was sharing a carriage with three chattering students and an older person, perhaps with some business at the university or perhaps destined for another platform farther along the ring, and so she was careful not to move her lips as she thought through this explanation, or report. It was a habit long ago developed out of practice, or loneliness: reciting what she wanted to say to some imagined other person, aloud or internally. That way she would be ready when she had someone to explain it to; but it also helped her to organize her thoughts. Or perhaps, at this point, she couldn’t refrain from involuntary narrative, and learning to do it silently at least gave her an outlet for discourses that others found boring.
As in this case. At least, she expected that none of the people around her were interested that A startling percentage of cases brought to the Investigators dealt with missing persons. It might even be considered the raison d’être of the service, if you looked back at the historical case that led to its establishment, not long after Giant was settled. After the controlled, condensed environments of the space ships and stations, where everyone was within contact all the time, life on a planet with a dense, communications-unfriendly atmosphere seemed full of gaps and mystery. Particularly in the rapid expansion period, people would disappear into the growing network of platforms and rings, and there would be no way to know whether they were prospering or vaporized unless someone went to find out. The Investigators were also something of a reaction against the hierarchical ethos of the space stations, a community service that was not about crime or castigation but about resolving some of the lacunae in communications across the foggy planet.
Buy the Book
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
Of course, they evolved.
Disappearance, too, took on new cultural significance in this context. There were persistent rail tales, renewed mutatis mutandis in every generation, about remote platforms where the one person nobody could tolerate was required to step off into the murk, or told to leave and jumped instead. The stories usually drew some lesson from it—sometimes the communities never recovered, sometimes the drastic step solved all their problems—but of the two verified cases of this happening that Mossa was personally aware of, no follow-up had been done to learn the aftermath.
Mossa kept her eyes fixed on the view from the railcar window, the constant motion of the subtly colored vapors overlaid with the faint reflection of the people in the car. She was reciting this explanation, she knew, because she wanted to distract herself. Or perhaps because she could think of the person she would like to explain to, but wasn’t sure she should.
A lonely practice; a practical loneliness.
Not all of the corpses disappeared into the planet. Bodies were thrown into furnaces or composted into much-needed growth medium. And not all of the missing persons had died. Some were found on another platform where no one had expected them to be, or drunk or high under their bed or someone else’s, or transformed in some way or another and pursuing a new life under another name.
And some of them were never found.
Most of them were never found.
Exiting Valdegeld’s main station, Mossa felt the route to Pleiti’s rooms tugging at her as though it were illuminated on her mind-map of the platform. She shook her head at herself. Pleiti probably wasn’t even there: she would be in her office, poring over her data and calculations as an ecosystem extinct for centuries repopulated in her imagination. The thought summoned an image of Pleiti coracoled among her cushions, entirely ensconced in the workings of her mind. Mossa had never loved being ignored as much as when it allowed her to observe Pleiti abstracted.
Later. Mossa started down Supal, then took the turn toward the Speculative campus. For now, she was in Valdegeld to investigate a missing student. Perhaps, after…perhaps if she searched long enough, it would plausibly be too late to go home.
In the image in her mind, Pleiti raised her head from her work, looked at her, and smiled.
Mossa smiled back, baring her teeth into the cold wind blowing down Weilo Road. Perhaps Pleiti would welcome her without the excuse. Perhaps she wouldn’t be asking too much, or promising more.
Perhaps, tonight at least, she didn’t need to work that late.
Chapter 1
It was the sort of lecture I liked: a topic that I knew enough about to follow easily, but little enough about to feel like I was learning. Although it was a Modernist scholar speaking on what was, technically, a Modernist topic—the literature of alienation over the past two and a half centuries—it was closely enough linked to Classics via an explicit comparison to writing from the last decades of life on Earth that it had been allocated one of my favorite lecture halls in the Classical faculty. The seats were warmed, the glass covers on the gas lamps were an ancient and kindly yellow, and a tea service, authentically brought from Earth generations ago, shone on a sideboard amid chafing dishes and covered trays, promising cheering refreshment.
