Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  “I’ll have to check the case web before I can answer that.” Bull went walleyed for a moment, communing with his memory palace. “Ah, yes and no. They were noted as an unusual collection of artifacts, and so one of the detectives took a look at them—examined a representative sample, exterior and interior, dusted for codon samples, checked isotope ratios to identify the planet of origin, that sort of thing. There was nothing obviously anomalous about them, and a distributed net search for some random samples of the content didn’t throw anything up, so the case committee concluded that Ana Graulle-90 was merely a collector of such things. A historian of accountancy practices collects archaic ledgers, yes?” He focused on me abruptly. “Do you disagree?”

  “Well.” I considered my next words carefully. “First, is there anything above the ceiling?”

  “Let me see.” Serjeant Bull’s uniform might be motley, but his belt carried numerous pouches. From one of these he pulled a compact device that he held to his eyes as he studied the underside of the roof. “Odd. It’s opaque.”

  “Opaque?” I asked: “What do you mean?”

  He held the device toward me, and I saw that it had a compact screen built into a visor, with some sort of sensor on the outside. “Magic police goggles: They’re a terahertz imager. You use it to see through nonconductive surfaces. Water and metals reflect terahertz radiation, so they show up. But the ceiling is opaque.”

  “So if Ana or whoever lived here”—he looked at me narrowly—“wanted a secret level that the police would be unable to find . . . ?”

  “These condos are recycled fuel tanks, their outer walls are sheet steel.” Serjeant Bull reached up and rapped on the ceiling. “Which”—he paused—“is very interesting, because there should be at least three meters of air above our heads. Hmm.”

  “It might be a false ceiling,” I equivocated. “There might not be anything suspicious about it.”

  “But you don’t think so.” Serjeant Bull increasingly struck me as one of those thinkers who is neither fast nor shallow: not one to rapidly and incisively solve problems on the fly but not likely to miss anything either, once he had time to give the issue at hand due consideration. “And your reaction downstairs was that you couldn’t imagine your sib living here. Why is that?”

  “We—” I gathered my thoughts. “I did not know her particularly well, but we shared a common ancestor and we have corresponded, over the decades. The living space downstairs is tasteless. It’s full of pointless junk. Serjeant, Ana grew up aboard a generation ship and lived by preference in deep-space habs, out in the cold yonder. Which is not to say that she might not have harbored a secret fetish for deadweight and finally felt free to indulge it once she had the opportunity, but that stuff is massive. And mass costs.” I swallowed. “And now this . . . this doesn’t figure. None of it. Not the bed, not the books. It’s just not like something one of us would do! Especially the books, unless . . .”

  I reached over to the nearest shelf and took another bound volume. Opened it. More tallies marching down the page, endlessly, totaled at the bottom and carried overleaf in wobbly lettering. Smeary ink. The description field didn’t help much: They were all ten-digit alphanumerics. I would need an inventory table to make sense of it. But the quantities and prices all added up, that much I could see. “These are account ledgers. There must be a, what do you call it, a pen somewhere near here.” I looked over at the table. There was a chair beside it, as one might expect. “She was keeping books for somebody, by hand, using these books rather than a calculator or any other kind of publicly accessible memory. A truly ancient method, but very robust! Why, if she removed her soul chips while she worked, there might be no record whatsoever of what was happening here that could be detected by remote searchers. Unless you hooked her up to a debugger and questioned her”—I shivered—“you’d get nothing.”

  Serjeant Bull looked around at the room, clearly seeing it in a new light. “You say the pigment dissolves in water. Hmm. And this paper: waterproof, yes or no?”

  “No.” I racked my brains, thinking back to an ancient history class: “It dissolves in water. And the only way in or out of here is through a wet lock. Someone who was sent to grab the books and didn’t know what precautions to take to protect them would ruin them completely in the process, destroying the accounts.” I looked up at the ceiling again. “That trapdoor by the staircase. Did anyone try lowering it— Wait, don’t!”

