Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “Maybe something just went wrong. You’re not even sure if the client was Toler.”

  “No, I’m not. But I suspect that whatever Ms. Dollard knows or did, it was compromising to the trojan. Loose ends like Reese would have to be tidied up.”

  “And Patri Simity?”

  Koeln shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “So you don’t know where Nemily is?”

  “No. We had her shadowed, but we lost her.”

  “And you don’t know where Toler is?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? All you have to do is follow the bodies. If you’re right.”

  Koeln punched the release button. “There is another possibility,” he said. “Your wife could be alive, could be working for Lunase, could well be the trojan.” He grinned at Mace.

  “Well. You work for PolyCarb. Find out.”

  The doors opened on ring four and Mace stepped out before Koeln could answer.

  He was missing something and it made him feel slow and stupid.

  He had wandered the rings until he found a ponies farm. He sat on the loam just inside the door. Soybean grew as far as he could see, the green carpet sweeping up at the horizon to disappear around the curve of the ring.

  “Where are you?” he asked in a whisper, then realized that he did not know about whom he asked.

  He had played the last couple years so low-keyed, so subtly, so distantly, that he had lost touch with nearly everything. He had lost touch with the reason for doing any of it. Fine, he had known that for some time, but now that he had found a new reason to take up the effort again he practically had to start from scratch.

  All the pieces were still there, though. He just could not see how they wove together to form the pattern he needed. And his feelings were getting in the way.

  If Nemily had come to hurt him, to use him to hurt Aea, then she was a most perfect weapon. She was naive, ignorant, and desperate not to be someone bad, and she was convincing. She was a cyberlink, so all that could be a shell around a truth she did not even know she possessed. She might have been used as a mule throughout, a carrier with no conscious knowledge of her role or mission.

  If she had struck at Reese, did that mean she now knew?

  But Mace mistrusted the appearance of perfection. He could not, ultimately, accept that she had been all that and aimed at him, too. The chances of him taking the bait... perhaps he was being naive himself, but the odds were too high.

  Why had she ghosted for Reese, though? And who had been the client? If that was the reason for Reese’s death, then perhaps he needed to reevaluate all his assumptions. And if it was the reason for his death, then why had they let Nemily live?

  If they had...

  He rubbed his face roughly. “Start somewhere else,” he said.

  The trojan, if there was one, might possibly even be Linder Koeln and could be presumed to be running any Lunessa agents. Who would they be and how would they operate? Assuming CAPs had been used by this rogue operation out of SetNetComb to smuggle in data, maybe even components with which to construct the sabotage material, Philip’s explanation of the isolating architecture of Nemily’s augment net meant that they were designed for keeping the secrets of their operators. If they all worked the same way, all of them could contain hidden data usable at the discretion of a single operator with the correct code.

  Or she was just an observer. Recording everything she saw, storing the data until someone came along to use what she knew....

  To what end?

  Any end. Reese sent Nemily to do an illicit ghost. Could her hidden programming, if any, now be in use? Or was she simply passing along what she had learned about Aea? Not knowing where she was or if she was alive, he could not ask.

  But she had called his dom. Something had gone wrong and she could not tell him about it over the tapped line.

  And someone had sent those files from Patri Simity to Cambel. Why? Who would know to do that? Assuming that they were ultimately intended to reach him, it had to be someone who knew that his domestic personality, his home system, was compromised, and that he and Cambel worked together.

  Nemily or Koeln?

  Koeln would have no real reason to send such a cryptic message. Nemily, on the other hand, might be trying to prove her innocence of any sabotage.

  All right, the trojan had brought her here, using Helen’s name as sponsor. It would be interesting to see if others had come in under the same sponsorship. But the important ones were Nemily and Toler. Why would the trojan use Helen’s name when he could have used any other deceased Aean in the same way?

  Of course, she had not been deceased when the sponsorships had been made.

  Koeln?

  No, not likely. Because whoever had used her name knew Helen, knew a lot about her, could answer the requisite questions on the In-Flux sponsorship forms. Mace doubted Koeln knew the first thing about Helen.

  It would be someone who had been with PolyCarb before the Hellas Planitia incident, with a high enough security clearance. If the trojan was good enough to successfully use Helen as a fake sponsor, then probably the trojan was good enough to hide a Lunessa origin. Koeln openly admitted his.

  The murders could only be to protect exactly that. Someone else knew.

  Perhaps that was what Nemily’s ghost had been about. Verification of associations. Who might know the trojan and where were they now?

  Mace stared at the field of green and the close roof of the world, a mild throbbing behind his eyes, and tried to match the pieces of the puzzles. It amazed him how quickly it had all become so complicated and he had not yet asked himself how it all related to Helen’s death.

  “All because Nemily Dollard took me home after a party,” he mused.

  He closed his eyes and imagined the faces of the players drifting across each others’ paths, like bodies in space, just missing each other because the trajectories were just right. He did not believe in coincidence. Unpredictable results, yes, but coincidence was an after-the-event imposition of pattern to try to make sense of randomness. If Nemily had been put in his path as bait, it had to have been with the assumption that he would take it. There was no way to guarantee that.

