3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  He was no poker player, though. "You look like the cat that ate the canary," the girl from Earth said. She was sitting across from him.

  "The what?" he said foolishly, not following the idiom. What was her name? He'd only heard it at the meeting last week. "You're Andrea Dubois, aren't you?"

  She smiled, pleased he remembered. She was a big pink blond girl and thus seemed strange to Stavros; most of New Thessaly's population was Hellenic, as slim and dark as he was. "How's this?" she said. "You look like someone sitting there waiting for the Academic Medal to go on your chest."

  "I think I did a good piece of work." He still didn't want to talk about it, but she was pretty, obviously bright or she wouldn't be here, and so he didn't want the conversation to end either. "You speak beautiful Basic—you sound like the instruction tapes I learned from."

  "Thanks." She smiled again. "I wish I could take more credit for it, but I just happen to come from Perth, and everyone in Australia talks this way. At home we call it English."

  "I'm jealous."

  "It's not as big an advantage as you think," Andrea said. "Because I use Basic all the time and never had to learn another language, I'll probably have more trouble than you in picking up alien languages."

  "Well, maybe," Stavros said dubiously.

  Without heat, they argued about it for a while until Andrea looked at her watch and said in some surprise, "Professor Fogelman is very late."

  "He makes a habit of it." Stavros chuckled. But when Fogelman did not show up after another ten minutes, he began to wonder himself.

  The door opened. But it was not Fogelman who came into the seminar room—it was one of the administrative aides from the anthropology department. The fellow looked shaken; his voice wobbled as he said, "May I have your attention, please?"

  The class quieted. He went on, "I'm extremely sorry to have to tell you that Professor Fogelman died last night. His body has just been found at his home."

  The seminar group exclaimed in shock and dismay. Stavros crossed himself. He had grown agnostic since coming to the university, but childhood habits still returned in times of stress. "What did he die of?" someone called.

  The aide looked unhappier yet. "Professor Fogelman appears to have been murdered, apparently in the course of a robbery. Police investigations are continuing."

  The second round of gasps and groans was louder and longer than the first. Stavros was too stunned even to join in. Fogelman had been too full of vigor—to say nothing of being too much a fixture on campus—to imagine him dead.

  Andrea apparently accepted the idea more quickly, but then, Stavros didn't think she'd done her undergrad work on Hyperion, so she'd seen Fogelman only once or twice. "What does this do to our enrollment in the seminar?" she asked.

  "Professor Richardson has agreed to take over the course," the aide said. Andrea looked relieved. Odds were the girl from Earth didn't know Richardson either, Stavros thought. Richardson specialized in physical anthropology, and thought the cultural half of the discipline a waste of time.

  "Get ready for fifteen weeks of potsherds and middens," Stavros whispered to Andrea.

  The aide left. The grad students trailed after him, still struggling to accept what they'd heard. "If I'd known he was going to get himself killed, I wouldn't have worked so hard," one said.

  "Nice pragmatic fellow," Andrea said, rolling her eyes.

  "We both know how he feels," Stavros said. "A lot of the time, I'd agree with him. Not now, though."

  "No?" Andrea gave him a curious look. "You are carrying something big there, aren't you?"

  Stavros hesitated. Sometimes professors ended up publishing work graduate students did. Sometimes other grad students pulled the same stunt. He sometimes thought anybody who wasn't a little paranoid had no business in grad school. But Andrea was right—he did have a blockbuster in his briefcase, and he felt he'd explode if he didn't show it to someone.

  "Do you really want to see it?" he said. "Let's go over to the Bistro. What they do to dolmades is a crying shame, but they're cheap and close."

  It was Andrea's turn to pause, but after a moment she laughed and said, "All right, you've got me curious. And what are dol-whatevers?"

  "Grape leaves stuffed with lamb and rice. They're an ancient dish; the recipe goes back to Greece, the Earth region the settlers from New Thessaly came from. The cooks at the Bistro don't season them right, though."

  "How long has New Thessaly been settled?" she asked.

  He shrugged. "A couple of thousand years. Why?"

