The lead light windows glowed red with sunset. That meant the end of heliostat transmissions through the beam flash units. Expensive flares would be needed from now on, and flare requisitions would show up on network accounts. There could be no more work, yet she was so close. If the moon was near full, though, the beam flash could still be used without being powered by flares, although at a slower data rate. She checked the almanac. The moon was a day off full! Lemorel retired to the Highliber's private toilet, taking the almanac with her. The moon would be sufficiently high for transmissions in another half hour.
The room was dark enough for her to need lamplight as she returned to the console. Today had been John Glasken's graduation. His friends were taking him on a secret revel to celebrate. Lemorel felt a pang of loneliness, she wanted to be with him so very much. This was the very day that she should have been with him! She stared at the white and black keys.." keys of power! Keys to order the Libris Black Runners to find a student named John Glasken. With a shivery thrill of excitement she invoked the RUNNERS function.
/ LOCATION' JOHN GLASKEN/STUDENT OF CHEMISTRIC/UNIVERSITY
OF ROCHESTER REPORT STATUS ONLY / They would probably find him within the hour; then she would have them deliver a sealed envelope with a little note of greetings. She wriggled with delight to imagine his surprise.
She continued to examine the Highliber's private library by lamplight while she waited. There were records of everything that happened on both the Alliance and Confederation networks, right down to details of rosters for each tower. The rosters for the eastern-line towers, the Griffith and the Darlington towers showed nothing out of the ordinary over the past month. She went back two months and suddenly the Wirrinya tower stood out. Eight of the eighteen communicators there had arrived over a two-week period. The roster also showed that six of the new arrivals monopolized the day shift, while both the dusk and dark shift always had one of the new communicators on duty!
Infiltration! Nobody had ever dreamed that a tower might be systematically infiltrated by qualified relays and receptors. A tower could never secretly fall to direct attack; there was a set of alarm codes that every relay had memorized, and these took only seconds to transmit. Within a day a relief squad of cavalry would be on its way from the nearest fortified town.
The Guild of Relays was huge. Each of the dozens of major towers and hundreds of minor ones had an average of ten relays, and for every active relay there was another involved in teaching, research, or administration. Relays did more than transmit messages at the tops of towers; they were also librarians, teachers, medicians, and merchants, they were pillars of local communities and the point of contact with the outside world. In other societies their role might have been filled by priests.
All shifts at Wirrinya were covered by the new communicators, and they had total control of day shift. Day shift carded most traffic, and relays liked to avoid it if possible. It was ideal for a group that wanted to take over and exclude all others. There were also observers on the other two shifts, just in case something important came through--but how could they read the codes? Repeater towers did not have code books. A caiculor could break codes. Did Wirrinya have a calculor too?
Someone at the Darlington tower was carefully checking all data that was being sent from Canowindra, and was smuggling encoded corrections back past Wirdnya, then on to Rochester. Was he an ally? If so, why did he not denounce Wirrinya outfight instead of just correcting their data? Wirrinya was in the Forbes prefectory, an independent, unaligned state. Any alert to arrest the conspirators in the tower would have to come over the beam flash line, and at least one of them was always on duty. They would have time to escape.." but surely exposing the plot was more important than catching the plotters.
The reciprocating clock's weighted beams rotated back and forth with a clack-click, clack-click. In fifteen minutes transmission by lunar light would be possible. Lemorel opened the Highliber's drinks cabinet and poured out a shot of apple brandy. Zarvora never drank alcohol; the jars were only for her guests.
What was there to do? Telling the Highliber anything that she had learned would also involve telling her how she had learned it. That alone would have Lemorel chained to a wall and stating down the barrels of two dozen muskets in less time than it took a beam flash message to reach Canowindra. The proper channels would take months.." but she could also do nothing. Perhaps that was best. She was only a small cog in a vast machine, and a cog in the wrong place, too. She sipped at the sharp, sweet brandy and pondered the moonlight on the roofs of Libris. Finally she made up her mind to wait for the message from the Black Runners about the location of her beloved Johnny, then run to his side and forget the mess.
Almost on cue, a mechanical bellbird raised a wing and whistled, then the battery of silver hens began pecking at the paper tape. It was a plain text message from the Libris Black Runners. Lemorel jumped from her chair, her heart pounding with joy:
/ SUBJECT: JOHN GLASKEN, UNIVERSITY STUDENT
LOCATION: A BACK ROOM IN THE TOAD AND TANKARD, ALEHOUSE.
COMPANIONS): SERVING WENCH NAMED JOAN JIGLESSAR, ALSO KNOWN
AS JIGGLE.
