The Elysium Commission

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  I tried a link with Krij. She wasn't taking links. I left a message with her talking head and finalized my draft report on Dyorr's research proposal. Basically, I made several points. First, his research was long-term and expensive. Sec­ond, it would benefit a limited number of people, but they were those who could not be helped by existing medical technologies. Third, it would greatly deepen true under­standing of what comprised intelligence. Fourth, if success­ful, it could lead to even more potentially socially disturbing implications than present psych-conditioning used by exist­ing less-than-savory commercial applications. Fifth, it would upset every established religion. Finally, sooner or later, someone was going to do it, and Dyorr's proposal was likely to provide Devanta and the Assembly with greater oversight and control than anything else. Seldara Tozzi wouldn't like the report, but she'd regret my not telling her what she didn't want to hear even less.

  I hoped it wouldn't be that long before Myndanori got back to me, but she would when she did, and not when I wished.

  With that task done, I began to study the Eloi-related search results.

  Max had come up with 611 matches, linked to 203 indi­vidual names. First I read through them and set aside those that were clearly "social" or irrelevant matches. Those were the ones that mentioned the spouse of someone attached to one of the Eloi Enterprises in a different context, such as at­tending a benefit or leading a volunteer or charitable effort. Then I dug in and began to study the rest.

  After another hour I had a short list of eleven names. What was interesting about them was that all of them were still alive and that none was presently on Devanta.

  Incoming from Krij.

  Accept.

  Krij's image appeared before the desk. Her smile was warm. For that I was glad. She tossed back her head slightly and flipped a short lock of shimmering jet-black hair back off her forehead. "You left a message, brother dear."

  "I'm still working on the Eloi project, and I've got some names I thought I'd run past you."

  "Before you do that... I need to ask... what did you do to piss off Banque de L'Ouest?"

  "I told Antonio diVeau I didn't appreciate his trying to snoop and crash my systems under the guise of inviting me on a cataract rafting trip. Why? What did he do?"

  "We keep running dossiers on all our clients. You're one of them. This morning we got an alert that you'd been credit-denied by Banque de L'Ouest. The notation with it indicated you were close to bankruptcy. Since you have this phobia about debt, and since we audit your books, I know that's somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible."

  "He's been suborned by Legaar Eloi."

  Krij sighed. "We'll file a reg-comp denial and issue a counternotice, with an intent to request documentation in support of their notice."

  "You'd better bill me on this."

  "We'll see. I hate bankers almost as much as you do. Now ... what about those names? I've got to meet a client here in a quarter stan."

  "What do you know about Laisyn Welles?"

  "Besides being the director of Classic Investment?" Krij smiled. "Not all that much. The Vallum Streeters think that he's the reason why Eloi Enterprises is so successful in the financial markets."

  "Then why did Legaar send him to the Abssenya systems last month?"

  "He probably said something Legaar didn't like. That's a real danger."

  "You know anything else?" She shook her head. "What about Willa Ching?"

  Krij offered a rueful smile. Her green eyes softened slighdy. "You know I've always been better with the num­bers and the regs. People are what Siendra would know more about. She deals more with personnel management. She's here. Would you mind talking to her?"

  "Mind? Why would I mind?"

  "You seem to avoid her. In a polite way, that is."

  "I've nothing against her. I just don't know her well, and she's so reserved around me ..."

  Krij's laughter filled the study. Before it died away, her image was replaced by that of Siendra, wearing a dark brown jacket over shimmering white shirt. She was smiling, as if amused at something.

  "Siendra."

  "Blaine." She paused. "Krij said that you wanted to know about people in Eloi Enterprises. You're interested in Willa Ching?"

  "Among others," I admitted.

  "Ching has a talent absent from the Elois. She can make people feel wanted and valued."

  "She was sent to Frydrich in the Prussian system," I pointed out.

  "That would make sense if they're expanding in that area. You'd want a people person, particularly there." She tilted her head slightly, thinking, and probably linking to her own systems.