  "Just that I'd be surprised if your people didn't use native spices in their cooking. Everybody does. For all you know, these dolmades may be more like the originals than the ones you're used to are."

  That almost made him angry, as if she had somehow maligned his home planet. A few seconds of reflection showed she was right, but that did not help much. "Come on," he said gruffly.

  Again, he didn't quite know how to take the appreciative noises she made over the Bistro's dolmades. After a couple of glasses of red wine, he worried less. He fiddled with his briefcase. "Are you ready yet?" he asked.

  "Eager, eager, eager," she teased, but good-naturedly. "Yes, show me your great mystery, now that I'm not distracted by starvation."

  He got out the hard copy of his paper, and ordered baklava—not even he could fault the way the Bistro made baklava. Andrea paid him the highest compliment of all: she left hers untouched while she read.

  She looked up after a couple of pages. "You're sure you're not exaggerating this?"

  "It's all straight from the report. If anything, summarizing it cuts the impact because so much of the documentation and supporting detail boils away."

  She gave an absent nod; she was reading again. When she was done, she knocked back the wine in her glass with a single gulp. "You weren't kidding," she said quietly. "What are you going to do now?"

  He shook his head. "I just don't know. I was going to ask Fogelman, but now—what a mess this is."

  He felt the inadequacy of the words, but Andrea understood what he meant. "If I were you, I'd be careful about showing this to a lot of people, at least ones you don't know you can trust."

  "Don't be silly," Stavros started to say. He stopped. Knowing something important could be dangerous; New Thessaly's politics had proved that more than once. He touched her hand. "I'm not sorry you saw it."

  "Good."

  * * *

  "Unfortunate the professor had to go downstairs at such an inopportune time," Paulina Koch remarked.

  "Yes, very," Hovannis said. "Especially for him."

  "No danger of any of that being traced to us?"

  Hovannis snorted. "Not a chance. The deal went through an intermediary; our friend doesn't have any idea who he was working for. He didn't even know exactly what he was supposed to do—just to scramble the computer system was all the instructions he ever got. They may catch him; Hyperion has a fair constabulary. It won't do them any good."

  "All right. That suffices, I suppose; you've already told me more than I ought to know."

  "I apologize for the need," Hovannis said. The External Affairs Director left. Paulina Koch was very good at putting data in compartments. That was one reason she made such an effective Survey Service Chairman. She began raising the walls around the compartment that held the Bilbeis IV affair. Eventually, she was sure, those walls would be too high to see over, and she would forget whatever was behind them.

  * * *

  If Stavros hadn't taken off his headphones to change disks on the music player, he never would have heard the knock on the door. He rushed to open it, expecting Andrea. She had been over once to see the Survey Service report on Bilbeis IV and again the next day just to talk. Stavros hoped for something more.

  "Hello!" he said enthusiastically—too enthusiastically, for standing in the hallway was not Andrea but a middle-aged oriental man whose face was vaguely familiar. Stavros's tongue stumbled over itself. "Er—yes?"

&n
bsp; "I'm Van Shui Pong," the man said, "from Hyperion Newsnet." He dug out a holo ID, but Stavros did not need it. He had seen the other man now and then on the screen.

  He stepped aside. "Come in, Mr. Pong. What could Hyperion Newsnet possibly want with me?" If anyone is less newsworthy than an anthropology grad student, he thought, whoever it is probably hasn't been born yet.

  "It's Mr. Van," the newsman said with the air of someone who had said it a great many times. He had a round, good-natured face, but his eyes were disconcertingly keen when he turned them on Stavros. "You were one of Professor Isaac Fogelman's students, weren't you?"

  The polite smile vanished from Stavros's face. "Yes. What of it?" Fogelman's murder hadn't even made the news.

  "Very possibly, nothing," Van admitted. "There was something in the constabulary report strange enough to make me do a little checking on my own, though."

  "What's that?" Stavros recovered his manners again. "Here, I'm sorry; sit down." He waved to the less disreputable of the two chairs in the dorm room.