ACTIVITY: FORNICATION--SPECIFICALLY, HE HAD HER BENT OVER A TABLE AND HAD MOUNTED HER IN A POSITION REFERRED TO IN THE
EROTIC AREN COMPENDIUM AS THE BULL AND COW.
UNUSUAL OR SUSPICIOUS ACTIONS: WHILE FORNICATING, GLASKEN WAS
SEEN TO DRINK FROM A JAR OF BLACK ALE, AND HEARD TO BELLOW
LIKE A BULL. By now Lemorel's hands were shaking so much that she could not hold the tape steady. She rushed to the window and stared out at the lights of Rochester, eyes blazing with rage and mortification. So that was what he was doing for his innocent revel--it probably explained a lot of his late-night study too! She would have the Black Runners kill him that very night--but no, that would undoubtedly lead back to her.
She closed her eyes and leaned against the window frame, burning with shame. While she had been longing to just hold his hand, that toad had been grasping handfuls of breast and buttock. A minute passed, and Lemorel grew curiously numb. It was as if everything soft had been burned away inside her. She returned to the tape machine, picked up the tape and read on.
ACTIVITIES SUBSEQUENT TO BEING LOCATED: AFTER COMPLETING THE
ACT OF FORNICATION BUT WITHOUT RE-BUCKLING HIS CODPIECE HE
RETURNED TO THE TAPROOM AND PISSED INTO THE FIRE. THIS
CAUSED COMPLAINTS FROM OTHER PATRONS. WHEN INSTRUCTED TO
"PISS OFF" BY THE VINTNER, GLASKEN AND TWO FRIENDS SET UPON HIM WITH THEIR SWAGGER STICKS. THE CONSTABLE'S RUNNERS
WERE CALLED, AND GLASKEN AND HIS FRIENDS TRIED TO LEAVE
THROUGH THE BACK DOOR. THIS DOOR WAS FOUND TO BE BOLTED-BY JOAN
JIGLESSAR, WHO WAS STILL GETTING DRESSED. ALL THREE
STUDENTS WERE ARRESTED.
CURRENT LOCATION: GLASKEN IS ASLEEP IN CELL 15, CONSTABLE'S
WATCH HOUSE CHARGED WITH RIOTOUS BEHAVIOR, ASSAULT, THEFT
OF A JAR OF BRANDY, INDECENT EXPOSURE, AND URINATING IN A
PLACE LICENSED FOR THE SALE AND CONSUMPTION OF FOOD AND
DRINK
CONTINUE SURVEILLANCE? / Lemorel pondered for a moment, then typed DISCONTINUE. Someone must have enjoyed compiling that report, she thought. She pondered Glasken's earlier court appearances. Doubtless the other times that he had asked her for bail and character references had not been due to mistaken identity while he rescued innocent citizens from shadow boys Blind rage welled up within Lemorel again.
"Filthy, fornicating, drunken sot," she muttered to the shelves of mechanical animals as her carefully cultivated facade of gentle and well-spoken sweetness crumbled. "Lies! I'll give him lies!"
A stooge. She was the perfect character witness to get him out of the sort of trouble that he was in now. She stamped about the study, seething with impotent rage. She could repay Glasken by leaving him to the mercy of the magistrate this time, but that was not good enough. She wanted to hit
someone now! Her eyes fixed on the pages of tables for the Wirrinya repeater.
"A tower full of Glaskens," she said slowly. I'll get them! I'll make them squeal like pigs."
Eight relays conspiring together, living a lie for five weeks and trusting their lives to each other: violate that trust, or even call it into question, and one might touch off a heated argument at the very least. Relay towers were not especially private places, and a fight would quickly be noticed by the tower marshal.
Lemorel jabbed at the Calculor's keyboard, doing a search of bank tally registers held in Rochester. None of the Wirrinya relays held one. She shrugged, composed a fictitious tally number, credited seven hundred gold royals against it, then sent it to the output buffer with the name of the Wirrinya day-shift supervisor appended. After checking the Highliber's record of the Wirrinya roster again, Lemorel encoded the names of the dusk- and dark-shift relay conspirators and appended TERMINATE. The word TERMINATE had no function attached to it in the Highliber's manual of commands, but it carried alarming implications.