  I waited, but I couldn't help but note that she looked more alive in that unguarded linking moment. Most people didn't.

  "Eloi Enterprises' annual report notes increased revenues from the Prussian systems," she added. "They don't give details, but they wouldn't mention it if the numbers weren't significant."

  Left unsaid was that the city sisters would be on them for felonious misrepresentation for failure to at least note an area of markedly increased revenues.

  "What about Laisyn Welles?"

  "A true financial genius. He turned Spectrum around in less than a year. That was when the Elois took him aboard. Classic Investment had scarcely ever made much. It was operated more as a capital pool and low-risk hedge fund. Within a year, he had it almost as profitable as Classic Me­dia, and within two it was nearly as profitable as the escort operation."

  "But why would Legaar send him to Abssenya?"

  "To make more credits. The one thing the Elois like more than anything is credits."

  That might be, but sending all the names on my list out-system didn't make sense. "Do these names mean anything to you?" I began to read them. "Valera N'gao, Mahmed Kemal..." When I finished, I waited again.

  Siendra smiled. "They're among the best people the Elois have."

  "Every one of them has been sent out-system in the last year. They haven't returned."

  "I'll have to ask Krij what she thinks, but it looks to me like they're trying to expand into true multisystem opera­tions. You know that they've clashed with the Civitas Sorores repeatedly. It could be mat they just want to move their op­erations elsewhere and that they're expanding as quickly as practicable."

  I hadn't thought of that. Was Elysium Legaar's plan for bailing out of Devanta? Or was Elysium just coincident with expanding operations? Or something else altogether?

  "Send me the list, Blaine, and I'll see what we can find out."

  I flashlinked it to her. I also included the names of Sepha­niah Dylan-Zimmer's and Antonio diVeau, as well as Sel­dara and Marie Tozzi, Dr. Guillaume Richard Dyorr, Cecilia vonKuhrs, and Darlya Rettek.

  "There's one other thing where you might be able to help, if you would," I ventured. "I was trying to locate a dramaturge named Terrie McGerrie through the Authors' Centrality, but they weren't much help."

  "I don't imagine they would have been." Siendra laughed sofdy. "They're not supposed to be helpful in that regard. More than a few of the dramaturges and creators use pseu­donyms and don't want to be traced, even to a pseudony­mous talking head. For some, the way words are used in direct vidlinks is as much an indication of identity as their face or name might be."

  "What are they hiding from?"

  "If you'd written The Exciting Escapades of Dragoon and Dirt, would you want to talk to anyone?"

  "Someone wrote that?"

  "It's a spoof of an ancient spoof, and it lase-burns more than a few pretentious types in the Gallian sector. In literary terms, it's somewhere between bad and truly terrible. That's according to those who have read it."

  "Which? The original or the latest spoof?"

  "I doubt either is that great, but I've read neither," Sien­dra confessed.

  "Somehow I don't think that's why people hide their creative identities."

  "What if you'd written The Universe According to Sister Incognita!"

  "Was i
t that accurate in depicting the inner workings of the Civitas Sorores?" I asked.

  "Accurate enough that the sisters attempted to suppress it," Siendra pointed out. "Accurate enough that all the secu­rity systems were changed and the points of system and physical access were modified."

  "And all these creators think they'd lose their freedom of expression if their identities were known?"

  "I doubt that most think of it in those terms, Blaine, but they wouldn't be comfortable without some identity shield. Nor would you, were you in their position. They're either notorious, or nonentities, or professionals who don't want their more lucrative major careers undermined by their mi­nor literary and dramatic efforts."

  "I suppose not. Did I ask you about Maureen Gonne or Stella Strong?"

  "Krij asked me. I've never run across either name. Our databases don't show them either, except that Gonne was with TEA for not quite four years, but you knew that."

  "What about Astrid Forte?" I had trouble remembering to use that name, although there was no certainty it was even connected to Strong/Gonne.

