To Hold Infinity

by John Meaney

  Dawn painted the sky pale turquoise, splashed it briefly with gold and scarlet, then gave way to glorious morning.

  In synch, finally, with local conditions, Yoshiko performed her morning training on the cool lawn. Terran chaffinches twittered in the trees, and the scent of mutated syringa-shrubs was sharp in the air.

  Afterwards, she went inside and showered, and a house terminal directed her to the breakfast room where Lori was already sitting down to eat.

  A silver tabby lynxette was sitting elegantly beneath a window. As Lori tucked in to her bowl of fruit and cereal, the lynxette bent her head to her dish of protein gruel. Her small tongue showed pink as she lapped it up.

  “That's Dawn,” said Lori. “She likes to eat breakfast with everyone else.”

  “She's beautiful.”

  “Mrrrgah,” the lynxette cried softly, as though in agreement.

  Yoshiko began to pick at her food.

  “You made some progress yesterday, I hear.”

  “Not much.” Yoshiko shook her head. “Rafael de la Vega's name was mentioned again, but this time it could easily be coincidence. He was my son's sponsor, after all.”

  “There's the question of Tetsuo's relationship with Adam Farsteen.”

  Yoshiko looked away. “The proctors will be already investigating that.”

  “Indeed.” Lori dabbed her mouth with a napkin, and pushed her dishes away.

  “But the Aphelion Ball is in two days’ time, and we have a high-ranking official visiting us.”

  “Major Reilly?”

  “No, no. The head of TacCorps. Luculentus Federico Gisanthro. If we need to exert some high-level influence, he's our man.”

  “That's good.” Yoshiko stared out of the window, at the mountains’ distant grandeur. “I don't suppose…Is there a Pilots’ Sanctuary on Fulgor?”

  “Let me check.” Lori's gaze grew unfocussed. “Yes. Two, in fact. The larger is in Lucis. Rather near Lowtown.”

  “Can I call them?”

  “Go ahead.” Lori fetched a small terminal from a table and placed it in front of Yoshiko. “I'll see you later.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lori left. The lynxette came over, and rubbed her whiskers against Yoshiko's leg. Absent-mindedly, Yoshiko scratched behind the lynxette's ears.

  She gestured the terminal into life, and requested a realtime call to the Pilots’ Sanctuary in Lucis.

  The head and shoulders of a young man appeared above the terminal.

  No more than Vin's age, he had pale skin, stretched taut over high cheekbones, and his eyes were deep glittering black. Like all Pilots’ eyes, they lacked any surrounding white.

  The young man bowed.

  “I am Pilot Noviciate Edralix Corsdavin.”

  “Sunadomari Yoshiko.”

  “I am honoured. May I help you in any way?”

  “Truly, I don't know.” Yoshiko hesitated. “It's a personal problem. My son disappeared a few days ago.”

  The young Pilot, Edralix, looked off to one side. “The NewsNets have reported this.”

  “I hadn't realized.”

  “It started as a human interest story, peripherally related to the Skein conference.” His dark eyes were expressionless. “There's been more coverage since.”

  Good old Maggie. Perhaps it would help to keep an open investigation going. It stood to reason that anything to do with LuxPrime, the technological cornerstone of Luculentus society, would be kept behind closed doors as much as possible.

  “Does the Pilots’ Confederation have anything to do with Fulgor's SatScan system?”

  Edralix shook his head.

  “There's no mu-space tech involved.”

  “I see.”

  Another wasted effort. She had hoped to access orbital scan-logs, showing Tetsuo's house, on the day he had disappeared.

  Maybe showing that poor man, Adam Farsteen…

  “—in a few days,” Edralix was saying.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Er, there'll be a Pilot here in a couple of days.” Edralix's youthful uncertainty was apparent. “Until then, it's just me and the tech staff.”

  “You've been very helpful.”

  “I'll get Pilot deVries to call you as soon as she arrives.”

  “Is that Jana deVries?” Yoshiko sat upright. “I met her on Ardua Station, in Terran orbit. I think she piloted the ship which brought me here to Fulgor.”

  “That would be right.” Edralix nodded. “She'll be back soon, with a layover for a few days.”

  “It would be nice to talk to her again. She was very kind.”

  “Yes.” A smile lit up Edralix's features. “She's the best.”

