Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

  “And we’re going to lose all that—for good. With the archives gone, we’d be forced to start from scratch in many fields. I can’t allow that to happen. A way must be found to wake up Nick and Gillian.”

  The Lion frowned. “And what can they do to prevent the decimation of the archives?”

  Excitement flashed across Adam’s face. “Gillian, I suspect, can do nothing at all—he’s just a warrior, a Paratwa-hunter.”

  He’s much more, thought the Lion. He’s the third surviving Ash Ock Paratwa, a living anomaly: tway of the Royal Caste—Empedocles of the Ash Ock.

  And he’s a shadow on my life.

  “Nick is the one we need,” continued Adam. “Begelman met Nick fifty-six years ago. Begelman claimed that Nick was the finest programmer he’d ever come across—a bona fide wizard from the days of the pre-Apocalypse.

  “I suspect that Nick was even more than that. I’ve researched those pre-Apocalyptic programmers, especially the ones whom today we consider geniuses—the Asaki brothers, Gorman, Vittelli, a handful of others. They were the cutting edge of computer science. And there were others who worked secretly; shadow figures, men and women whose names were never known. Nick, I believe, was one of these hidden geniuses.”

  Adam gripped the edge of the table. “The concepts they toyed with! The technologies they designed, of which only fragments survive today! Interlace core drives, hunt/seek inhibitors, wetware memories, mnemonic cursors . . . not to mention sunsetters. I could list a thousand inventions.

  “And Nick could bring them back to us! If he is actually one of those pre-Apocalyptic geniuses—and I have little doubt that he is—he could teach us so much! And if there is anyone who has a chance to stop this sunsetter from wiping out the entire archives, it’s Nick.”

  The Lion gave a slow nod. “You’ve told Doyle Blumhaven about your belief in this man Nick?”

  “Of course. But I get the same old response. Blumhaven doesn’t believe Nick would be of any use to us. I’m convinced that Blumhaven is not going to allow Gillian and Nick to be awakened—ever.”

  “Why?”

  Adam licked his lower lip. “I don’t know . . . not exactly. But if I had to guess, I’d say that Doyle Blumhaven is afraid. Afraid of change. The first time Nick and Gillian were awakened from stasis, their discoveries turned colonial life inside out. Blumhaven doesn’t like that sort of untidiness. It doesn’t fit in with his idea of the status quo.”

  Inez raised her eyebrows. The Lion smiled. This young man had just expounded their own shared opinion of E-Tech’s chief.

  “So,” the Lion concluded, “you want Nick and Gillian to be awakened . . . illegally. And you have a plan to accomplish this. But you need our help.”

  Adam Lu Sang drew a deep breath. “Yes.”

  The Lion stared past Adam and Inez, through the shadows of the pine forest and beyond, to the immense gray wall two miles in the distance—Irrya’s north polar plate, the end cap of the cylinder.

  I want to see Gillian again. I want that more than I want anything else in the universe.

  He sighed, remembering an old Costeau saying. When dreams come true, payment is due.

  Adam Lu Sang was delivering the dream. But what would be the cost?

  He turned his attention back to the programmer. “You’re a very trusting soul. You come here today to persuade two Irryan councilors to break the law, involve ourselves in what could become a politically self-destructive sequence of events.”

  Adam swallowed. “I came to Ms. Hernandez because I thought La Gloria de la Ciencia would be the most likely source of assistance. She suggested coming to you . . .”

  “And so you did—as a traitor to E-Tech, the organization that you swore an oath to. Why should we trust you? ‘Once a betrayer, always a betrayer,’ I’ve heard it said. Things would be much safer if we simply reported this entire incident to your superiors.”

  Slowly, Adam pushed back his seat and stood up. He pointed his finger at the Lion. His hand was shaking.

  “I came here in good faith. I came to you because I believe the archives are in jeopardy. There’s a sunsetter in there and no one alive today has the remotest idea how to stop it. If you refuse to help, fine. All I ask is that you keep this meeting confidential. I’ll find someone else to assist me.”

  “Sit down,” ordered the Lion.

  With a red face, the programmer snapped back into his chair.

  “You have the courage of your convictions,” stated the Lion. “That’s a good start. But it will take more than that.” He paused. “Do you have a family?”

  The programmer drew a deep breath and swallowed. “A wife and two girls.”

  The Lion smiled grimly. “You risk losing a great deal.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’ve thought about the consequences . . . if events backfire.”

  “I have.”

  The Lion glanced at Inez. She nodded.

  “All right. I assume that you can get the stasis capsule containing Gillian and Nick out of whichever E-Tech vault it happens to be in?”

  Adam wagged his head eagerly. “I can do better. I can have that stasis capsule transferred to any colony, and in such a way that it won’t appear to be missing from its vault.”

  “How?”

  “The whole storage system is numeric-based, which is the only sensible way to deal with eighteen and a half million stasis capsules. You can access some capsules by name, of course, but in this case, there are no records of any names—the Begelman program merely contains capsule ID data.