  "Let me see."

  After a moment, her eyes widened. "That's a registered legal identity."

  "What does that mean? Everyone has a legal identity."

  "One that's registered means that it's not only reserved, but that its use by any other individual is a felony." She smiled. "Registered identities are limited to the directors of major corpentities, justicers, and elected officials above the local level. They're also allowed to certain other individuals if a petition is approved by the Civitas Sorores."

  "What kind of individuals?"

  "Security personnel, prominent artists, people whose fame or notoriety might make them vulnerable to ID theft." That left me concerned and puzzled. "Blaine?"

  I shook my head. "It doesn't make sense, but I'll have to think about it." She and Krij had given me what they could.

  I supposed that I should have gone back to the commissions immediately. I didn't. I felt that breaking the link so quickly would have been bad manners. So I asked, "If I'm not in­truding, what did you do before you worked with Krij?"

  She shrugged. "I spent two tours as a line officer with the Assembly Interstellar Service. That was enough. Piloting was the only good part, and that didn't make up for the rest of it. I didn't see much combat. That was before the Frankans started getting restive. After that, I tried being an adminis­trative resources director and a few other things. The ser­vice and the corpentity stints confirmed that, while I could handle military and administrative bureaucracies, I was se­verely less than pleased in doing either. I met Krij when she was on an assignment and persuaded her that my expertise was better as a consultant than as a bureaucrat. I haven't re­gretted it."

  "She's done better with you."

  "I'd like to think so." She frowned. "Why didn't you join her after you left Special Operations? Your talents and hers would be formidable together."

  They might be, but I needed distance. Krij could be for­midable all by herself. I laughed. "I'm more of a shadowy character. She's a creature of the light."

  "That sounds more like a reason to work together rather than separately." She gave the slightest headshake. "Krij just flashed me. Our client is arriving."

  "You'd better go. Thank you."

  Her image vanished.

  Two tours in the Assembly IS? She'd said she'd liked the piloting best. That meant she was deep-space qualified. I'd never gotten to that, just in-system small craft.

  I still didn't have much more to go on for any of my commissions.

  Then... something Siendra had said struck me. If word usage were a signature, couldn't I use that to search? It took me almost a stan to set up a search routine mat compared elements of style, subject, and presentation. I turned it loose on all literature and vid-dramas created in the past year on De­vanta. The systems promptly informed me that the expected time of completion would be some thirteen standard hours. I'd suspected it would take a while, but that long?

  There was no help for it. So I tapped into the current news, then had it play out with holo and audio. The image appeared in the space before my desk.

  "... the alien spacecraft mystery deepens ..."

  How could it deepen? It was alien and billions of years old, as I recalled.

  "... University of Muriami technarcheologists have confirmed that the spacecraft discovered last month in the Drift is indeed more than a billion standard years old. Yet it appears to be almost an exact duplicate of a current non-Assembly military craft... buried in the middle of a constructed asteroid with a large and inactive power source ... one expedition member suggested it might be some sort of burial monument..."

  I laughed out loud. It had to be a fraud of some sort. Hu­mans hadn't been around millions of years, let alone a bil­lion, and the odds of another race producing a similar craft were statistically improbable. It was more than a little un­likely that humans had copied the alien craft, either, since spacecraft development had been progressing for thousands of years. Progressing far too slowly to have gotten an infu­sion of alien technology. As for a burial monument in deep space... I snorted.

  I thought about blanking the audio as another image flicked up into a holo projection. I didn't look, but half listened.

  "Assembly Premier Ferraro met earlier this week with the special envoy from the Shiite League in an effort to slow the escalation of military buildups in between the

  Frankans and the League in the Sack area of the Trailing Arm....

  "The Assembly's Gallian Sector Four Fleet completed its deep-space maneuvers without any additional encoun­ters with unidentified forces ... earlier, rumored contacts had been laid to Frankan or Argenti vessels.