  The only other face that seemed connected to both Nemily and Toler.

  He hated being set up.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes. The pieces orbited a common center. He had avoided this conclusion, wanting first to rule out all other possibilities.

  First, though, he had to do one more check.

  He wondered who would be in the InFlux offices at this hour.

  Seventeen – AEA, 2118

  NEMILY HESITATED TO APPROACH MACE’S DOM. She rode the spinward shunt all the way around three times before she made herself get off at the station.

  She walked up the pathway with palpable reluctance. There was no way Mace could know that she had read Helen’s jacket, that she probably knew more about her than Mace did. But all her instincts made her afraid to confront him, as if the certainty of her intellect meant nothing to the emotional weight of her betrayal. If he did not now know, he would soon enough, because she would tell him. And he might hate her for it.

  How do I expect to stay on Aea, she wondered, when I’ve already made sure they won’t want me?

  She walked up to the door, glancing nervously around to see if anyone watched. The other doms were almost invisible through the thick stands of dwarf trees. The upshaft end of Aea was thick with genetically altered trees and shrubs. She had looked them up once and saw photographs of their originals on Earth, giant things that towered over their landscapes. These barely reached three and four meters, but they were rich with leaves and heavy bark, green and lush and, for her, emblematic of all that she wanted.

  She pressed the mici.

  “Yes?” Helen’s voice said.

  “Hello. This is Nemily Dollard. Is Mace home?”

  “No.”

  She waited, but the door did not open. She realized then that she expected
it to open for her until it remained closed. “Helen?”

  “I am the basic house logic system. ‘Helen’ is the domestic personality currently offline.”

  “I see. May I come in?”

  “Given the present circumstances, I don’t think it prudent to make that decision. If you want you may wait there till Mace returns.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know where he is. He checked in two hours ago.”

  “Where was he then?”

  “He had just left your domicile.”

  “He’s looking for me?”

  “Yes.”

  Nemily looked back up the path as if she might see Mace walking toward her. “Two hours ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then where...?”

  She had left her augments at the Temple. She did not want to risk returning for them, although after SA finished searching the place they would find them and know she had been there. She had another set at her dom. She needed a few other things from there as well, even though it now seemed impossible to hope that she could remain on Aea.

  “Tell him I was here and tell him I’m going back to my dom. If I’m not back here in an hour, then that’s where I’ll be. Will you tell him?”

  “Yes.”

  She felt mildly guilty at the half-truth. She did intend to go to her dom eventually—she had to—but not at first. She did not know if SA was monitoring Mace’s house system. Perhaps she would not have to explain this small lie; it seemed insignificant compared to the trouble she expected to be in.

  She strode up the path to the pedistry anxious and worried that at any moment she would see either Structural Authority security or Glim Toler coming to seize her.

  What surprised her most was that the address was in segment three. She had been certain when she looked it up that Cambel Guerrera lived in segment two, a neighbor perhaps to Mace.

  That Cambel let her in was another surprise.

  Cambel wore a short silk robe of deep blue and pale green. Her apartment, spacious and high-ceilinged, seemed crowded with small objects: lamps, end tables, curios, frames, small figures on shelves, one long sofa, chairs and a display on one wall of ornate fans.

  Nemily stood near the center of the room, looking around, nervous and uncomfortable. She watched Cambel empty a chair of a stack of folders. Cambel waved at the chair, then sat down on the sofa opposite, one leg tucked casually beneath her.

  “I’m guessing,” Cambel said, “that you sent us that file from the Temple rector.”

  Nemily sat down. “Yes. I thought Mace should see it, but I didn’t know if his comm was being monitored.”

  “By SA? It’s not, not anymore, but I suppose you couldn’t know that. So you sent it to me and thought I’d pass it on.”

  “Yes. Did you?”

  “I haven’t seen Mace in the last several hours. He’s out looking for you.” She nodded then. “It was a fascinating read, that file. How did you know about it?”

  “I didn’t. I mean, I went to the Temple to see if I could stay there for a time.” Nemily felt herself scowl. “No, that’s not true. I went there looking for Glim Toler. I thought the rector might know.”

  “And you went through her files while you were there?”

  “I—she wasn’t—no one was there. The place had already been searched. Whoever had done it had missed her protected files. Or just couldn’t get to them.”

  “But you could.”

  “I’m a CAP, Ms. Guerrera. We’re very good at getting around systems like that.”

  “I see. What do you want now?”

  “I’ve been to Mace’s dom, he’s not there—”

  “I told you—”

  “—so I came here. You’re his friend, you work with him. If I can’t trust you, then...”

  Cambel leaned forward. “Then?”

  “Then Mace has no friends.”

  Cambel Guerrera’s face remained impassive. She stared at Nemily a long time. The only sign of tension came through her hands; the tendons stood out sharply

  Finally she sat back. “He has better friends than he knows.”

  Nemily’s sense of relief came in a rush. She swallowed thickly and let herself lean back in the chair.

  “Toler was at the Temple,” she said.

  “What? When?”

