It was 1:52 A.M. –
– it was 2080.
A decade later Trent shook himself, said for the third time, “Uh –”
Melissa du Bois looked at him with a polite, interested expression. “Yes?”
I thought Gerard Tepare was Chief of Security at Halfway, Trent could say, and watch this fearsomely intelligent woman say politely, Indeed? And how does a civilian come to know who Chief of Security is, fresh from Earth? Who told you this?
“Melissa du Bois,” said Trent. “That’s a very nice name.”
She smiled at him pleasantly and said politely, “I’ve always thought so. How do you know it?”
Her English was spoken with an exactly correct American accent, the flat atonal Hollywood accent affected by newsdancers. The dissonance, the lack of her old French accent, threw Trent almost as badly as finding her here. To the far side of his field of vision, Trent could see a PKF pressure suit hanging in the corner, a simple security precaution most people took in pressurized environments. Trent smiled back at Melissa du Bois. “Lucky guess. Someone in the corridor mentioned the name as I was coming in, and then I saw the name on your pressure suit when I came in.” Wishing desperately that someone had mentioned the name on his way in, Trent turned slightly, reached out and turned the p-suit just a bit, so that the patch came into view –
The karma gods liked him. It said:
Sergent M. du Bois.
Trent let go of the p-suit with a hand that threatened to shake, shrugged, and said, “Did I guess right?”
Melissa sat back in her seat, and nodded with a faintly amused expression. “Yes. You did, Chief. You’re a quick-witted individual.” The smile came to her features easily; it marked her for an Elite created within the last seven years. Except for the artificial eyes, one would not have easily known her for a cyborg – even the eyes were better than the glassy oldstyle black Elite eyes; they were brown and just a bit too shiny to be real. Her hair looked real, cut short in a brush cut, the rich brown Trent remembered; and the golden brown skin, the color of a white woman with a tan, managed to look both soft and tight, stretched across hard muscle. She wore the long-sleeved black and silver PKF dress uniform, in a close cut. She looked military, looked dangerous, and looked, to Trent at least, amazingly sexy.
Trent had been following her career since he had last seen her, in January of ’70. She had been cyborged six years ago, in 2074, and had served in Los Angeles during the TriCentennial Rebellion. The last report he’d had of her, she had been assigned to duty in Capitol City, on Manhattan Island in New York. There was no meaningful discord between her rank of Sergeant, and her posting as Chief of Security at Halfway: an Elite Sergeant was an important individual, perhaps the equivalent of a commissioned Major in any traditional military service. Mohammed Vance, the Elite Commander, had, eighteen years prior, ordered a thermonuclear strike while still a Sergeant. Elite ranks more nearly resembled those of police: Officer and Corporal and then Detective – a very few Elite held the rank of Detective, though it was a common enough title among standard Peaceforcers assigned to a particular prefecture. Then Sergeant, to Lieutenant, to Captain, to Commissioner, and from there to Elite Commander.
Mohammed Vance had advanced from Sergeant to Elite Commander in only fourteen years.
“Have a seat,” Melissa said. “This won’t take us long, but we do need to get through it.” She gestured at the three smooth silvery ovals, sitting on the desk in front of Trent’s seat. “If you please.”
Trent picked up the largest oval, placed it against the back of his neck. It was light and it adhered to his skin. He picked up the two ovals that remained, held one in each hand.
A holofield appeared hanging off to Melissa’s right. She glanced at it, at the information it held, and then back to Trent. “Please answer yes to the next six questions. Are you twelve years old?”
The world around Trent grew distant. A voice that did not belong to him, a voice with Eugene Yovia’s faint English accent, said, “Yes.”
“Are you thirty-six years old?”
“Yes.”
“Is your name Antoin Smith?”
“Yes.” He’d introduced himself to her, ten years ago, as Trent Smith –
“Is your name Eugene James Yovia?”
“Yes.”
“Are you three meters tall?”
“Yes.”
“Are you 190 centimeters tall?”