  “I can enter that system and decode-recode without leaving a trace. I can move the Nick-Gillian capsule as a routine transfer and route a second capsule from somewhere else to occupy the missing numeric slot. Then, after Nick and Gillian are brought out of stasis, I can transfer their empty capsule back into the system. For a short period, there will be one less capsule than there’s supposed to be, but I can cover that discrepancy by making sure that a routine capsule audit is occurring at the same time.

  “Once they’re awakened, of course, they’ll have to be hidden.”

  The Lion nodded. “That could be arranged.”

  “I can provide Nick with an access code to get into the archives. He can work directly on the sunsetter problem from anywhere he chooses.”

  Inez frowned. “I thought you had to be physically inside the archives in order to access them?”

  “A myth, perpetuated by the E-Tech bureaucracy,” said Adam. “You can penetrate the system from a simple home terminal. Of course, you must have the access codes and a working knowledge of the layout—it is the security of those aspects which maintains the secrecy of the archives.”

  The Lion stood up. “When can we begin?”

  Adam grinned. “I’ve already done the preliminary work. The stasis capsule can be transferred tomorrow. All I need is the delivery location.”

  “You’ll have it by this afternoon. And now, Adam—would you excuse us for a moment? I’d like to speak to Inez in private.”

  “Certainly.”

  They left the programmer seated at the table while they ambled up the grassy path toward the A-frame house.

  “I assume you ran a thorough check on our young wizard?” asked the Lion, when they were out of earshot.

  “Absolutely,” said Inez. “That’s why I made him wait several weeks before I even agreed to see him. It’s not every day that someone from the vaults requests a clandestine meeting with me. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being set up for any dirty tricks.

  “I’m convinced that Adam Lu Sang is for real. His entire professional life—eight years—has been spent with E-Tech, and he’s had astonishingly rapid advancement. In school, most of his teachers claim he was the best student they ever had, with a natural aptitude for programming; he was top of his class from day one until graduation. And he’s highly respected throughout most of the computer industry.” Inez smiled. “Some are even calling him the next Begelman.”


  “Do you have other contacts in the E-Tech archives?” asked the Lion. “Someone who can verify this story of his?”

  “I have some people who supply me with information on a regular basis. And for the past month or so, they’ve been hinting about big trouble in dataland; something is terribly amiss down there in the vaults. But until last night, I had no real idea of what was happening. Adam’s story filled in all the missing pieces; everything fell into place.”

  The Lion permitted himself a faint smile. “If things go wrong, Inez, we’re going to be most unpopular.”

  She chuckled and laid a hand on his arm. “Since when did that ever bother Jerem Marth?”

  “Not recently,” he admitted.

  She released his arm. “Good. Then I won’t feel so bad about burdening you with something else. Do you remember me telling you about my grandniece, Susan Quint?”

  The Lion nodded. “She’s the one you got a job for with La Gloria de la Ciencia last year.”

  “Uh-huh. As a progress inspector. An occupation that I felt might give her some direction, some purpose. Susan has always been sort of . . . well, concerned with shallower things; nothing ever seemed to grab her, hold any real meaning. Being a progress inspector has helped somewhat, but I suspect Susan still believes that attending an Irryan banquet remains one of life’s most important events.”

  Inez stared upward at one of the pines. “Susan did not have a very pleasant childhood. Her parents—my nephew and his wife—were devout members of the Reformed Church of the Trust, and rather . . . affected. If you remember, about fifteen years ago, the Council of Irrya signed the Senate resolution that placed a numeric limit on the Church’s freedom to bury its devotees down on the Earth. When Susan’s parents realized that it would become more and more difficult for them to be granted a planetary burial as the years went by, they committed ritual suicide in order to guarantee that their bodies would be immediately entombed on the Earth.”

  The Lion shook his head sadly.

  “Susan was eleven at the time; another nephew of mine took her in, raised her as a part of his family. Over the years, she’s had extensive psychological counseling. But obviously, some severe damage had been done.

  “Anyway, early yesterday evening, Susan came to my apartment building and demanded to see me. She was almost incoherent; between the tears, she kept babbling weird stories about being in Honshu and witnessing the Birch massacre and feeling as if she somehow knew one of the killers. Then she told me how she had just escaped from her own apartment; two E-Tech Security officers came there to interview her about the massacre. And then they tried to kill her.”

  Inez sighed. “To say that I was a bit skeptical would be an understatement. But I put an immediate call into our progress inspection department and it turned out Susan had been scheduled to pass through Yamaguchi Terminal—obviously, she had indeed witnessed the Birch massacre there. But the part of her story about feeling as if she recognized one of the Birch killers—a fleeting eye contact, she called it—and E-Tech Security officers trying to slay her . . . well, knowing Susan’s past, I concluded that these portions of her tale were pure paranoia. Probably, she had misunderstood the officers’ intentions. I figured the terrible experience of Honshu had thrown her over the edge. I calmed her down as best I could, then I called a doctor and arranged for her to be admitted to my hospital and committed to a short-term psychplan. With her personal history, it seemed the right thing to do . . . she was so terribly confused and frightened . . .

  “We drove to the hospital and she was still in pretty bad shape the whole time, still crying uncontrollably, babbling out this same story, begging me to believe her. She gave me the names of the two E-Tech officers and I promised that I would check things out. But by the time I got home, I was dead tired, and the next thing I knew, the colony was facing sun.