  “Thank you very much for your help.”

  “That's OK,” said Edralix. “And, er, good luck.”

  Yoshiko waved the display into nothingness.

  “Mrrgaow?”

  “Don't worry.” Yoshiko rubbed the lynxette's head. Outside, sunlight glinted gold off the distant snowcovered peaks. “We're going to get some help.”

  Time to make use of his contacts.

  Rafael had never tried to form any close contacts within the supposedly incorruptible LuxPrime. It was the only way to avoid entrapment, to avoid meeting someone who might guess how he had subverted their technology.

  In Skein, he asked for a realtime comm to Captain Rogers at the Bureau for Offworld Affairs. A busy-icon greeted his request.

  He left no message.

  Always, he dealt with contractors at several removes from prime sources like LuxPrime. Now, he prepared a flock of NetAngels to contact them all, on various pretexts. Should any ghost-Rafael detect responses which were outside its expected paradigm, it would immediately get hold of the real Rafael, who would smoothly take its place.

  He entrusted the task to AIs only because he expected no results.

  As the NetAngels began their tasks, the real Rafael dipped in and out of Skein, sampling their conversations.

  None of them even hinted at wrongdoing or tragedy involving a principal LuxPrime courier. News of such an event should have cascaded rapidly through his network of contacts and associates.

  Had Farsteen disappeared, in the same manner as Tetsuo?

  In reality, Rafael leaned back in his couch and stared at the ceiling. He wondered if he had a pretext for calling Federico, and seeing if he could extract any information from him.

  Perhaps a complaint about harassment by Maggie Brown…No, that didn't strike the right tone. Perhaps just passing on the confidential info he had inferred from the wording of her questions. That should do it.

  He did not, however, hold much hope of Federico's dropping useful hints, unless it suited some purpose of his own.

  Still, he hesitated. Federico Gisanthro was his most useful contact—apart, possibly, from the corrupt Captain Rogers—facilitating Rafael's introduction to offworld workers in mu-space tech and other fields. But Federico was, too, his most dangerous associate, as sharp as they came, and if he ever once suspected the existence of Rafael's vampire code or the mu-space comms network which held his vast plexcore nexus, then there would be a TacCorps team here in seconds.

  Just searching his house, and discovering the buried plexcores, would be enough to indict him.

  All right. Just do it.

  He pictured Federico's ideogram.

  [[Luculentus Federico Gisanthro, ident 5γ33G3• {sept∆2∑}]]

  “Hello, Federico, old chap.”

  <<>>

  He was in a cavern—no, a grey man-made tunnel where only a few white glowglobes cast black sheets of shadow across construction debris. Federico was crouched down against a small yellow dirt-covered mining machine, which bore the label “Bronto.”

  <>

  <>

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  White beams flickered out of the darkness and a man fell at
Federico's feet.

  “The bastards,” whispered the fallen man, frozen in position.

  “The jumpsuits—” A rictus spread across Federico's face as he returned fire. “—The beams solidify the jumpsuits.” He turned away from the Rafael-image. “Now! Go!”

  For a moment Rafael thought Federico meant him.

  Federico, flanked by two of his men, vaulted over a pile of battered drums and fallen joists, and ran to the tunnel's side.

  Rafael's viewpoint whirled sickeningly as he followed. At least he had to expend no physical effort to keep up.

  Federico and his men began to climb up twisted steel rods, which hung like uncovered roots from the dark bare earth. They crawled up to the tunnel's ceiling, and hung upside down like spiders from the carry-rail which threaded the ceiling's apex.

  Rafael's point of view rotated through one hundred and eighty degrees and he fought back his vertigo, reminding himself of the feel of his chair beneath his hands, back in his own home.

  “So what,” asked Federico, “can I do for you?”

  He did not look in the mood for chit-chat.

  “I gave a news interview to an Earther.”

  “Jolly good.” Federico dragged himself along the rail.

  Rafael noticed the tiny safety link which hooked him to the rail, quite useless if the rail itself gave way. The man had no nerves.

  “She seemed to hint about some trouble at LuxPrime.” Rafael swallowed, despite himself, as they moved out over a vertical shaft whose bottom was invisible. “Something about a courier called Adam Farsteen.”