  “It’s been a little over two hours. I was getting ready to leave and he came in. The patri—she had been beaten and someone had left her in the rectory kitchen. I thought Glim had done it, but he called pathic. Then he wanted me to go with him. I got away from him. I’ve been wandering since.”

  “Why didn’t you call SA?”

  “I—” She sighed and closed her eyes. “No reason. I did send them the same files I sent you, but... I thought I might not see Mace again if I called them. I didn’t know if they’d believe me that I had nothing to do with Patri Simity’s injuries. I was afraid Glim would tell them we were together.” She looked at Cambel. “I didn’t want to be expelled.”

  Cambel seemed to be weighing information. Her fingers tapped a-rhythmically on the back of the sofa.

  “Do you love Mace?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Oh? Is it a secret?”

  “No, it’s—Mace knows, we talked about it. I can’t. I’ve never experienced it, so I have no way to know. I need to—it’s the nature of my augmentation.”

  “For a person who doesn’t know, you act like you love him. Or at least want him.”

  “I want to be with him. Is that the same?”

  “It is for me.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  Cambel waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. Mace and I have come to an understanding. I won’t interfere. I can’t. But if you don’t know, how do you intend to find out?”

  “I offered to run Helen.”

  Cambel blinked. “As a ghost?”

  “Yes.”

  “That wouldn’t be a very good idea.”

  “Why? Didn’t she love him?”

  “I don’t know. But for me, it would always be a question as to who it is I’m loving.”

  “I don’t—I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “Secondhand emotion. Mace loved Helen. Whether or not she returned it, we may never know. Unless you ghost her. What if you find out that she didn’t? What if she was only with Mace because it was convenient? And what if she did love him? Would Mace be returning that love or loving you for yourself?” She shook her head. “That’s too many possible ways to mess it up. If I understand what you’re telling me, there are treatments for it. You don’t have to become a ghost to fix your problems.”

  “I see. Why are you interested?”

  “Mace is... I don’t want to see him hurt again. Not the same way You become Helen for him, someday you’ll have to bury her all over.”

  “What about Helen? I could settle the question of her complicity”

  Cambel nodded thoughtfully. “Possibly But does Mace really need to know? If she was innocent, then it confirms what he already believes. If not, if just adds to the hurt.”

  This was not what Nemily had come here for, but it was accidental wealth. She had not considered the possible impact on Mace when she had made the offer. One more problem with the way her brain worked— sometimes the obvious was the hardest thing to see.

  “Now,” Cambel said. “Why don’t you tell me all about Glim Toler. Then maybe we can decide what to do.”

  “Mace wasn’t even supposed to be there,” Cambel said. “He got himself assigned to head security for one of the Directors, Listrom, if I recall. Helen was on her way back to Aea, but had been diverted to Mars to do something at the Hellas Planitia site. No one knows what, because the company decided to seal everything and pretend she’d died somewhere else.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They do that in cases where someone is doing high-level, special work and it’s not supposed to be public. In other words, it’s kept from
the shareholders. Helen Croslo, among other things, was a spy for PolyCarb.”

  Nemily thought for a moment. That makes sense.” “Does it? In any case, Mace found out she would be there, and arranged to be there, too. Then the accident happened and he abandoned his assignment to run out there. He took over security on the recovery mission, then got in over his head. I believe—and the company believed at the time—that Macefield Preston would not be a team player and let it drop. He had too much personal investment. He would dig and make scenes and embarrass PolyCarb. Couldn’t have that. So I was given the thankless job of removing him permanently from the investigation. I didn’t know either one of them before that, Helen or Mace, but PolyCarb handed me the assignment of convincing Mace to sign off on Helen’s death certificate. I can’t tell you how that felt.” She stared at her hands for a few seconds. “Maybe I can. I felt like a first-rate Judas. The arguments were so logical, so sensible, and I believed Helen was dead. There’s no way she could have made it across that desert without transport. Which made the second tier of logic work—if she had transport, she was culpable. But I could see the logic work on Mace and it was ugly. PolyCarb made me hurt him. Badly. They shouldn’t have done that.” “You didn’t have to do it.”

  “You aren’t management. You can’t imagine the pressure.” “You’ve never lived in Lunase. Would you care to compare?” Cambel’s eyebrows went up. “Touché. Anyway, I had to accompany him back to Aea and get him settled into a new position. The trip back... well, he didn’t settle. He kept asking questions and poking into places he had no authority for. I was given another assignment. Get him to stop or he’d be expelled.” “Would they have done that?”

  “There was a window of opportunity, but once Mace accepted the insurance settlement and resigned from the company, it would have required an SA judicial action to do it. The company missed its chance. But once he was outside, his avenues of research became very limited. He still wasn’t going to quit and he kept bothering me to help him. There were... inconsistencies... with the PolyCarb official version, so I started giving him small things on the side. PolyCarb must have found out. They reassigned me. I recognized the pattern. They were about to ship me all over the system to keep me out of the way They’d done that to a lot of the personnel at Hellas Planitia. I told them to go to hell this time and handed in my resignation.”