The office reminded her of the advisor cubicles. What had been the name of that last officious ass? Pisquol. Somehow the sound of it seemed appropriate.
The desk here was larger, though, and the slate sat up at an angle, and the walls were brighter. But it still—
She blinked. The man behind the desk had asked her something but she had stopped listening at some point several seconds or minutes before. On the desk before him lay five thin square cases. Pictures, faded but obviously at one time very bright and colorful, lay beneath the yellowed plastic surfaces. He opened one and within she saw an old, old data disc.
I’m sorry,” she said, “would you repeat that?”
“I asked if you were aware of the restrictions on smuggling,” he said.
“Those aren’t mine.”
“Of course they’re not. They belong to someone who expects to take delivery from you.”
“No.”
“Then they are yours?”
“No. I don’t know where they came from.”
The man—he was thick-faced, pale skin, with a wide mouth that seemed capable of twisting into any emotion imaginable—sneered and shook his head.
“We can’t help you if you don’t tell the truth.”
He drummed his fingers. “Yes?”
“I am telling the truth. You can—you can prove it. I—”
“Yes?”
“I’m a cyberlink. You can do a scan—”
“That could take days. Explain to me why you’re valuable enough to spend days on the dubious effort of sifting through your codes to find something you may very well have simply erased.”
“I don’t—we don’t—”
It was all falling apart. She felt angry and scared as she had never felt before. Toler had done this, she knew, Toler had asked for a favor and she had turned him down and now he was ruining everything for her. She understood little enough about normal people, but the one thing that she doubted would ever make sense was the way they felt compelled to destroy what they could not affect. He could have walked away, found someone else who would have done what he wanted willingly, but no, his pride had been hurt, and for that a dream must die. And there was no way to tell this man here, he simply would not understand. He did not know Toler, very likely knew nothing about the vacuum in Lunase, the way it worked, the prices exacted for the smallest show of dignity. She could only sit here, humiliated and terrified, and try to wrap her hope around the growing center of despair and make it feel... less.
“You don’t what? Lie? I’ve heard all the stories about CAPs and I know better. You’re human, just like the rest of us.”
That shocked her. Half of it made her feel unexpectedly good, the casual way in which he accepted their basic commonality. The rest... she lied like everyone, broke the law like everyone, deceived like everyone.
He picked one of the cases up, turned it over. His face turned speculative.
“This is just music?”
“I told you—”
“Sure,” he waved her silent. Suddenly, he tapped keys on his console. A few seconds later he looked at the screen. “Hey,” he spoke to someone
Nemily could not see. “Got time to look at something? You’ll be interested.”
“Sure,” a new voice said, a male voice.
“You really don’t know who this is for?” the man asked.
“No. I don’t know anything about it. I told you, someone put it in my gear—”
“And you didn’t check it and Lunase security didn’t check it.”
“Lunase... we were leaving... they don’t care...”
The door opened behind her. She resisted the urge to look around, afraid to show her fear to anyone else. She listened to his tread as he came around the desk.
“Look at this, Mace.”
The newcomer leaned over the desk and stared down at the cases. Nemily looked up at his profile. His nose appeared slightly crooked and he wore a beard salted with white. His high forehead did not crease, though it gave the impression of concentration. He was tall, almost as tall as a Lunessa, but much broader, his frame substantial. He lifted one of the cases and held it carefully with his fingertips. He glanced at Nemily and she immediately looked away.
“Contents clean?” he asked, his voice much quieter than she expected.
“Don’t know. She claims not to know who they’re for or where they come from.”
“Why show them to me?”
“You’re interested?”
“Maybe.” After a pause, he said, “Coltrane, Gershwin, Montgomery....”
“Mean anything to you?”
“Greatness.” He sighed. “Mind if I use the next room?”
“Go ahead. We’re not going anywhere.”
He scooped the cases up and left the room.
“What—will happen now?” she asked.
“That depends on what my friend finds on those discs.”
She did not trust herself to say anything more. In Lunase it would have been simple. Harassment came in definable shapes and to each there was an appropriate response. She did not know the shapes here. Not knowing, no response seemed best.
The door opened again and the tall man returned.
“As far as I can tell, just music,” he said. “I might find something
deeper if I had more time, but it doesn’t look like anything else has been added. They’re what they seem.”
“Well, that’s something anyway. Still, contraband—”
“Disappears all the time.”
Nemily risked another look. The two men regarded each other in unspoken negotiation. Finally, the official shrugged.
“Let’s talk, my friend,” he said and stood. He pointed a finger at Nemily. “You stay here. I’ll be back.”
They left the office together then. Nemily became aware of her breath, loud and ragged. She searched the walls for the eyes and ears she knew must be present, as they were everywhere in Lunase. She began to imagine life as a series of small rooms connected by tunnels. There had been no intervening space, no empty void through which the Colfax traveled. The freighter had been just a slightly bigger room containing slightly smaller rooms, the whole of which had shifted a few meters over a day or so to connect to another set of tunnels and a new set of rooms. She could map it, trace the paths, and felt certain she could find a way to fit it all inside an even larger though not inconceivably big room.