“Yes.”
“Very good, M. Yovia. We’re calibrated.”
Call me Gene, Trent’s inskin said. “Call me Gene,” Eugene Yovia’s voice said.
She smiled at him, a gorgeous smile that reached Trent even through the layers of haze. “Very well, Gene. I’m Chief du Bois in public, and you’ll be Chief Yovia, but in private I’ll be happy to call you Gene.”
The muscles of Trent’s cheeks moved. A smile. Great. “Great.”
She glanced at her screen. “You can answer these questions as you please. This is your second tour of duty at Halfway?”
“Yes.”
“Nearly three years, your last tour, early ’73 to late ’75. You helped install most of the Three-C systems.” Command, control and communication. “You oversaw the early programming of Monitor.”
Monitor, the expert system that ran the Unity. It lacked self-awareness, like all legal expert systems. “That’s right.”
“You were promoted three times in three years, from programmer to sub-Chief of Three-C. You received a commendation for design improvements in the tracking systems used by the laser cannon –”
Trent’s inskin shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not a weapons guru, just a decent coder. I eliminated some unnecessary error checking in the target acquisition routines, improved response time nearly a sixteenth of a second. It was basic optimization, just hand-tuning; Monitor would have caught it when it went online. I just trimmed three large conditional blocks down into a single re-entrant loop.”
The smile came back, slightly larger. “Whatever that means. I don’t program, Gene. Your superiors were impressed, at the time.” She glanced at the holo, and the smile faded. “You got married on December 31, 2075.”
“Yes ... bad day to get married, it turns out. Commonest day of the year for people to get married. Everyone jacks their prices up ... caterer alone cost us each a month’s salary, and we were a well paid couple.”
“You quit your job and went downside to conceive and raise a child.”
“Yes. Janice was – concerned. She didn’t want to bear a child who would be trapped in low gee its entire life.”
“You tried to have the child genegineered.”
Silence. Trent let it stretch, then said, “Is that a question?”
“Why did you do that?”
“I went through all this with the PKF and the Space Force Security officers, downside.”
“Again, please.” It was not a request.
“The world is complex,” said Trent. “Multiple things happen on multiple levels.”
“Is that your answer?”
Reluctantly: “Janice has a tendency toward obesity. She fights it, but it’s a fight. On my side of the family we have weak eyesight and hereditary coronary disease. When we were arrested the court took notice of ameliorating circumstances. The designs we’d agreed to merely corrected our deficiencies. There was no attempt at radical genegineering ... it was just a misdemeanor.”
Melissa nodded, glancing at the holo. “Interesting,” she murmured, and Trent was not sure what she meant by that, his story or his readout. “I concede that I understand the impulse, Gene, to provide for your children, but the willingness to break the law – any law, no matter how much you disagree with it – it’s a discouraging thing to find in the record of a man being moved up to Chief of Information Systems.”
“If they could have found someone better, they would have,” Trent said softly. “I’m the best there is.”
She glanced at the holo again, and her lips twitched. “We
ll, there’s no doubt in you about that, is there?”
Trent shook his head. “No.”
“How do you feel about the Unification?”
It wasn’t even necessary for Trent to lie: “Mixed feelings. It may have saved humanity from nationalism. Today – we have problems, don’t we?”
“Yes. We do. How do you feel about the rebels?”
“The Reb and the Erisian Claw,” said Trent, answering a question she had not asked, “are fools. They’ve chosen an approach to the problem that doesn’t work. We have things that need to be improved, but the way they went about it, it won’t work. It didn’t.”
“How do you feel about the Unity?”
His inskin had to answer that one, and it did, manipulated Trent’s larynx, tongue, jaw, and Trent heard Yovia’s voice through a half-klick of radiation shielding. “About the ship itself? I don’t feel much of anything about it. Maybe it’s necessary. I’m not wise enough to know.”
“You have never danced, never considered Playing?”