  “Five minutes after I woke up this morning, I got a call from the hospital. It seems that Susan managed to sneak out of her room sometime in the middle of the night. And she didn’t show up for work.” Inez shook her head. “The fact that she escaped from the hospital did not surprise me—Susan was always a very ingenious little girl, very sharp, a fast thinker. I wasn’t really too worried about her running away—I figured she would calm down eventually and get in touch with me or return to the hospital.

  “But then about an hour ago, on my way to the rendezvous with Adam, I heard over one of the freelancer channels that two E-Tech Security men were murdered last night—some kind of an ambush in a parking garage.”

  The Lion nodded. “Yes, I heard about that too.”

  “Their names were Donnelly and Tace. They were the same two officers who, Susan claimed, tried to kill her last night.”

  The Lion stopped walking. “You don’t think she had something to do with the killings?”

  Inez leaned against a slender pine and folded her arms. “No. Those two officers were ambushed and murdered during the time that Susan was at my apartment.”

  The Lion rubbed his foot across a fallen pinecone, burying it in the soft mulch at the base of the tree.

  “And it gets more interesting,” Inez continued. “I called one of my sources in E-Tech Security. Those murdered officers weren’t assigned to the Birch killings. There was no reason for them to be in Susan’s apartment last night.

  “After hearing that, I had no more doubts that Susan was telling me the whole truth. Poor girl—I feel so bad that I didn’t believe her.”

  The Lion frowned. “Then there must be a connection between Susan’s witnessing the Yamaguchi massacre and the murder of these two E-Tech officers. Did Susan mention any other details about the massacre?”

  “I can’t recall her mentioning anything significant other than this feeling that she somehow knew one of the killers. But even that was pretty vague. She was in pretty bad shape the entire time I was with her. She wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.

  “At any rate, it’s now vital that I find her as soon as possible. If someone tried to kill her once, they may try again. And the fact that her two murdered assailants were actually from E-Tech Security . . .”

  “You want outside assistance in locating her,” finished the Lion. “You want Costeau help.”

  Inez nodded. “And if your people can locate her, I’d like your clan to keep her in hiding—at least until I find out who can and cannot be trusted in E-Tech Security.”

  The Lion gazed back at Adam Lu Sang, who was watching them intently from the clearing. “Anyone else you want me to hide for you today, Inez?”

  She laughed. “No, Jerem—I think that will about do it.”

  They headed back toward the waiting programmer. Inez chatted about an Irryan senator who was causing La Gloria de la Ciencia problems. But the Lion heard little of what she was saying. His thoughts were on the future, on Gillian, and what he would say to the man whom he had not seen in fifty-six years.

  O}o{O

  Ghandi knew that someday the rage would consume him.

  He could feel the muscles in his upper arms twitching, as if tiny creatures had come to life there, madly dancing microbes fighting the natural rhythms of his body, taunting for release. As always, he was able to contain himself, force muscles into obedience. Over the years, the fantasies of letting go—screaming out his anger—had gradually lessened, though there were still night incursions into a world where liberation was permitted. But most often, when mornings came and the real world beckoned, the fantasies retreated. All that remained to mark his rage were those tiny little microbes, which, if given their way, would plunge Ghandi’s whole body into uncontrollable seizures.

  The elevator door opened. Tight-lipped, he stepped out into the executive suite of CPG, fifth largest corporation in the Colonies. CPG stood for Corelli-Paul Ghandi; legally, this was his corporation. But he had never truly controlled its destiny.

  The microbes twitched.

  “Good morning, sir,” said the black execsec from behind her spacious desk.

&nbs
p; Ghandi mumbled a greeting.

  “Sir, your wife is here. She arrived about fifteen minutes ago. She said to tell you that she’d be in the board room.”

  “Is she alone?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No, sir. Your aide is with her.”

  His aide. Ghandi felt the little microbes shift ever so slightly, trying to jerk his muscles into a response. He took a deep breath, steadied himself.

  Calvin, his so-called aide.

  That fucking maniac!

  The secretary keyed open the door to the inner offices, and Ghandi stormed down the wide entrance hallway, past the onslaught of holographic bullets: ricocheting color logos of CPG’s major publicly controlled corporations, each three-dimensional image exploding into etchings of major product lines. The hallway was ostensibly designed to impress visiting dignitaries, though its main purpose—known only to Ghandi, Colette, and Calvin—was to enable the hypnotic manipulation of specific individuals. The spectacular high-speed holos existed primarily to camouflage one of Colette’s needbreeders.

  The hallway expanded, branching into a series of gently rising ramps leading to the various private offices of CPG directors. Ghandi continued on the straight path—the trunk of the tree—heading toward the solid platinum-colored door at the end of the corridor.

  He placed his right palm against the door’s ID sensor. The portal fragmented into thirty-two rectangles; each rectangle held its shape for a moment, then decomposed into a harmless pink gas. Ceiling fans sucked the gas up into the ventilation system. Ghandi stepped through the opening, feeling a draft across the back of his neck as the door reformed behind him.