What else would foster fear, suspicion, and doubt at Wirfinya? The truth was probably no more their ally than it was Glasken's, so she would give them a dose SEAN McMULLEN of it. She accessed a random sample of Southmoor military-movement records from the Canowindra terminus, records that had been corrected then smuggled past Wirdnya by whoever was running the Darlington calculor. She instructed the Calculor to encode them in a standard encryption, then transmit them to
" "Canowindra. That was enough for the eyes at Wirrinya--but there was still the matter of getting it all past Darlington. Thirty minutes passed, thirty minutes of fuming about a drunken chemistric graduate in the Constable's Watchhouse. In the morning he would send her a message that he had been unjustly arrested by the Constable's Runners while defending a little old lady against a pack of shadow boys but Lemorel would ignore him. The magistrate would throw the book at him after all his earlier escapes from justice, and he would spend at least a week sampling rotten fruit, eggs, and fish in the public stocks.
Then it would be her turn. What to do with him, to him, about him? How to make him pay? She would be waiting when he was released from the public stocks, she would give him such a beating that he would never again dare to make a Dragon Librarian his stooge.
Lemorel forced her thoughts away from Glasken. Eyes at the Darlington tower would be reading her message by now. Was it causing a fuss, she wondered Appended to some dummy data had been a note for the calculor operator there:
/ TO THE GENIUS IN DARLINGTON REPEATER, GREETINGS. NO
THANKS TO YOU I NOW KNOW ABOUT THE SECURITY VIOLATION
AT WlRRINYA. YOU WILL ALSO KNOW THAT THEIR MASTERS MUST
BE GETTING THEIR ORDERS TO THEM VIA SOME SECURE CODE.
WHAT IS THAT CODE? GEL DIVA /
Over one hundred miles down the beam flash line, Nikalan Vittasner smiled and shook his head.
"Geldiva, Goddess of the Brewarrina Pantheists," he said to himself. "Geldiva, Weaver of Illusions. Clever girl."
Quickly but carefully he composed a reply.
/ WHY SHOULD I TELL YOU? SIVA, DESTROYER OF ILLUSIONS
AND GOD OF THE ANCIENT HINDUS
Within half an hour he had his answer.
/ SIVA, I DEDUCE THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE A MASTER CODE
BOOK IN YOUR RELAY TOWER. IF YOU HAD THAT CODE BOOK THEN YOU WOULD KNOW WHICH CODE THEY ARE USING TO COMMUNI
CATE WITH THEIR MASTER. IF YOU HAD THAT CODE THEN YOU
WOULD HAVE SENT THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO WlRRINYA BY NOW. GEL DIVA / Nikalan nearly burst out laughing at the message, a combination of unaltered military data that should have been altered, with a tally for a fortune in gold royals against the name of the infiltrator who was day-shift supervisor. The tally was for a Rochester bank.
He composed another reply.
/ MESSAGE UNDERSTOOD AND ACCEPTED, GEL DIVA I DO NOT
HAVE THE CODE, BUT I HAVE A SAMPLE MESSAGE THAT HAS BEEN
ENCRYPTED IN IT. THE SAMPLE FOLLOWS, ALONG WITH MY ATTEMPTS
SO FAR AT BREAK/NG THE ENCRYPTION. GOOD LUCK. IF
YOU CAN BREAK IT, THEN WHEN YOU SEND THE MESSAGE TO THE
TERMINUS, FLAG IT GEL DIVA AND I SHALL PASS IT ON WITHOUT
DELAY. IN THANKS, SIVA. / Rochester had a register of all master codes, but this code was not among them. It would take months for an individual to break, not the Calculor. Lemorel consulted the manual and found a command named CODE BREAKER She typed in the sample, along with the work that Siva's calculor had done. His had perhaps a tenth of the power of the Highliber's machine, that was obvious. The task would take only a few hours, as Siva had given her a head start.
What to do about Glasken, she wondered as she sent the message off to be decoded. Beating was a crude, common vengeance, in fact it would be a public humiliation for her as well. She had been his dupe, and she did not want the world to know it. As she looked down at the keyboard she thought of the Libris Black Runners. Fear? Lemorel had the power of the Highliber now. Apart from having to spend the night in the watch house Glasken bad not a care in the world, the world was his for the taking.." but that could be changed.
Another message, this time to have a search made of Glasken's room at the residential college. They would probably find little more than filthy sketches and stolen brandy jars, yet he would see that a search had been made. There was one sign of Libris that everyone in Rochester knew, the red stamp of a book closed over a long dagger. That stamp meant that you had offended, and that you had been given an unspecified number of days to make amends. Lemorel looked through the manual and found the command to use the stamp. It could be used as a genuine option to warn of impending assassination, or merely to frighten. She typed, then sent off the command. The Calculor was slow to respond, due to the load of the decoding task.