“Considered it? Everybody considers it.” Sitting in fast time, the Image of self watching the body’s reactions, skirting around the truth – “I imagine I’d be a great Player. But I am extremely good at what I do, and extremely well paid. The incentives are outweighed by the disincentives.”
She nodded. “Have you ever been approached by the Rebs, or by the Claw, or any subversive organization?”
Eugene Yovia was approached, yes indeed. Months and months before the last Chief informed you folks that he was going to retire, we moved in on him. Have I been approached by a subversive organization, no, not the way you mean –
He said simply, “No.”
“Have you ever thought about joining one?”
The information was on file from other interviews with Yovia; Trent said, “When I was a young man, sure,” which was nothing but the truth, for both of them.
“Leaving aside your feelings about the ship: do you feel any conflicts about your work here on the Unity?”
Trent smiled at her. “None.” It was not the inskin speaking. “None at all.”
IT TOOK NEARLY another half an hour before Melissa du Bois was satisfied. More than once she approached the subject of his divorce, and then stopped herself; once she said, “No, never mind, none of my concern.” Finally she took the plates back from Trent, and told him she was done.
“So I pass? I’m a good patriot, am I?”
The look she gave him had steel in it. “Do I sense a certain cynicism in that question?”
“Noooo,” said Trent slowly. “Not really.”
“‘Not really.’” She nodded decisively. “I rather like you, Gene. You’re a good computerist, I’m sure. You seem a decent fellow. But a good patriot?” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t go that far. Not by my standards. A good patriot would never have left his job here, not even to get married and raise children. A good patriot would be oriented less toward his job, and more toward what his job here meant to the Unification.”
“I see.”
She stood, and Trent stood with her. “I’m fairly new here myself; I just took over from the previous Chief two days ago; so you and I will be starting out here together, come Monday morning.” She held a hand out, and Trent took it. Her handshake was pure business. “I’m looking forward to working with you, Gene. Chief Yovia.”
“Chief du Bois – Melissa – I’m looking forward to working here.”
She let go of his hand, and hesitated. “You know – if you don’t mind my saying, your file says you had biosculpture – you are a very interesting looking man.”
“Me and Elvis,” sneered Trent. It was a good sneer too, the King would have been proud, except he’d been dead for over a hundred years.
Melissa du Bois looked at him, at the sneer. “Right,” she said, with the faintest possible touch of uncertainty. “You and Elvis.” Clearly she had no idea who “Elvis” was. “Chief?”
Trent paused in the doorway. “Yes?”
She cocked her head to one side. “Is it possible ... you seem familiar. Have we met before somewhere?”
Trent felt as though someone had dipped his skull in liquid hydrogen. Wild goose bumps prickled the back of his neck. He gazed at her with as complete a lack of expression as he could manage. “No. I am sure I would remember.”
“Yes. Of course. Well ...” Melissa du Bois stared at Trent, visibly struggling with it, and then said, “Doubtless I’ll see you again in the next few weeks.”
Not if I see you first, thought Trent. “No doubt.”
IT WASN’T UNTIL after he’d left that it came to Trent what she’d meant by the questions, wondering if they’d met: she had no idea who he looked like.
Had she really never seen an Adam Selstrom sensable?
My, my, thought Trent. The girl has no social life at all.
She was thirty-three years old, Melissa du Bois, and had spent the last decade struggling to rebuild a semblance of a career out of the wreckage left by her last encounter with Trent. The struggle had marked her, visibly enough: she was harder than Trent remembered, and more cynical –
And much more dangerous.
TRENT HAD BEEN assigned a two-room suite in forty-one percent gee, the bottom or outermost ring, at what had once been the Halfway Hilton, before the imposition of martial law at Halfway. Early in ’77 Space Force had requisitioned the hotel, a double wheel design with counter-rotating wheels, and towed it to its current position a quarter klick out from the Unity.