  Bull stopped in midstride. “Why? What do you think would happen?” he asked mildly.

  “There’s something wrong with this whole setup,” I began. “The pigment Ana—or whoever—used in these books. Did anyone send a sample for analysis? To find out where it came from?” My head was spinning, correlating disconnected data. Water-soluble ink, used to make marks on fibrous water-absorbent paper. A cylindrical dwelling, the ledgers stored upstairs. Trapdoor below, opaque false ceiling above. Only way in and out via a water lock underneath. “It’s all about the books. If you take them out via the front door, the ink will dissolve. And you can’t get at what’s in them via any kind of search algorithm. This whole room was meant to be a secret, wasn’t it? Hidden in full view and disguised as a dwelling. Someone hired Ana to keep books for them, and whatever they were accounting for, it had to stay invisible and out of sight.” I was thinking furiously. “But suppose . . . suppose they didn’t know about Ana’s other connections? Our correspondence, or the fact that she was expecting me to arrive? Maybe they hired her to do the job without telling her what it was, first.”

  “You are suggesting that your sib was engaged to work on a secret bookkeeping program, yes?” Serjeant Bull said slowly. “And her employer panicked when they learned of your impending arrival and k— removed her. Is that what you think? But then why did they leave these books, if they were both secret and valuable enough to justify removing Ana Graulle-90?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they were interrupted, or forced to run, before they could destroy them. They’re certainly bulky. Or maybe they—whoever removed her—didn’t realize what they were; if she was working in secrecy, and her employer sent thugs to take her, they might have assumed she was keeping everything on a soul chip. Or maybe they learned I was coming and decided to remove her before she told me whatever she was doing.” I shook my head, unreasoningly upset: Serjeant Bull was barely going through the motions of trying to conceal from me the fact that he and his colleagues thought Ana was dead. And after a year of her absence, how could I gainsay them? “The ink. And the paper. Where do they come from?”

  This time Serjeant Bull was quiet for longer. I was about to repeat my question when he looked at me. “The leaves are made from bleached and macerated fibers extracted from various species of leviathan grass, presumably harvested nearby and processed into, um, paper. Traces of leviathan grass were found in the feedstock processor by the dining niche downstairs, and a tub of the stuff was present in the vestibule, so it was assumed that Graulle-90 was manufacturing the material as she needed it. There is a household fabricator and some unidentified mechanical parts that had been manufactured in it were found nearby, so perhaps those were part of her ledger factory. The pigment was more of a puzzle. A forensic tech finally determined that there was microscopic tissue debris in it and extracted a genome sequence; it is a naturally occurring substance extracted from the ink sacs of feral sepiidians—another of the invertebrates from Old Earth that adapted to life in the upper waters here. The stuff is called sepia, and it has a long history as a pigment used for dying this paper stuff.”

  “Did the investigators find any containers of it here? Or pens, brushes, styli? Other writing implements?”

  “Oddly, no.” Bull seemed to come to a decision. “Thank you, Ms. Alizond. You have been most useful, and we must now continue this investigation without you. We will need to remove these books to safekeeping as evidence before we probe whatever is above the false ceiling. Such as, perhaps, a
water tank? Is that what you think? Primed to drench these shelves of books, rendering them useless?” I nodded. “It’s a little excessive, but I have heard of stranger things.” He looked around. “So this is a secret archive, maintained by hand in an archaic code and designed to be hard to detect and easy to destroy, eh?” He looked at me. “You’d better go now; I’ll call you when I need you again. Please do not speak of anything you have seen here. It would be unfortunate to have to charge you with interfering with an investigation.”

  I shivered. “Thanks, but no thanks.” Whoever Ana had been working for—and I was still convinced that this was not where she’d been living—news of my impending arrival had caused them to kidnap or kill her. I began to wonder if perhaps the safest thing for me to do wouldn’t be to depart Shin-Tethys as soon as possible. Helping out a sib in their time of need might be the done thing, but putting my own life on the line was another matter entirely. And so as I headed for the stairs, I resolved to do what I could to help the Serjeant’s continued inquiries from the safest possible distance . . . preferably on another planetary body.

