Archform Beauty

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Munich, 1941

  Torches blaze around the rear of the hall, lighting the red, black, and white banners topped with bronze standards.

  "Wie zuerst ich dich fund

  Als feurige Gluth,

  Wie dann einst du mir schwandest

  Als schweifende Lohe:

  Wie ich dich band,

  Bonn' ich dich heut'!"

  The massed voices blend into an echo that reverberates up into the darkness of the Kongressaal. The outspread arms of the copper eagle stretch above the hooked cross and the brass bowl where red flames lick at the gathering darkness.

  The lower notes echo from the pipe organ, the tones resonating through the vast hall under the Deutsches Museum, rippling the crimson banners that seem to drip blood upon the black-clad honor guard below.

  "… Wie ich dich band,

  Bann' ich dich heut'!."

  As the music fades, indrawn breaths punctuate the silence of the dark. Presently, the words begin, almost as if a continuation of the Wagnerian resonances.

  "… a heritage beyond price, an honor beyond honor… those who gave their souls for the freedom and future of our people and for the eternal greatness of the Greater German Reich. Germany, sieg heil!"

  "Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!!!"

  The refrain echoes like thunder into the upper reaches of the Kongressaal, shaking the Deutsches Museum from beneath, shaking the ground around, and rippling into the darkness far beyond Munich.

  Chapter 5

  Parsfal

  I was buried in the southwest corner of the lowest level of the university library. My eyes burned as I flicked past image after image in the reader, hurrying through decades of information quickly, trying to locate old photos and stories not in the link archives—or even fragments of stories that could be twisted as needed. I already had some possibles that I'd scanned into my office archives, two about Walter Cheesman, one about Moffatt, and a couple about territorial Governor John Evans, and some from later governors of the former state of Colorado. I got tied up with some articles about a political organizer named Robert E. Lee, who was sometimes called "the general,” but who wasn't one. That was the trouble with liking your work. Besides being single, that is. I had to fight to stay on the subject at hand. NetPrime wasn't paying me for psychspinning, or straight historical research, but for usable slants for PrimeNews.

  Parsfal! Where are you?

  I winced at the volume on the link. Bimstein always overboosted. In an earlier age, he would have yelled, like Yeats's rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, except that Yeats never envisioned his beast yelling as the center fell apart. And Bimstein wouldn't have understood a gong-tormented sea, or even a wine dark one. He would have made some caustic remark and told me to get back to work.

  Where I said I'd be—in the old university library. You wanted background on the southern water diversion.

  Why did you have to go there?

  Because the old newspaper stories were microfilmed or fiched or whatever, and it would have cost too much to convert them to electronic storage. So no one did.

  What will that give us?

  The same as always—the impression that we look into things much deeper. That we, above all other newsies, understand the depth of the stories we cover, and provide a beauty of coverage that no others can emulate. I paused. While providing color and other titillations from those safely dead and beyond the shelter of the libel laws.

  I could sense Bimstein's snort over the link. Don't be too long. Kerras says he's going to need your touch on something else. It must be big. He won't say what.

  Kerras never said what he was working on, not unless Kountze landed all over him. And whatever he was working on was big, whether it was a three-cred miscredit in the local housing assistance office or a rash of detentions of invisibles or a massive kickback from the Martian Republic to MMSystems for leaking the design of the latest asteroid tug's debris screens. It hadn't been called a kickback, of course. The Republic had just paid what it called an early delivery fee for some standard power modules. With Kerras, the current story was always big, and he was always upset if he didn't get the big ones, like the PDF asteroid stories that Kountze had given Brianne deVeau two years ago, after the Belters had "miscalculated" and sent all sorts of rock heading earthward. Water asteroids were easy to destroy or divert, compared to mining debris, and Kerras had wanted that one, but Kerras hated all Belters, and didn't care that much more for the Martian Republic.

  Parsfal?