  "The Assembly Ministry of Government Affairs has re­leased the revised standards for planetary government re­formulation. The principal change in the policy and guidelines was to clarify the language defining noncon­sensual, nonrepresentative planetary governments ... Devantan libertarian critic Alesandro Hamilcar praised the MGA revisions as long overdue. He pointed out that in many respects the Civitas Sorores of Devanta might well be included in the definition of repressive planetary governments..."

  The dear sisters? I couldn't say that I was that fond of the Civitas Sorores. They were anything but representative, de­spite the facades erected around them and the illusions of representation fostered by the elected advisory representa­tives. But I'd never been mat fond of popular democracy ei­ther, and I certainly didn't want the MGA policy revisions to be used as a tool to demand reformulation of Devantan planetary government structures—or the lack thereof. Why were people always meddling with what worked?

  "The Masculist Forum has released a statement de­nouncing the use of medical technology to 'artificially' establish the sexual orientation and gender of human fetuses in utero ... Masculist spokesman Josiah Brigham called Thurene the Gehenna of a doomed culture ..."

  I winced at that. The law already prohibited prebirth sex­ual manipulation, except in cases determined medically necessary. Why were the Masculists digging up that legal corpse? No judiciary would change the law, and the sisters certainly wouldn't.

  "On a happier note, the PostColonial Museum in Vannes has just opened a totally new exhibit featuring the first sisters of Devanta...

  "In Devantan legal news ... yesterday EsClox Limited filed for a preliminary injunction against the just-enacted charter amendment requiring mandatory licensing of defense-related technologies ... The EsClox motion claims that the definition of "defense-related technolo­gies" is so broad that it could include all advanced sys­tems ... The Soror Tertia of Devanta expressed confidence that the motion would be rejected in a matter of weeks. She said it was merely a delaying tactic. No charter amendment has ever been overturned by the Sec­tor Judiciary..."

  Something about that nagged at me. I couldn't have said why.

  Max... quick background on EsClox. Within minutes, Max had something. I blanked the news an
d read the short paragraph off the holo projection.

  "EsClox ... nanodesign specialty firm from Bretcote... provides quantum synchronization equaliz­ers and other equipment of a similar nature ... ownership has remained private, but one third of capitalization was provided by Classic Investment in return for a semiexclu­sive, long-term technology-sharing agreement..."

  That brought me up short. Max... search high-tech Gal­lian sector corpentities with technology-sharing agreements with either Classic or Eloi enterprises.

  There were thirty-seven—all on Devanta. None had any name remotely similar to Elysium. I had to hand it to the Eloi boys. They had access to a lot of new technology. Why Legaar and Simeon would need it in their businesses I couldn't understand. What I could understand was that Es­Clox was pursuing a legal challenge to buy time. That suggested Legaar clearly had something going on with Classic

  Research that he didn't want to license to the Sorores. Or not until he cleaned up matters, such as his use of Lemmy's technology. Yet... with all the tech-sharing, Eloi was ex­panding elsewhere?

  I was learning more than I'd ever wanted about Eloi En­terprises, but not much of it pointed to Maraniss or to what­ever Elysium might be. Not that I could see. Not yet, anyway.

  26

  Indirection offered with care can be far more useful than unthinking directness.

  From as soon as I'd stepped into my study on Miercen morning, I'd gotten to work on setting up more indirect searches for my pending commissions, based on variations of what I'd set up for Terrie McGerrie the day before.

  The style comparator routine had come up with another possible pseudonym for Terrie McGerrie. The probability was over seventy-seven percent that a newer dramaturge with the pen name of Marley Louis was also Carey Douglass/Terrie McGerrie. Louis's latest work was entided The Endeavor Affair. Except for the name, the bio was close to identical to those for Douglass and McGerrie. I sent a men­tal and silent thank-you to Siendra. I was beginning to see why Krij was more successful with Siendra as a partner.