  "Thank you. As I say, it may well be nothing. Still, I find it strange that a burglar would take the time to dump an entire computer memory. Suppressing the internal surveillance program is normal, but this went far beyond that. There's no doubt it was done deliberately; all of Fogelman's data cards were blanked, too." The newsman rose in sudden concern. "Are you all right, Mr. Monemvasios?"

  "Yes," Stavros said, but the word rang hollow in his own ears. He sat down himself, heavily. For the first time in his life, he knew what fear felt like.

  Van saw his agitation. "You know something of this, or can guess?" he asked eagerly.

  Stavros hesitated. Andrea's warning abruptly seemed much better advice than when she'd given it. Telling Van about the data card leaning against his computer could land him in genuine trouble that keeping quiet would avoid. But if Fogelman had been killed to make sure the report on Bilbeis IV never surfaced, then staying silent would only let the killers, whoever they were, get what they wanted. But, Stavros thought hopefully, most likely there was no connection between the burglary and the report but the long arm of coincidence. The Federacy was a big place; anything could happen, and probably would, somewhere.

  Stavros got up. "You'd better see this and tell me what you think." Van followed him to the computer console. He put in the data card. The screen lit. No going back now, he thought. He did not feel the way he imagined investigators were supposed to feel. He just felt nervous.

  Van Shui Pong went through the abstract of the report and got a couple of chapters into the body before he hit the pause button. When he looked over to Stavros, all the good humor had fallen from his features. "I take it you believe this document to be genuine," he said at last.

  "Of course it's genuine," Stavros said indignantly. "I told you, Professor Fogelman gave it to me. His fingerprints must still be on the data card, if you doubt that."

  "Not what I meant." Van held up a hand. "I am no anthropologist. Is this an authentic Survey Service document? The Service is an influential arm of the Federacy, and not forgiving to anyone with the gall to call it to account. I'd hate to have my career blighted for no good reason."

  "Here—look at these, then." Stavros secured the data card with the Bilbeis IV report and took out a couple of others.

  Van went through them as carefully as he had the first one, perhaps more so. "If it is a forgery, it's masterfully done," he conceded. "All right, I'm willing to spend the money to check one step further. To spend the newsnet's money, anyway—I'll have to go back to my office to use the accessor there. Do you want to come along?"

  Nothing could have held Stavros back. He grabbed a cap. "Let's go." Accessors to link in with computer systems planets away were uncommon and exorbitantly expensive. Of course the university had one, and the local government, and Fogelman had doubtless used the anthro department budget, not his own, to get up-to-date data cards for his seminar. The newsnet setup might well be the only other one on Hyperion.

  * * *

  Stavros had never been to the newsnet office before. It reminded him of the way the university got the week before exams: both had the same air of intense concentration and near panic aimed at getting something important done on time.

  "Better be good," somebody called as Van sat down in front of the accessor, "or they'll make you pay for it out of your own pocket."

  "Funny, Flavius, funny." The newsman punched buttons, paused in thought, punched again. He gave Stavros an apologetic glance. "I haven't used this gadget in a while."

  Despite the caveat, he did not take long to make the connection with the Survey Service archives. bilbeis iv, most recent survey report, he typed.

  survey service report—bilbeis iv—federacy standard year 1186 appeared at the top of the screen.

  Stavros paid no attention to the text below. "That's not right! That's the old report—the one that tells how what's-his-name got this whole mess started."

  Van typed, more recent reports?

  no more recent reports. The reply was immediate and uncompromising. Van looked at Stavros, who wanted to hide under his chair. He wondered where Fogelman had come by the data card, if not from the Survey Service. He could not imagine the professor manufacturing such a document or how he would go about it even if he wanted to. The video perfectly matched the first report's pictures and supported the text it accompanied.

  "It's crazy," Stavros said. Van Shui Pong did not answer. Grasping at straws, the grad student suggested, "Ask when the next report from Bilbeis IV is due. The place must be up for resurvey—fifteen hundred years is the standard interval for pretechnological worlds."

