by Simon Kewin
“Not until I know what you are asking. I infer from your question that Pannax Ro has revealed information to you which the Arianas Mind does not know or has chosen not to share.”
Lacking Coronade's near-infinite computational capacity, it took her a few moments to decide upon the best response. “Yes,” she said eventually. “New information has come to light that affects the talks, but which the Aranians have chosen to keep secret for now.”
“As a way of putting pressure on you to satisfy their objectives. I'm intrigued.”
“They claim that their civilisation, or an earlier iteration of it, visited Penanda a little over one thousand years ago. I need to know whether that claim is reliable. It is possible Ro may have assumed I wouldn't dare to send anything there to confirm the truth, for fear of antagonizing the Sejerne.”
“One convenient aspect of Sejerne's reverence for the world is that they don't maintain close orbital monitoring of it, so far as I know. They certainly don't land upon it. I believe it would be possible for a ship to visit the world without any of the three cultures being aware.”
“Especially as you have access to the logged spaceship activity of those worlds.”
“It is possible there are vessel movements I'm not aware of, but I believe I can plot a safe vector into the system for a small probe.”
“There has to be some risk.”
“I calculate the chances of us being able to make a successful and secret visit are high. Arianas might be watching the location of the supposed landing-site because they are aware of its significance, but surely not the other two worlds.”
She considered as she walked. The shimmering wall of the dome was only a few hundred metres ahead of her. She wasn't looking forwards to emerging into the sun-blasted heat of the desert. Was it possible Ro was playing a subtle game here, tricking her into violating Penanda in order to antagonize both Sejerne and Gogon? On balance, she believed not. Her readings of Ro's emotional states were faint, but the Aranian felt wary, hunted, rather than sly or duplicitous. On balance, she was inclined to believe Ro's statement. But she needed to be sure.
“Then, please initiate a quiet incursion into the system to investigate the coordinates Ro has provided,” she said to Coronade. “I suspect the remains, if there are any, will be fragmentary. Reading between the lines, it seems to me that the ancient mission crashed onto the planet, killing its two astronauts and probably scattering the ship's remains across a wide area. Whether that was the plan all along, I don't know. The technology of the day must have been primitive; it's entirely possible that the craft burned up on atmospheric insertion and didn't reach the surface.” She transmitted the global positioning data Ro had provided her to Coronade.
“In which case, we have an interesting legal situation,” said Coronade. “Could they be considered to have landed on the planet if they burned up in the atmosphere?”
“No doubt Ro would say fragments of their ship must have rained down onto the surface and that, therefore, they effectively reached the surface and can claim it. The legal situation is perhaps debatable, but the political one is not. Sejerne would consider even an atmospheric insertion by another world a violation. It would mean the abrupt end of the talks and, most likely, the abrupt start of a conflict.”
Coronade said, “I have despatched a probe to approach the disputed world and study the coordinates. We will know by early tomorrow whether there is any evidence for Ro's claim.”
“Thank you. I assume this means you will keep this act a secret from the other planetary minds?”
“I see no need to trouble them with the matter. Sejerne would obviously be deeply offended if it knew the truth, and while it troubles me not to inform it, I consider the sacrifice worth making if we can bring peace to the system. If we are lucky, the probe will not need to enter the planet's atmosphere to dig through rock and soil. Scans from orbit might reveal the truth of the story, although you must understand that picking out the remains of a spaceship after so long a period will be difficult. And we are heavily preoccupied with other matters at the moment.” Was there a hint of humour in Coronade's response? The Minds were obviously capable of handling an effectively infinite number of matters simultaneously.
“You are referring to this Magellanic Cloud story?”
“There have been developments. You need to know about them as they might help your position.”
“Tell me.”
“We have received more intelligence from Ormeray Ten. It now appears that the surviving members of the Magellanic Cloud left on their ship very soon after arriving, claiming they were being pursued and intending to warn the whole galaxy of some threat unfolding behind them.”
“It sounds like they're suffering from some mass delusion to me. What do you make of their warnings?”
“Very little. The ship has not reappeared in known space. No one knows where they are. Either they suffered an accident, or something really was pursuing them. Or they killed each other in the throes of madness.”
“My guess is they'll show up soon enough, and then we might be able to tease out some useful thread of the truth. They're hiding out, thinking they're cornered. If they were being rational, they'd have jumped straight to one of the Nexus worlds, come here even, to report what it was that they believed took place. Come to that, they could have simply stayed where they were and put the information onto the nanotube mesh.”
“Ormeray Ten suggested a metaspace jump directly here, but they refused, claiming it was too dangerous.”
She'd reach the doorway now. If she'd been stalked by a gataraptor, she hadn't seen it. Sealing herself inside the inner chamber of the airlock, she rapidly shrugged her way out of her thermal layers, stripping down to the thin garments she wore underneath. She activated the cloth's rolling exothermic reaction to help cool her down outside. It was only a short walk to the QuantLev terminal, but the exterior temperatures were ferocious, especially after the cold of the subarctic biome.