And yet I was having difficulty maintaining my concentration. My mind drifted like fog: from the delicate wordplay of Zint Plistor; to the system of gas-piping keeping the cushions toasty; to the net of rails girdling this permeable planet; to the latest species micro-map I had populated for my own research, tiny dots like a cross-stitch, satisfying to complete yet ultimately useless; to (with an effort of pouring myself back into the present) the erudite punning of Candela Roon, whose work spanned the Transition; to the precise varieties of dainties likely to be lurking in the tiered trays by the teapot; to the words of a dead man who had accused me and mine of excessive comfort.
Annoyed—with myself as much as with the dead—I glanced at the wall, where a crafted, cog-bound timepiece detailed the progress of no less than seven Classical calendars and mechanically demonstrated the placement of sunlight on a rotating model of Earth; a small dial in the lower corner indicated the local time on Giant. Not much longer now. I dragged my mind back to the lecture; meditated on the anachronisms of the tea service design; then moved on to (a leap, but the thought, like the dainties, had been lurking for some time) the probabilities of my seeing Mossa that night (slim) or any night before I chose to betake myself to Sembla on Earthday eve (not much broader). I was still meditating on that concern, with a curl of fancy into how that meeting, should it happen, might unfold, when the lecture ended.
Still somewhat dazed with my warm imaginings, and more relieved than I would have liked to be that the talk was over, I gathered my (largely unused) bloc into my satchel and made for the tea table. There were the tomato chutney tarts I was fond of from previous talks at this hall, and lovely little custard wagons. I had not tried the latter before, and discovered, unsurprisingly but to the detriment of my atmoshawl, that they cracked unpredictably and had a tendency to drip.
“Pleiti!” I turned from my cleanup efforts to see Gartine, another scholar, approaching. “We don’t often see you at these Modernist events.”
“I find different perspectives can be refreshing to the mind even if they are not directly useful.” Remembering that Gartine’s research group had been one of the sponsors for this talk, I attempted to pivot from professionally modest to effusive. “Naturally, this particular talk offered much…the speakers, so well chosen…”
“Mmm. Well, I’m pleased to see you so little affected by recent events,” Gartine went on, meaning exactly the opposite.
“Not nearly as eventful as the chisme made them seem.” It was my standard reply, honed over the months since I had become notorious at the university, but I had to swallow an unexpected wash of bile. “Really, I had very little to do with it.” Gartine believed me no more than my other colleagues, and seemed disinclined to give up, so I did instead. Weariness, I self-diagnosed, and made my excuses, hoping it didn’t look like flight.
The chill revived me somewhat as I stepped from the salle. The sky was lightening; events like this one tended to span the dawn, so that people finishing their diurnal could stay up a little late, while those on the other schedule could wake a little early. I was in the former group, on this occasion, and my steps thudded wearily on the platform, exhaustion a gravity multiplier as the sun started its race across the sky.
The tradition of divided schedules, with some of the population sleeping while the other was active, had started in the early days of settlement; or, strictly speaking, before then, on the spaceships, but it was on the settlement that it had taken its current form. There hadn’t been enough places to sleep, early on; not just beds, but places offering sufficient warmth for a person to safely lie still through the night. Even after they built the first atmoshield—not something we would recognize as one today, not even really worthy of the name, as it was an impermeable dome more like a ship’s hull—that first platform was crowded and precarious.
What was stranger was that the practice had stuck, even after the settlement had expanded and inhabitants were able to live in approximately Classical ways, with work and agricultural cultivation and sleep and family and, eventually, leisure and hobbies and elite centers of learning. Of course (I thought, as I continued my walk, well wrapped against the cold, the early sun barely tipping over Valdegeld’s august buildings into its narrow streets), of course all those activities had been constrained at first as well: not enough university space to give classes to everyone who wanted them at once, the agricultural rhythms made possible by satellite mirrors requiring extensive working hours, and so on. But I liked to believe there was a tendency towards flexibility as well, a willingness to shuffle circadian strictures in the new environment of Giant. Why, I knew people who worked on a night-day pattern instead of day-night—Sintra, for example, in Classical geography, claimed she liked it because she could easily meet up with people from both the more usual schedule groups.