While the Black Runners were ransacking Glasken's room and putting the red stamp of fear on his pillow, Lemorel was reclining in the Highliber's reading chair and drinking apple brandy. Her thoughts returned to the Wirrinya problem, and of her own precarious position. Records would have been kept of her work on the Calculor, and there was no other master user other than the Highliber-but there was! The one who called himself Siva at the Darlington tower. Some of Lemorel's own early work had proved that the Libris Calculor could be operated over the beam flash network, and the Highliber had since used that very facility when touring the provinces. It might be possible to make it look as if Siva had somehow taken control of the Libris machine.
It was four in the morning before the Calculor had the code broken, and Lemorel was jolted awake by a mechanical owl striking a bell. Using the Wirrinya conspirators' code she assembled a message that read like a mistake by their own masters, words meant for their leader's eyes only but sent when a minion was on duty. Finally she typed the encrypted message into the output buffer, with GEL DIVA PLEASE REMOVE THIS' appended in plain text. She struck the SEND key firmly.
Lemorel stretched and looked up. Stars were visible through the windows. This was the message that would shatter the conspiracy at the Wirrinya relay tower, but she was not the Highliber. As much as the Highliber might approve of Lemorel averting a costly war, her gratitude would probably not extend to forgiving a blatantly illegal use of her Calculor. Even if she escaped the firing squad, she would have her career in Libris brought to an untimely end.
For the next hour Lemorel worked her way through the internal records of the Calculor, changing housekeeping entries so that tasks originating in the Highliber's study seemed to match messages sent from Darlington. Finally she cleaned up the crumbs and washed the glass she had used, covering her tracks so well that the Highliber's lackey would not suspect a thing. As she finished, the mechanical hens began to peck out a brief message from the Black Runners:
/ TASK: SEARCH OF COLLEGE ROOM OF JOHN GLASKEN, WITH STAMP OF
FEAR TO BE LEFT ON HIS PILLOW AS A WARNING
CONTENTS
OF NOTE: ONE FLINTLOCK
PISTOL, REPORTED IN THE CONSTABLE'S
REGISTER OF FIREARMS AS HAVING BEEN STOLEN FROM THE
MASTER OF THE ROARING BOAR (ALEHOUSE) DURING EQUINOX FESTIVAL
* 2 GOLD ROYALS 19 SILVER ROYALS ONE DEACON'S PLEDGE
STAMP SET AT 14 APRIL 1696 GW* ONE BAR OF SEALING WAX 11
PROPHYLACTIC DEVICES, NEWLY WASHED, OILED AND LAID OUT TO
DRY A SKETCH OF LIBRARIAN CLASS DRAGON BLUE LEMOREL MILDER ELLEN (NUDE)
SIGNED WITH HIS NAME F/VE MARKED CARD
DECKS ONE PAIR OF LOADED DICE 87 SHEETS OF DOGGEREL VERSE
LOVE POEMS DEDICATED TO 37 DIFFERENT GIRLS 327 LOVE LETTERS
FROM 52 GIRLS / Lemorel fought down a wave of nausea, then ripped the tape off the mechanism. Her whole wonderful romance had been a shabby trick. He had a stamp to reseal that ac curse box of condoms every time that he wanted to impress a prospective conquest with his virtue and common sense. How many had pre ceded---and followed--her along that path to his bed? She returned to the keyboard and composed a message.
/ INSTRUCTIONS RELATING TO JOHN GLASKEN, STUDENT
CONFISCATE HIS PISTOL, MONEY, CLOTHING, DEGREE, THE DEACON'S
STAMP AND EVERYTHING ELSE NOT OF IMMEDIATE USE TO HIM AS
A STUDENT
BURN ALL SKETCHES, POETRY, AND LETTERS, AND BURN THE LIST OF
WHAT WAS FOUND IN HIS ROOM
CUT THE TIP OFF EACH OF PROPI-ILACTIC DEVICES I Lemorel disengaged the Highliber's keyboard as the sky brightened outside, then left the study and sat on a bench in the corridor outside. She tried to doze, but thoughts of Glasken intruded. Was Joan Jiglessar a new sweetheart or some casual dalliance? What did she have that Lemorel did not? There might have almost have been two Glaskens: one wise, sensible, and honest, the other with a taste for drink, brawling, and the most gross and tasteless amorous frolics imaginable. Presently the sheer exhaustion of the night claimed her. She fell asleep sitting upright, her head slumped to one side and her hands folded in her lap. "Superlative actor," she muttered in her sleep, "and all love is acting." When the Highliber's lackey arrived for the day's work he found Lemorel waiting patiently outside his door. He assumed that some mixup by the guards had allowed her through, and quickly explained that the Highliber was away.
Souls in the Great Machine Page 16