  Recidivision

  There is a time for the prudent traveler to give the appearance of being of no great means; and there’s a time when the prudent traveler should book themselves into the most discreet and securely guarded guesthouse they can afford, to hire bodyguards, and to ignore the expense.

  I decided that now was the latter time. So I left Ana’s rented pod and took myself directly to the Grand Imperial Hotel Ariel, where I marched up to the concierge pool, and said: “Hello, I would like you to arrange an escort to take me to the nearest bureau de change, please? And then some assistance opening a local bank account, checking into the best available suite you’ve got, and hiring a bodyguard.”

  The concierge surfaced briefly, to blink a saucer-sized eye at me. “Excuse me,” buzzed the transducer at the poolside: “Am I to understand you would like to check in?”

  “Yes,” I said patiently, “but in order to pay you, I will first need to liquidate some slow money. I’m a little short on the fast stuff right now.” Which was entirely true—Medea’s kingdom ran on its own evanescent scrip, backed by fiat royalty, and Rudi hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to fork out the salary he claimed to owe me before we climbed into that capsule. “I believe there is a branch of SystemBank Taj in this town?”

  A brief flurry of underwater activity made the concierge pool heave and splash: A coil of thick, muscular, sucker-lined flesh broke the surface briefly. I took a nervous step backward across the slippery tile mosaic as the transducer buzzed again. “If you would care to check in first, guest services would be happy to assist you with your requirements. Billing can be deferred for up to one day, subject to credit checks.” A dactylus with disturbingly fingerlike palps flopped over the edge of the pool and twitched toward me. “Please consent to handshake . . .”

  I extended my hand to the teuthidian concierge, palm to suckers, exchanging identity tokens with him. His skin was cold and rugose, clammy with an undertaste of static electricity. Despite his superficial resemblance to a giant squid from Old Earth, he was no less human than I; his body was assembled from mechanocytes to a design pattern better suited for life in the hydrosphere of Shin-Tethys, but the brain—modulo some cunning somatic translation layers—was largely unchanged. “I am Krina Buchhaltung Historiker Alizond-114,” I said. “I would like to rent the use of your facilities for not less than ten days, including full personal security service. I also need full identity verification at all times—I have a stalker. And I need assistance in organizing a fund transfer via SystemBank Taj.”

  “We can organize that for you.” The concierge—a discreet sign by the transducer informed me that I was welcome to call him Chen—floated close to the surface, his skin flickering between violet lines and yellow spots. “I will ask the bank to send a clerk over to your suite. Which is being prepared now; it will be ready in a few minutes. For the bank’s information, in confidence, what sort of financial instrument are you intending to convert?”

  I kept my face still. “One New California dollar. Hitherto unbroken.”

  The concierge sank to the bottom of his pond, tentacles flashing crimson: Evidently this was the manner in which giant squid demonstrated their embarrassment, or at least a double take. “Excuse me. Did you say you want to convert one New California slow dollar?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Then please accept my apologies. Our head of security will be with you shortly: Meanwhile, the Grand Imperial Hotel Ariel is pleased to upgrade you to the Grand Imperial Suite at no extra cost, if that will be satisfactory?”

  The rest of the day passed in something of a blur.

  The Grand Imperial Suite—on the lowermost subsurface deck of the hotel—was suitably impressive, with both dry and wet accommodation, its own controlled entrance, and a sufficiency of rooms and passages that I could easily have become lost in it if I had not first asked for a map upload. The head of hotel security was, in her own person, also suitably impressive: a former colleague of the police inspector, now working to ensure that the hotel’s more illustrious patrons would encounter no untoward embarrassments during their stay. And the SystemBank was indeed more than willing to send a branch manager (not a mere clerk) to assist me in negotiating the sale of one of my carefully hoarded dollars. This latter process took some time (it is necessary first to countersign the dollar with a checksum derived from one’s soul, then arrange for a formal transfer of title notice to be transmitted to the beacon station for onward confirmation by way of the issuing bank—which in the case of New California was more than twenty light-years away). As I anticipated, the conversion rate on offer for a negotiated transfer was little short of usury—I lost nearly 90 percent of the value of the dollar in fees and discounted interest and insurance policies—but left me with the best part of a million Argos Riyals in hot, fast, anonymous cash, most of it sitting in SystemBank Taj’s accounts for now.