“Dangerous?” she said. “That makes no sense. To us or to them?”
“In their minds, both, I think. They believed they were being pursued and did not want to put the central point in the Nexus in danger by luring the mysterious enemy here. It seems likely that they believed they were protecting us by disappearing.”
She didn't say it out loud, but it was a mistake to think of Coronade as vital to the functioning of the Nexus, important as the planet was culturally. A brain wouldn't die if it lost a single neuron. She wondered what the precise nature of the Magellanic Cloud survivors' delusion was. Insanity could be creative in its idiosyncrasies; it was incredible the lengths to which people would go with their fantasies, the intricate details their minds invented.
“They gave no clue about the nature of this supposed threat?” she asked.
“Nothing that makes much sense.”
The renegade crew of this Magellanic Cloud were, clearly, a danger to themselves, and needed to be found and helped. Assuming they were still alive, they were probably quaking in fear on some unnamed asteroid, seeing space demons in the void. A sad situation – but their continued absence was useful.
“We can assume the delegates will have heard this news,” she said. “You're right; this could help make the notion of a common threat appear more real. Pitched correctly, we could even have Gogon, Sejerne and Arianas talking about a united defence force against this … whatever it is.”
She stepped through the outer door into the clashing light of the great sands sun. The heat on her shoulders and the top of her head was like a physical weight, pushing her down. She squinted, blinding light reflecting off the glass of the half-domes.
“There's more,” said Coronade. “We are in in constant communication with Ormeray Ten, but five hours ago it went dark. We've heard nothing from it since.”
Most likely some malfunction; it wasn't unknown for frontier stations to glitch out, their inhabitants taking systems offline to upgrade or repair them. She could spin a ver
y different story to the delegates, though. A puzzling and troubling loss of communication with a vulnerable frontier world. “You must have sent ships in to investigate.”
“Three separate ships jumped through metaspace to the system. None has returned or replied.”
That got her attention. Assuming the scout ships didn't inconveniently turn up at Coronade and explain there was no problem, she could easily sell the idea of a developing threat to galactic culture from these scraps. Speculation and suggestion filled the void when there was a lack of hard information. All she had to do was direct that speculation to her own ends.
“What is the attitude of the Gogon, Sejerne and Arianas planetary Minds?”
“Like me, they are intrigued.”
“Intrigued but not concerned?” There was the hint, the faintest hint, of a pause in Coronade's response. A linguistic flourish or a sign it was struggling to fully compute the likeliest explanation? Oddly, the minute pause troubled her more than all the wild stories. She could, of course, get no empathic reading off the immanent artificial Mind. As she toiled through the heat, blown sand rasping beneath her feet on the walkway, a line of sweat trickled down her back.
“We have studied all likely and theoretical threats based on four hundred years of interstellar expansion,” said Coronade. “We have found nothing and can predict nothing that could possibly endanger us in any significant way. One solar system could be at danger from an unanticipated stellar event, or even a military strike, but our civilisation is spread among thousands of worlds. Its diffusion and diversity are its strength. On the other hand, rumours and wild stories are easy to invent. Sooner or later the truth will emerge, and it will become clear there was never any danger. Until then, you have a window of opportunity.”
Gratefully, she passed into the gloriously cool interior of the QuantLev station. She would be back in Suri within minutes.
“Thank you again,” she said. “I will attempt to make some progress before this little panic blows over.”
Three
She was reading through her final briefings the following morning, sipping sweet fruit juices harvested from the cultivated zone of the upland flower jungles, when the high-urgency message from Coronade broke through her mental Do Not Disturb flag. The Mind had never attempted to reach her before when she was offline. She guessed that either the probe despatched to the disputed world had found something with urgent implications, or else there was a new development to do with the Magellanic Cloud. If it was the latter, she found herself hoping it was something bad. Debris of the ship found floating in space, say. It was a grim thought, but it might make her job easier.
The balcony of her quarters also overlooked the Hub park. She stared out that way, half- expecting to see that something had changed, or glimpse an unidentified threat rolling over the rooftops. Of course, there was nothing. She knew what was happening to her; it was a familiar-enough disadvantage to having boosted empathic senses. The background anxiety from the population was washing through her. It happened when troubling news or some rumour spread, colouring her attitudes and responses to everything around her, especially early in the morning when her mental defences were lower. She'd grown accustomed to spotting it was happening, letting the alien thoughts run through her unchallenged, allowing the waters to flow rather than trying to dam them. Of course, the scene before her looked as peaceful and ordered as it always did. So early in the morning, there were no crowds. The rising sun lit up the spires and towers of the city with a golden light, scattering the first shimmers across the far blue ocean.
The intrusion had broken her concentration. She granted Coronade access to her brain comms to discover what it wanted. It soon became obvious that it wasn't anything to do with the probe or the Magellanic Cloud.
“You are needed in the Congress Hall immediately,” said Coronade.
She sighed inwardly. “Has one of the delegations refused to attend?” She'd been expecting something along those lines.