  Just finishing up. Be back in less than an hour.

  Bimstein didn't answer, and I just got his simmie. So I broke off even before the simmie could offer to take a message.

  The regional water diversion was coming up before the NorAm Senate, and the debate would be heated because of the continuing drought, and the low flows in both the Rio Grande and the Colorado. Phenix had put population caps in place, and wanted Denv to do the same—or send more water south. That was already getting big play in the Denv District Coordinator's election, and I wanted some deep background quotes, historical quotes, or statements that sounded real and that no one could dispute. Then, who was going to dispute pre-Collapse quotes, anyway? Kerras needed stuff that would show the issue was more than words, that it went back a long time.

  What I was doing would take more work once I got back to the office, because I'd have to refine the personae that resembled the historical figures, and then spend an extra hour—or more—getting the details right. But it worked. The segments for which I'd done the research and creative re-creations had the highest ratings of any local news provider. They always did.

  I shut down the reader, and closed my portable scanner, then walked over to the records custodian—a permie who'd been watching me for almost two hours, since there was no one else down in the archives. I extended the case that held the old records. "Thank you.”

  "Glad to be of service, ser.” His face wasn't quite blank, but he wasn't smiling, either.

  With a nod at the poor man, even if he had deserved permanent nanite reprogramming, and was bound to tell the truth at all times, I took the ancient circular steel stairs that must have been two hundred years old and hurried up to the main level and then out into an overcast late March day that was as cold as early February, without the snow, a day that all the instruments would agree was a dark cold day, even if it weren't in January.

  I'd debated calling an electrocab, but Bimstein wouldn't have allowed it as an expense, and I didn't want to eat the fare. Instead, I walked across the gardens east of the library and then south along the ancient boulevard, hurrying most of the way, until I reached the local shuttle station. There were a good fifteen people waiting already, and that meant a shuttle was likely to be arriving soon. I could have linked and called up a schedule, but what good would that have done? The shuttle wouldn't arrive any sooner.

  Most of those on the platform were students. They were the ones in multicolored singlesuits, without jackets, or with sleeveless vests, or, occasionally, with a jacket, but one left open. They clustered mostly in groups, looking as though they didn't want to be there, as if taking a shuttle were somehow beneath them. Then there were the junior faculty types, looking not all that much older than the older students, but then with nanomeds, no one looked much older than grad students, except in the eyes, until the last decade of life, when even nanomeds didn't help. The faculty types wore either solid-colored singlesuits with jackets over them, or tunics and trousers and jackets.

  I usually wore a singlesuit with a jacket over it, but that was more for convenience, with the moving around that could come at any time in digging up stuff for NetPrime. The tunic, trousers, and jacket were what I preferred, but I never got to wear them enough.

  Once on the shuttle, I listened. It was useful and sometimes even interesting.

  "… sometimes… rather be an invisible…”

  "… nah… they get caught…”

  "… Dagmar… got accepted by A-S
quare for pilot training…”

  "… wouldn't catch me driving a steel closet through the Belt…”

  "… lots of creds…”

  "… see those meteors last night…”

  "… ice chunks… sloppy mining…”

  "… claim that Elymai and Aristo are clones… link-programmed to sing…”

  "… eyes don't look that way…”

  "… cleanup programming take care of that…”

  "… think about that filch McCall?"

  "… did it, if you ask me…”

  I got off at the OldTech station on the low ridge that split the true filch part of southside from the part where the less affluent filch and high sariman types lived. I couldn't see that much difference, especially not compared to my tiny quarters. At least I had a stand-alone house in the small historic district, even if the walls did date back more than three centuries and the covenants required that I not change the exterior. It was the only thing I'd gotten from my grandmother. Worth about half a small filch mansion, but you couldn't buy half of one, and I couldn't afford the other half. Damned if I would live in eastside or east southside with the sariman types, either. I supposed that made me a snob of sorts.