  Shrugging, Van typed in the question. next report expected with return of survey ship jêng ho, was the response. Van shrugged again. "Your data card has that much right, at any rate."

  "Well, when is the Jêng Ho coming back?" Stavros asked. Van entered that question, too. They both waited impatiently, hoping the reply would do something to clear up their confusion.

  The screen stayed blank for some time. "Must be going through a different data base," Van said. The words were barely out of his mouth when the answer came: survey ship jêng ho scheduled to return federacy standard year 2687:139.

  "What's the current FSY date?" Stavros asked. The Federacy Standard Year, based on Earth's, had 365 days of 86,400 seconds each. It gave thousands of planets, each with its own natural period, a common way to reckon time. Like Hyperion, though, most of them used local time for everything but Federacy elections and other matters of off world importance. Stavros hadn't worried about FSY dating in months.

  Van dealt with it more often; as a newsman, he used FSY datelines to see how recent stories set away from Hyperion were. But he did not have the FSY date at the tip of his tongue either. He fiddled with his watch, frowned, cleared it, tried again. "I knew I had to get this thing fixed," he muttered. "It says it's already FSY 2687:157."

  "That's crazy," Stavros agreed. "Ask somebody else."

  Van did, loudly. "It's 157," three people yelled back, one of them adding, "for another three hours, anyway."

  "But that makes no sense," Stavros said. "If the Jêng Ho was due back from Bilbeis IV eighteen days ago, the crew must have filed its report already. Why isn't it on-line for accessing?"

  "I'm beginning to think they did file," Van said, and he was not talking loudly at all now. "If the report you have is the real one, and it's missing from the Survey Service files, and your professor had all his data—to say nothing of himself—erased just after he pulled it out, what does that suggest to you?"

  Stavros thought about it. "Trouble."

  "To me, too." But Van sounded as though he enjoyed the prospect.

  V

  "You appear to have made a mistake, Roupen," Paulina Koch said.

  "So I do," Hovannis replied stolidly.

  "Is that all you have to say?" The Survey Service Chairman seldom let anger into her voice, but this was an exception. The first tape she'd just
played from Hovannis was of some muckraker's story from the Hyperion Newsnet. It quoted at length from the Bilbeis IV report Hovannis had been so sure he'd squelched and then went on to scream cover-up. The second tape worried her more. She had just gotten that one. The story on it was much like the one from Hyperion, but it came from Fezzan, a dozen light-years away.

  "What do you want me to do, jump off the top of the Survey Service tower?" Hovannis was finding that Paulina Koch no longer intimidated him as much as she once had. They were in the same starship now, even if it had sprung a leak. The thing to do was patch it, not argue. "I scrubbed the report, but I missed the notice of the Jêng Ho's return date. The snoop spotted it and drew the right conclusions, that's all."

  "I've been called into the Assembly for more questioning tomorrow," the Chairman said.

  "And?" Hovannis waited for her to tell him she was throwing him out the air lock. If she tried, he had no intention of going alone.

  "And I will deny everything, of course," she replied. "The initial report was bad enough. It would have cost us embarrassment, funding, and influence. Now we have suppressed evidence and involved ourselves in various other unsavory activities. If those are discovered, we stand to lose more than influence."

  Hovannis gave her an admiring glance. "The whole thing is a forgery, then?" She had balls if she thought she could bring that off.

  "From top to bottom. We have no record of any such report, so it could never have entered our files in the first place. Obviously, then, it must be a fabrication. How will the Assembly prove otherwise, from the computer records?"

  "No way, of course." The External Affairs Director had already corrected his blunder; the Jêng Ho was now due to arrive any time, at least in the Survey Service data bank. He amended, "That's just from the computer records, though. If they start summoning the Jêng Ho's crew, everything is out to lunch."

  Paulina Koch smiled a wintry smile. "Not necessarily. They will take a while to think of that, and we already have."

  "Yes, I see what you mean," Hovannis said. If and when he tackled that job, he planned to handle it so indirectly that no trace would ever lead back to him. He went on. "I just hope they don't decide to make another visit to Bilbeis IV and check things out firsthand."