They were good quarters, for a civilian. The bathing facilities were complete; an enclosed shower, an open tub with high sides, tile floors that would tolerate the inevitable low-gee splashing. The mirrors in the bathroom were a ridiculous extravagance; rather than using reflective paint that could be turned on and off, the Hilton had used actual mirrors, bolted to the walls.
Trent wondered if the mirrors were breakable, and hoped he would not have occasion to find out. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen a real mirror since leaving Earth, and could not recall an instance.
Trent assumed that his actions and conversations would be spied on at all times while in his quarters, and while aboard the Unity, and most of the rest of the time as well. He vaguely recalled that, decades ago, cameras – not even holocams, flat cameras – had been mounted behind mirrors. “One-way mirrors,” they’d been called. He thought that it had required a darkened room on the other side of the mirror, but wasn’t sure –
Not that it mattered. The PKF had not grown so incompetent that they couldn’t mount molecular cameras in a commercial hotel wherever they pleased.
He took Eugene Yovia’s suit coat off, kicked Yovia’s shoes off, and laid down on the bed, and fell asleep still wearing his shirt and slacks, and had nightmares all night.
11
THE SIGN THAT hung over Eugene Yovia’s workstation appeared to be hand-lettered – calligraphy, done with a slightly shaky hand: “Only success will be tolerated, and it must be good, too.”
“Well there, young fellow. Been a while, hasn’t it?” Sub-Chief Lendyl Kenneth Wilson, Ken or Kenny to those he worked with, sat at the keyboard in front of the systerm in Trent’s office; he spoke without looking up.
“Four, five years,” Trent said. “A while.”
Ken was that rarity, a man who was actually as old as he looked. He was in great shape – he had beaten Yovia at dropball with some regularity, back in ’75 – but he was casual about the cosmetic side of his geriatrics. At ninety-five he was rail-thin, with a shock of sparse white hair that tended to go in every possible direction by the end of a long day, with heavy laugh wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He hummed with energy. Trent couldn’t imagine where he got it from, as that day wore on; as far as he could tell the man didn’t actually eat.
“Have a seat, have a seat,” Ken said. His speech patterns were odd. Trent had watched a recording of a conversation between Yovia and Wilson, when Yovia accepted the job upstairs. Yovia had called Wilso
n to let him know he was coming back; they’d been friends, Yovia’s last tour. Wilson had a tendency to place heavy emphasis on odd words for no apparent reason – he was the sort who, in sensables, was called a “character.”
It was 08:05, Saturday morning. Trent had gone to the quarters assigned to Yovia, in the huge quarter-gee donut nearest the Unity, the night prior, and slept until 07:00, when his inskin had awakened him. He’d taken the first available shuttle over to the Unity, 07:30.
After over a decade living with the ten-hour clock used by the SpaceFarers’ Collective, and for that matter the rest of the Solar System except Earth and Unification Luna, it required a conscious effort to shift back into a twenty-four hour day. Trent let his inskin handle it; his biological component kept trying to convert times into the ten-hour clock it had grown used to. It surprised Trent to realize how deeply ingrained the habit was; he’d spent the first eighteen years of his life with a twenty-four hour clock, and he’d expected no difficulty in living under such a clock again.
Making just one reference to a ten hour clock would be a disaster. Now why did he do that, people would say –
– and Melissa would make a quick guess.
Ken gestured at the seat facing his, and Trent pulled himself into the chair. He left the seat ties untouched. The fact that the office had chairs was a sign that it had been designed for downsiders, with the psychological comfort of downsiders in mind; Halfers, and SpaceFarers too for that matter, see no point in chairs in a free fall environment. They just take up cubic.
“Been brushing up on your chess, have you? Good, good, maybe you can finally give me a game.”
“I’ve gotten a little better,” Trent admitted. “Enough to put a hurting on you ... not that it was ever all that hard.”
Ken Wilson was the best pure programmer Yovia had ever met, and at chess he had beaten Yovia – not really a bad player – five times out of six. Ken grinned at Trent, and said, “And dropball, too, you’ve been practicing your dropball.”
The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) Page 10