The door opened and the official returned to his chair behind the small desk. He worked busily at his console for a few minutes, his brow creasing. Finally he sat back and smiled at her, his attitude changed utterly
“So. Welcome to Aea. You’re a cyberlink, did you say?”
Four – AEA, 2118
“ARE YOU GOING TO THE PARTY, MACE?”
Helen’s voice echoed slightly in the greenhouse. It brought Mace unpleasantly out of a near-selfless reverie, the closest he ever came to the negation of conscious awareness bonsai reputedly enabled. In the three years since his return to Aea, he had become quite good at the art, though he had yet to achieve complete obliteration. He set the small pruning shears down and studied the plant before him. Celtis chinen-sis, a Chinese nettle-tree, its silvery trunk slanting gracefully in shakan style.
He cleared his throat; it always became dry when he worked out here, in spite of the moist air. His mouth tasted of bark, and his raw sinuses filled with a burnt odor.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he said.
“I think you should.”
Condensation tunneled the windows all around him, scattering the light and obscuring detail from outside, giving the impression of a wide, airy world beyond. Racks ran along one wall supporting his collection of philodendrons, ferns, ficus, rubber trees and the other bonsai.
“Why?” he asked.
“Do you want a list? Other people will be there.”
Mace lifted the long-neck can from the floor and liberally soaked the loam in the shallow tray
“Do you h
ave the last update on my traces?”
“Yes. Completed half an hour ago. Don’t change the subject. You need human contact as much as privacy.”
“I have plenty of human contact.”
“You do business with people. It’s not the same. You spend too much time alone.”
“By whose estimate?”
“Would you like me to cite the references? The standard psych vectors—”
“No.” He set the can down, cleaned his tools by the sink, switched on the lamps that hovered above each tree, then made his way to the exit. At the door he pressed a panel and the walls darkened till only a dusky level of outside light seeped through. “Besides, I’m not alone. I have you.”
“I’m hardly a substitute for the company of other people. You promised to start normalizing your life, Mace. This is a good step in that direction.”
He could not argue. He had promised, though he wondered sometimes how valid was an oath made to a machine. He had taken steps to comply. He had been to a few parties in the last couple of months, small affairs he had gone to with someone else who had been invited. This was the first one to which he had been the recipient of an invitation and his reticence enfolded him like a blanket.
“Give me the update, Helen.”
There was a moment’s pause—for Mace’s benefit, to let him know, subliminally, that the system was changing priorities—before Helen continued.
“Oxmire is still sequestered on the Titan platform. I have been unable to find an avenue into any data that might explain that. He is several months overdue for rotation. Cavery has been given a change-of-status on Midline.”
“To what?”
“Unknown. All I have is a C.O.S. notice.”
Odd, Mace thought, unless he was being moved into a secure position like Oxmire, removed from all outside access by a posting as site manager on Aea’s Titan project. Cavery, though, had been shunted here and there through Signatory Space over the last few years, filling inconsequential security postings wherever PolyCarb had an office. If not for his PolyCarb employment, one might think he was a vacuum dealer. Mace wondered, not for the first time, about how that word came to be used for contraband. Vacuum. Nothing. It did not exist, therefore.
The thought faded and he returned his attention to Cavery. He had been on Midline longest—six months.
“All right,” he said. “When you find out, let me know.”
“Of course.”
The third man he had kept track of after Mars—Hobs, the cyber-link—was dead. He had been on a small station, Cassidy when it had simply fallen apart. A year after Mace’s return to Aea, Cassidy’s structural integrity had dissolved over a few days, spilling its contents out into hard vacuum. The few ships that had gotten away later suffered the same fate. The cause was still unknown.
Similar things had happened to other people who had worked at the Hellas Planitia recovery site. He could not get to them, either because of inconvenient postings or because they were dead. He had fenced with the various bureaucracies and data systems since resigning from PolyCarb and had been effectively kept out. He had never been able to learn why Helen’s presence at the Martian site was denied by PolyCarb. Where had she died then? He had been forced to declare her deceased, but no corpse had ever been found, and all his attempts to extract information from PolyCarb about her location at time of death—like most of his attempts to discover details of her career with the company—had come to nothing. Paradox. She had died on Mars. But she had never been there.
He could always download the contents of her persona encoding and hire a cyberlink to run it. It was doable. Except he could not do it. The closest he had ever come to opening the encoding had been when he had programmed the domestic personality, the “Helen” that now conspired with his acquaintances to maneuver him out of his shell. That had not been a deep probe—barely enough to configure the major personality features, not enough to learn any secrets—and he had felt profoundly unsettled afterward, so much so that he waited nearly a month before running the new d.p. program.
No, what lay within the pendant would likely stay within it. He wanted to exhaust all other possibilities before resorting to such necromancy.