I was, by this point, nearly to my rooms, on Thanma Street. I considered stopping at the tiny poultry farm on the next corner for breakfast, but decided I would rather reach my rooms sooner, indulge in a warm bath while the tea steeped, and then work in a desultory, pleasant way on my new project for a little while before I went to sleep.
My rooms are in a narrow, four-story building reserved for scholars in Classics, nearly two hundred years old and exactly what people imagine when Valdegeld is mentioned: metal walls beaten into the textured, herpentine patterns popular during the era when much of the university’s physical plant was built; quaint windows designed to hold extra layers of atmoshield although now, with the exception of those on the top floor right which are original, they have all been replaced; an arching entranceway; and, of course, the porter’s lodge just inside the door. At that hour I was a little surprised not to see the porter on duty sitting at the reception station outside the lodge, so I knocked quickly on the open door and poked my head in for a greeting.
“Ah, there she is,” said Genja, a solidly built woman with a long meta-braid down her back. “I told you we wouldn’t miss her.”
“And right you were,” responded Mossa, uncurling from the chair opposite her. “It’s been a pleasure sitting with you indeed.”
“And you. Have a good day then—or evening, as may be,” Genja added, quirking her head at me as Mossa joined me at the door.
“You could have come up, you know,” I said over my shoulder, as Mossa followed me up the stairs. It was a by-product of having live-in oddsbodies around the place that they were aware of visitors and, unless they tried very hard not to pay attention, who stayed the night. Mossa had never seemed particularly shy of people noticing our relationship, but she might have been unsure of my feelings on the matter.
“Thank you, but in this case it was no bother,” Mossa said, her voice soft as we passed the doors on the first level. “I was feeling sociable.” I glanced back with some skepticism; Mossa would not often be described as sociable. But her mien was entirely serious, and I reflected that, while she was not one to speak for the sake of speaking or enjoy crowded conversation, I had noticed her particularly engaging in discourse those people that most scholars would exchange no more than pleasantries with. I was, as I opened the door, feeling rather relieved that I had chosen to look in on the porter’s lodge.
“Tea?” I inquired, unwinding myself from my outdoor accoutrements.
“If you don’t mind,” Mossa said, watching as I raised the fire. “I stopped in without warning, and you are probably tired after a long day…”
“I’m happy to see you,” I said, almost managing not to hesitate before I pressed a kiss to her lips, and then continuing on to put in an order for the scones I knew she was partial to. “Are you…” I almost asked if she was staying, meaning more: Are you coming to bed with me now, immediately after tea, or will you talk and then leave? Surely not though, in general we kept the same schedule, and why would she arrive at this hour if not to—
My steps stuttered to a halt; I turned to her. “You’re here on work.”
Mossa did not flinch. “Not here in your rooms, but yes, here in Valdegeld.”
I had intended to lounge beside her on the cushions, but fell into the low chair instead. “Is it—” I didn’t know what to ask. She was an Investigator, obviously it was a poor prospect for someone. What I wanted to know was Is it like last time? Would it upend my life, shake my faith in this university, make me question my entire life’s work?
Would it throw us together, like the last time Mossa came to my rooms on work had, or would it unstitch us?
Mossa shrugged a little, perhaps as a response to my uncertainty, perhaps settling herself on the cushions. “A student is missing. I have only just started looking into it, but you know. People go missing here. They stumble or jump or get pushed through atmoshields.” She paused abruptly. “It’s…” I wondered if she too was trying to find a way to say Not like last time, without knowing precisely what quality we were both hoping to avoid. “It may be bad, but this early on there’s nothing to say the student won’t turn up in a few days after an impromptu holiday somewhere.”
The dumbwaiter dinged, and I rocked forward to go for the scones, but Mossa was on her feet first.
“You’ve had a long day, I can tell.” She let her fingertips glide over my temple, my cheek. “Relax, bathe or change if you like. Or were you going to bed?”
I hesitated again, but this time from a delicious sense of choice rather than uncertainty. “A lave, and then I’ll rejoin you.”