  The OldTech station wasn't much more than an antique brick platform, with a slate tile roof and nano-screens to break the wind. Only two of us got off. The other was a woman in the singlesuit of a Comm-Inspector. I just hoped she wasn't headed for NetPrime, but she walked eastward. Could be headed for either NorNet or one of the indies.

  The wind had turned warm by the time I left the station, a spring chinook that appeared from nowhere and had me opening my jacket before I'd walked a hundred meters. Another two hundred brought me to NetPrime—a low pale green marble structure with clean lines that rose out of grass that was green even under the snow in full winter.

  The building was nestled into the ridge, with four levels below ground, and three above, meeting the environmental requirements for non-obtrusiveness. The tech areas were mainly on the third and fourth levels down, but I was lucky. Issues research was semi-tech, and that put me on the first level down, and off the main garden courtyard. So I had natural light through the courtyard skylight. What I didn't have was much space. My cube was all of two and a half meters square, and most of it was taken up with shelves—filled either with datablocs or several dozen hard-copy, old-style books that had never been converted to electronic storage, not that I'd been able to find. One was a gem—Statistics from Colonial Times to the Present. Of course, the "present" had been almost two hundred years before, but the numbers were fascinating. More than three hundred million people just in the old USA section of NorAm? Unbelievable. I had barely passed through the archway that held the concealed security scanners when my link buzzed.

  Parsfal? You back yet? Kerras came across the links as thin and whiny, for all that his voice was mellifluous in person and over the net. Mellifluous—beautiful word, even if I did have to keep it for myself.

  Just heading down to my place. Got a couple of sweet hist-slots for the diversion piece. You'll love them. I might. How long? How much time do I have?

  NorNews doesn't run national for almost another hour. Need to jump them. Bimstein says you've got thirty, pushing it. You'll have something. Thanks.

  How good it would be was another question. I'd hoped for an hour, although I'd already linked the scans of the old photos I'd taken in the university library to the simmie-building program with commands to construct, but the tweaking required to make the images look real on a holo projection could take the hours I didn't have.

  Hurrying down the ramps, I barely avoided ramming into Eldiego—the RomNews anchor. His late-afternoon slot had a nine percent share of the total sectoral news market—close to phenomenal in a fragmented fullnet system where a two percent share for a single slot was considered respectable. Eldiego smiled, and I grinned back sheepishly. The man never seemed upset.

  Parsfal? Kerras, again.

  I'm working on it. That was almost accurate, even if I weren't quite to my cube.

  We've got some advance stuff on the McCall murder.

  Murder? Thought she was trapped in her electral when it caught fire and the nanite system expanded to contain the blaze. Programmed wrong.

  SlashBurnNews already out with a story that the regional advocate's office is going to indict. Claim that her husband reprogrammed the system against her electral. So we're behind. Need an angle. When you get the hist-slots done, need background on him, and on elaborate murders of the filch. You know…

  I know. Later… or you won't get these.

  He was gone, and I was brushing past Istancya as she left her cube and I slipped into mine, linking into the system to check how the constructor had rebuilt the simmie of the long-departed Colorado State Governor Evans. The problem was that there weren't many photos from when he'd been governor, and most were from his later years. So I needed some regression there, trimming and darkening the beard, adjusting the skin tone and tension… a lot to do in not that much time.

  Before I knew it, the link was buzzing again.

  Only got ten minutes for the hour-top slot.

  Done. Feeding to Metesta now. Bimstein got on my nerves, but there wasn't any help for it. He might lizard me endlessly, but he let me work my own way.

  Thanks. Try not to push it so close. Sometime this afternoon, in between, while you're looking into the McCall stuff… also need a few facts on the Legislature's funding for local education and something on the nanomed support level for immigrants.

  We try… but digging up the old stuff and verifying the new takes time.

  Again, he was gone, and I had to cut off his simmie. He was like that.