“Not that. I have just heard that Delegate Palianche has been found dead.”
A jolt of alarm pounded through her. “What? How?”
“The reports I have say he suffered massive cranial damage from a blow dealt by an energy-weapon.”
“Is he being treated?”
“Brain trauma from his injuries are too extreme; there is no possibility of him being resuscitated.”
“Damn.” She'd wargamed every scenario she could imagine, but she hadn't seen that coming. “Can you show me?”
Images streamed into her mind: the congress chamber just as she'd arranged it. Palianche sat in his chair, flanked by the flags of his planet. He was slumped forwards onto the triangular table, arms outstretched. The top of his green head had been sliced clean off and his purple-red brain severed in two with it. A pool of viscous blood spilled onto the table from his ruined cranium.
“By the stars!”
“I'm sorry,” said Coronade. “I know such scenes can be upsetting for an organic life-form.”
“Yeah,” said Magdi. “No kidding. When was he killed? I mean, who killed him?”
“Unknown. As you will be aware, my ganglia are not woven through the structure of diplomatic buildings such as Suri's Congress Hall. The privacy of conversations taking place there has to be absolute. These images have been relayed to me by the Gogoni delegation.”
They called the planetary intelligences they'd constructed Minds, but in truth it was an inadequate metaphor. Just as it was wrong to think of Coronade as vital to the Nexus, there was no single controlling point in Coronade's consciousness, no easily-identifiable brain. Minds were distributed, woven throughout the structures of the planet they became synonymous with. Coronade could not be killed with one well-placed blow as Palianche had been. It meant that the Mind was always there, always aware of what was taking place, always available. Except, not all areas were open to it: citizens had their privacy if they wanted it, and certain public areas were also outside its extent. The Congress Hall was one such place.
Which made it, Magdi thought, a very good place to commit an act of murder and get away with it.
“His advisors found him?” she asked.
“I was alerted to the situation by Pannax Ro. She entered the chamber to take up her seat and found him like that.”
“She found him?”
“Yes.”
“Already dead?”
“So she said.”
“You don't believe her.”
“I have no basis for a judgement. She could be lying; she could be telling the truth.”
“Did she enter alone?”
“Unknown.”
“How long had he been there?”
“Unknown.”
“The rest of his delegation must have some idea. When did Emchek and Sorabai last see him alive?”
“Again, I do not know. I have no close entanglement with the minds of the delegations; they prefer to keep their distance. The situation at the Congress Hall is unfolding, and I am blind to much that has taken place.”
“Damn,” she said again. It meant the end of the peace talks, clearly. Months of preparation and careful diplomacy ruined. They hadn't even started, and already she'd lost one of the delegates.
She came to a decision. She gulped back the last of her fruit juice and, in a whirlwind of activity, got herself ready to leave. She'd planned to take her time, go through her normal routines to get her mind into mesh, but there was no time for that now.
“I'll get to the Congress Hall. We need to find out who did this, and why. I take it the Marshals are on their way to take charge of the investigation?”
“I have not instructed them.”
That puzzled her. “Why?”
“There is no jurisdiction. The Marshals have no authority in the Congress Hall, just as they have no power over diplomatic staff or off-world delegates.”
“Then who does police the diplomatic population?” Strangely, it was a question that had never occurred
to her before.
“There is no such formal authority on Coronade. It has always been felt best not to place any shackle upon those taking part in political discussion.”
She grabbed the briefings she'd been reading, stepped out of the door, then stopped as she remembered another set of documents: field-reports from Sejerne printed with actual ink and paper. She returned to pluck them from the bedside table where she'd left them the night before, marked up with her notations and questions.
To Coronade she said, “That seems ridiculously naive. Delegates aren't saints. Neither are conciliators, come to that. You're saying an envoy could commit rape or murder and not be breaking any law? You're saying I could?”
“The situation has been left flexible. There are, however, precedents. One hundred years ago, an entire delegation from Vo Nor was killed when a low-orbit shuttle malfunctioned upon its approach to Polar City Four. It eventually turned out that both craft and ground-based control systems had been carefully sabotaged over a long period of time by a rival delegation in an attempt to acquire an advantage in the talks.”
“Did it work?”
“All members of the Vo Nor delegation were killed. The talks eventually resumed.”
“Isn't Vo Nor one of the most highly-militarized planets in the Nexus?”
“It's fair to say there remain unresolved tensions in that particular situation.”
It was a three-minute walk from her quarters to the Congress Hall. She hurried directly there, glad there were no crowds to get in her way so early in the morning. “And you worked out who'd sabotaged the ship, committed the murders?”
“I helped, but it was the Conciliator who carried out the investigation. Which is very largely why I am contacting you now.”
That pulled her up. She stopped while she considered Coronade's words. She caught sight of herself reflected in the glass of a museum building, saw the clear look of puzzlement on her own features.
“You want me to investigate this?”
“You are the obvious candidate. You have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the issues involved and your heightened empathic senses might be of help. At the same time, you are not a suspect.”