  I hated having to do this but could see no alternative. In all probability, Ana had been abducted and slain by a hideous crime syndicate or some other nightmarish stupidity. My mission to retrieve her was a complete and utter failure, and my life would probably be in danger if I stayed here. Furthermore, my stalker from the chapel would be arriving shortly as that vehicle entered orbit. So I must look to my personal safety, regardless of the expense, and it is easier to buy safety if one is a prominent foreign millionaire than an anonymous local pauper.

  My plan was to hide here for a while—no point in not giving Inspector Schram the benefit of the doubt, and an opportunity to make whatever use they could of my assistance—but eventually I would have to leave. And I had every intention of chartering a private yacht and hightailing it to Taj Beacon, there to beam out-system. Whether to Shin-Kyoto to continue my pilgrimage—pretending to be unaware of my lineage mater’s disapproval, waiting for me back home—or to pick another destination at random, I had not yet decided. It’s the sort of decision I have never been good at making.

  Having reduced my assets by a not-insubstantial amount, and having determined to stay here for at least ten days, I set about spending some more money. My shipboard free-fall suit was both elderly and unfashionable: Moreover, it was far from waterproof and had become embarrassingly moist over the past day. A faint aroma clung to it, and I feared that it was beginning to degrade. So with the concierge desk’s help I arranged for a visit from a tailor—one suitably cleared by the hotel-security staff—and commissioned a brace of wet and dry suits.

  Other needs were less easily taken care of. “I need to consult a body shop,” I told the concierge. “One who specializes in adapting visiting land dwellers for subsurface life.” Not because I planned to spend any great time underwater but because if I should find myself in such a situation, I would be in considerable trouble: my gas exchangers—lungs, in Fragile terminology—were not designed to extract dissolved oxygen
from water, and I only held a couple of hours in reserve. Nor were my fingers and toes appropriately webbed for mobility, and my auditory equipment and attitude sensors would need adjusting. (Forget venturing below the two-hundred-meter line; that would require more drastic, invasive upgrades to my ’cytes’ programming. Not to mention replacing my legs with a tail: and, as I told the travel agent on Taj Beacon, I am unaccountably attached to my bipedalism.)

  “We can arrange for you to have a visit from the hotel doctor,” said the concierge. “However, it will not be possible for you to receive extensive modifications without visiting an external clinic. We can arrange security for such a visit, but I believe we will require advance notification, and additional charges may apply.”

  “That’s acceptable.” I waved it off. “If you can send the doctor up—”

  “Excuse me.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I feared I had missed the concierge’s words.

  “A visitor in reception is asking if they can see you, Ms. Alizond. They identify themselves as Count Rudolf Crimson-50. They are unaccompanied. Would you like us to pass on a message or indicate that you are not to be disturbed?”

  “No! Wait!” I clutched my head. “He’s on his own? Send him up here. Wait, check him for weapons first? No, he’s not stupid enough to— Wait, do you have a conference room available? If so, send him there. I’ll meet him, then see the doctor afterward.”

  * * *

  Rudi was waiting for me in a small conference room two levels below the lobby, unaccompanied and clearly unarmed, just as the concierge had indicated. He looked smaller and somehow less threatening under these changed circumstances: His wing membranes drooped heavily in the planetary gravity, and his fur formed bedraggled tufts. But his gaze was as sharp as ever, and his manner as controlled as if he were still in control of the board of his own vehicle.