  Before I went to work on the McCall murder stuff, I wanted to see how much Metesta used in the final cut for Kerras's water piece. I called up the running cut for the news, watching on the screen, rather than having the holo field fill my cube. The first image and voiceover I got was an image of a starburst, followed by an intense point of light, and trails of light flying in all directions before fading.

  * * * *

  "That was the PDF successfully destroying an errant water asteroid headed toward Earth. We'll be back in a moment with the details…" I skipped ahead to Kerras's piece, which ran later in the national news roundup.

  "Here with Senator Cannon just outside the Senate chambers is Les Kerras.” The field cut to the tall senator with the deep blue eyes and striking white-blond hair. Cannon offered the viewers an engaging and warm smile, projecting a palpable warmth and concern.

  "Senator Cannon, you've opposed the Southern Diversion ever since you were first elected to the Continental Senate. Why?"

  "The Southern Diversion is nothing more than filch-food. Filch-food for the southwest. Eastslope needs its water. Formulators don't make water. Every liter that goes south raises the cost for the people of Deseret that I represent. It's that simple. Diversion means higher prices. Diversion's theft with fancy words.” A wider smile followed. "It's also theft from the people of Denv. Theft that could lead to population caps here.”

  * * * *

  I had to smile. Every sentence was short, and there were plenty of five-second cuts for the instanews types. No one was going to outsimplify Cannon. And he'd also placed himself in favor of protecting both the people of the NorAm capital and his own district. He didn't miss many angles.

  Kerras voiced over. "That was Senator Cannon, about water diversion. Diversion rights go back a long way. Back to the first territorial governors. Here's what they had to say.”

  The simmie of Governor John Evans was almost perfect, with the well-trimmed dark beard, the vest, and the wide lapels of the frock coat, and the deep resonant voice. "Besides the Denver Pacific Railroad, the Denver Union Water Company was what made Denver into the state capital and the only tolerable place in the western wilderness… Take away the water, and you would have nothing but the savages of Sand Creek.”

  Then came the simmi
e of Governor John Vanderhoof. "I stand on the principle that you shouldn't build dams that take water and provide nothing in return. Diversion is theft, nothing more.”

  * * * *

  I was pleased with the hard-eyed look that I'd managed to inject into that simmie. Of course, they hadn't quite said what I'd had them say, but it was close enough, and certainly accurate in an overall historic sense.

  * * * *

  Kerras's voice-over followed. "There you have it. For over three hundred years, the people of Denv have had to fight for their water. Senators Elden Cannon and Kristine Patroclas are carrying on that fight against the filch interests of the Southwest.”

  * * * *

  Kerras had provided the senator with coverage almost as good as a rezad, one of the new ones, for free, and I'd helped, as usual, even if I didn't care much for Cannon. Then, I didn't care much for politicians of any kind. Patroclas was a pleasant cipher, and that was why Kerras had used Cannon.

  I couldn't rest on self-satisfaction, though. I had to get back to digging up numbers and examples for Kerras that would fit the McCall case. After all, PrimeNews was "news with a difference,” the difference being the slight gloss we added with hist-slots and numbers, or with any other slant we could find, and it was my job to find the slant.

  After wandering out to the break room and getting a beaker of orange juice from the formulator—charged to my account, of course—I went back to my cube to start on the background to the McCall murder case.

  My first cut at statistics didn't do much good. As I'd suspected, while there were NorAm enumeration blocs that were categorized by income levels, the blocs were regular squares and didn't fit the actual Denv quadrants. Nor did the overall stats help much. Less than two percent of NorAm population was filch, but the filch weren't distributed equally. Most were in centers—probably ten percent of the Denv area population was filch—or in secluded locales where they had private retreats. Springs was about average, while places like Pueblo and Collins had nearly no filch. Durngo and Aspen were each nearly seventy percent filch, and had been for centuries, but two areas of less than a thousand people didn't affect the area percentages much.