He had learned enough to know that Helen had been much more than she ever told him. Her security clearance, for one thing, had not been a mere one level above his, but five levels. That was as inner circle as one could get inside PolyCarb without actually sitting on the Board. Troubleshooter indeed, he thought wryly.
But it had become apparent that he would probably never find answers to the questions he wanted to ask and that he had to make the decisions he had delayed making for three years—to keep digging at it or let it go. Friends, pathologists, psychiatrists, even his domestic personality, Helen, had convinced him to come out of his shell more, stop obsessing, and try to get back to something like a normal life. For the most part, he agreed with them. He only wished his reluctance would obligingly diminish.
The door let him into a brief hallway where he removed the multi-pocketed vest and hung it in a narrow closet. He ascended the short flight of steps at the end of the passage.
His house was a series of chambers attached to a central shaft that rose twenty meters to a domed skylight. A stair wound, colubrine, between inner and outer walls, up to a parapet around the dome.
He stepped into the open space of the turret—
“Mace.”
—and glanced toward the skylight high above. “What aren’t you telling me about tonight’s party, Helen?”
The question was unfair. The system could not refuse a direct query and its context-response protocols kept it from dissimulating by actually proceeding to tell Mace everything it was not telling him. The result was a hint of hesitation while the system attempted—futilely—to find a way around Mace’s programming. He wondered how it experienced frustration.
“You will disappoint a lot of people. I’m not supposed to tell you, but it is a party for you.”
“Me?”
“Your birthday. A surprise.”
“Not anymore.”
“That is no excuse not to go.”
“Do I need an excuse?”
“Mace....”
He crossed the floor to an archway that led into his kitchen. He pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and washed his hands in the sink.
He had received the invitation three days ago. The party was at Piers Hawthorne’s dom and that alone blunted his enthusiasm. Normally he recycled such invitations, but this one had uncharacteristically come directly through Helen’s system, so she knew about it.
“Mace.”
“I have plenty to do tonight. The Influx reports alone ought to keep me busy for hours and I want to go over those updates—”
“I can do the Influx reports. There is nothing in those updates you can do anything about. You’re simply trying to get out of something you know would be good for you.”
Mace turned off the water and dried his hands. He sniffed at himself; his clothes smelled of earth and water-soaked leaves.
“Mace...”
He could shut the system interface down. The rest of the evening would be quiet then. But that was cheating. He had programmed her to do this kind of thing. Her nag factor, he called it.
“Mace...”
“If it will make you happy.”
“I don’t have a limbic system, Mace. Happy isn’t something you can make me. You might consider mollification sufficient.”
“You’re going to get morbid on me now?”
“Whatever it takes to prevent you from becoming a hermit. You weren’t a recluse when I met you.”
And even though you’re dead, he thought, you won’t let me turn into one. His hand went to the pendant hanging from his neck. He rubbed it absently. “I did too good a job constructing you.”
“Don’t boast, it’s immodest. Are you going?”
“I’ll go. What time is it?”
“Eighteen-twenty. You hav
e time.”
“I’d better shower. Scrape off some of my reclusive odor.”
“The water is already up to temperature.”
He left the kitchen and went up the winding staircase. The outside wall was transpared and he looked across the grassy slope, past the copse of dwarf elms, to the ascending plain of parkland that ended sharply at the edge of one of the solar traps. The mirrored lid attached to the outer surface of the world was open and light came through the orbital-length window, scattered by the prismatic crystalline structure of the glass to spread and mingle with the light admitted by the other traps. On the far side of the bright ribbon Mace could make out collections of houses, roads, parks, lakes, and a few wispy clouds.
At the landing, Mace touched a contact just above his other shakan-shaped Chinese nettle and the wall opaqued to a milky translucency. He liked the pearly glow; it seemed to make the oval leaves of the miniature tree shimmer.
In his bedroom he removed the pendant and set it on a velvet square on his nightstand, then stripped out of his clothes. He slapped his stomach and kneaded the layer of fat that was beginning to hide the still-hard muscle. He tried to remember how long it had been since his last good workout. His joints ached a little more often lately. The most physical activity he indulged in anymore were his visits to courtesans, the ghosts, the ones who offered a buffet of downloaded personae, becoming any type, any one he might want.
Spending too much time with the ghosts, he thought. Too much time, too much money....
The water in the shower came on when he stepped into the booth. It stung at first, a degree or so too hot. The water shut off when he reached for the towel draped over the door.
I’m forty-six, forty-seven in five more days... I was forty-three when she died...
He pulled on a cobalt blue shirt and black pants, soft moccasins, then went downstairs to his den. The small room contained a high-backed chair, a display panel, and his sensorem. “Elgar,” he said. “Cello Concerto in E minor.”
He sat down as the sound of massed strings moved over him from the walls like a massage. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin and stared into nothing. The somberness of the opening sections gave way to an unexpected playfulness.
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