I emerged from the bath feeling far more balanced on my axis. I had wrapped myself in a quilted dressing gown, partly in hopes of being unwrapped thereof, partly as a signal that I was indeed relaxed and comfortable, not standing on ceremony with my paramour—a signal as much to myself as to her. She was sprawled across the cushions before the fire, clearly relaxed (or exhausted?) herself, which made it easier to slip down to join her, plucking a ginger and pear scone as I did.
“Do you want to tell me?” I asked, leaning into her lithe solidity, her warmth by my side and the fire warm before us.
Mossa turned her head sharply in a half-shake. “I don’t mind but…so far at least, it’s not so interesting.” Not like last time. I exhaled. “I’d rather talk about your research.” I settled into a further recline, and she slid her fingertips into my hair. “How is your latest matrix coming?”
“Oh, the usual,” I said with a yawn. “I’m early on in this one,” I added, to excuse the lack of urgency.
“Are you moving to another area of research?”
“Hm?” I swallowed the crumbles of scone in my mouth. “No, why do you ask?”
“That book, on the writing desk? It’s not in your usual topic.”
I turned to look, even though I already knew: like all the books from the library, the metal casing of the chip was unadorned with illustration or even a title. “How do you know that?”
She waved at the chip. “The library number. All your books start with 067, sometimes 068 or 9. This is 043.”
I had to breathe deeply through it: the sudden inrush of warmth that Mossa had poured that much attention into the details of my life; then the downswing of recalling that such details, for her, were as easily imprinted as a Classical quotation for me. “Yes. It’s a new project, in fact, though more a sideline than any change in my primary research area, a bit of a lark.”
I said it with a twitch of defensiveness. It was not so long ago that Mossa had suggested I revolutionize the way Classical scholarship was conducted, find a way to research potential ecosystems for the reseeding of Earth without depending on attempts to exhaustively mimic the balance of what had lived there before humans crushed it. I had pondered quite a bit what such a new form of theorizing might look like, was still pondering intermittently. But the cataclysm Mossa and I had been involved in, though it had reordered some of my ideas, had not erased my responsibilities at the university; if anything, it had increased them, as I was pulled into the strong and often conflicting currents of reaction. It had been far easier—and, if I was honest, comforting—to slide into my old patterns of research. I had been rather expecting Mossa to note that fact with some gentle critique. I had not fully given up on change, but this particular project, exciting though it might be in the moment, was anything but revolutionary.
I took a sip of tea, but she was regarding me with apparent interest, so I went on. “The university received a soil donation from Cater Rallon, the ag magnate. They’ve decided to use it in the Soyal Courtyard—you know, by the Silvered Library?—to turn it into a small park, and they want to grow a garden based on an example described in Classical literature.”
“And they want you to interpret the literature to design it? That’s marvelous!”
“Well, as one of a small squadron.” As the leader, in fact, but she would deduce that soon enough so there was, literally, no need to boast. “It’s exciting actually—to be doing something that will see an immediate effect, a change in the environment here…” As opposed to endless efforts to find the perfect combination of species to repopulate Earth, but that was the ramp onto a thought-spiral I’d had quite enough of lately—“And it’s rather refreshing to be reading outside of my usually narrow range.”
“Time or location?” Mossa asked, taking another scone and dusting it liberally with cocoa and cinnamon powder, followed by a pinch of garam masala.
“Both, although not terribly far in either direction. The end of the previous century, and in Canada rather than England. We’ve found a wonderfully specific and complete description of a garden—I’m just reading through the rest of the novel to see if there might be any additions later—it doesn’t have the plan, of course, but the number of floral species mentioned is, is, it’s fantastic really.” For all my enthusiasm, I ended with a sigh, and we were silent for a while but for the quiet rushing of the fire.
“I’ll look forward to walking through it,” Mossa said at last, and as I wondered whether there was an unspoken with you, her sly smile reminded me of our walks in the gardens of Sembla, where she had kissed me for the first time since our tumultuous relationship as students. So I leaned towards her until it happened again.
Excerpted from The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, copyright © 2023 by Malka Older.