  “Really?” Federico, hanging by one arm, helped his men to attach some equipment.

  “Just thought I'd let you know.”

  “Very decent of you, old chap.”

  A beam sizzled past Federico and he dropped spiderlike from the ceiling, brought up with a jolt by his harness, as he twisted round and returned fire. Rafael heard a faint cry from below.

  “Sorry, Rafael, I'm a little busy now.”

  Like questing fingers, beams spread up from the darkness. Federico's own men, dangling from the ceiling beside him, readied some sort of weapons array.

  A flash of white. A beam cracked past centimetres from Federico's face.

  “See you later, chum.”

  <<>>

  …And Rafael was sitting back in his chair, breathing hard, the smooth arms slick beneath his sweating palms.

  “Nice friends you've got,” he said to the empty room.

  As though other people—besides the sweet things he subsumed into himself—could ever matter to him.

  Federico was a dangerous quantity to manipulate, and would return anything he discovered about LuxPrime only if it was in his interests, but Rafael could handle him.

  Rafael himself was an emergent property of an underlying neural community the likes of which the universe had never seen. Someday he would be powerful enough to strike at will through Skein, plunder any mind he chose, plunder every mind on Fulgor—

  A fantasy? Perhaps not.

  “Move over, God.” He could. He could really do it. “Rafael Garcia de la Vega is taking your place.”

  Tetsuo leaned against the research station's balcony. The stone balustrade felt powdery through the thin film of gel which covered his hands.

  Sunset's spectacular crimsons and oranges streaked the sky. This low in the canyon, planes of shadow hid the rockface walls, and the sun itself had long disappeared from sight.

  “Pretty, isn't it?” said Dhana beside him.

  “Yeah. Look at the way the light catches that quartz up there, by the rim.”

  “Mmm.”

  Tetsuo adjusted his resp-mask, then stopped fidgeting and watched the sky slowly grow a deeper red, bruised with purple and vermilion. The silence was companionable, but all the while he was intensely aware of Dhana standing beside him, drinking in the same sights as he.

  “Brevan hasn't grown to like me much, has he?”

  “I wouldn't say that. He's got a lot on his mind.”

  Tetsuo shifted his resp-mask. “I don't suppose I could get one of those membrane implants?”

  Dhana touched the gill-like bands across her neck.

  “It's not worth it, unless you live out here for a long time.”

  “I suppose not.”

  The shadows drew in across the canyon.

  “It's peaceful here,” he said. “I'm not surprised no one knows about your work, if you're all this far out in the wilderness.”

  “We've organized small demonstration sites before, and tried to make them public. And once we actually staged a small march in Soltar City.”

  There was a bitter expression on her face.

  “What went wrong?” he asked carefully.

  “Proctors. TacTeams broke up the demos, and broke a few heads in the process.”

  After a pause, Tetsuo said, “I met Federico Gisanthro once. The head of TacCorps.”

  “Really.”

  “Seemed like a bit of a hard case,” said Tetsuo. “Can't say I liked him.”

  “Damned Luculentus—” Dhana looked up at his headgear briefly.

  “Sorry. But we've heard about Federico Gisanthro. Machiavellian as they get.”

  “I'm not surprised.”

  “His identity as head of TacCorps is only public knowledge because of legislation, you know. It's said that he manipulates other Luculenti as easily as they could manipulate schoolchildren.”

  “Said by whom?”

  “Our political analysts.”

  Tetsuo remembered the piercing gaze of those mismatched eyes. He shivered.

  “But you have Luculenti help, don't you?” he said. “Otherwise Brevan would never have known about my upraise op. The information was only in Skein.”

  “Yes, there are Luculenti who are sympathetic to us. So far, they've kept our existence pretty much secret. TacCorps taught us the wisdom of that.”

  He wasn't really paying attention to her now. Had he really been so forgetful, so ready to ignore the trouble he was in?

  “I suppose you know I left my flyer in Nether Canyon, don't you?” asked Tetsuo. “Do you think I could go back to it? With you or Brevan as escort?”

  “I don't know.” Dhana's glance flicked quickly to her left.

  Tetsuo wondered what it was she was failing to tell him, and decided that his only recourse was to be open himself.

  “There's a small set of infocrystals in the flyer. That's all I'm after.”

  “What kind of info?”

  “I don't know.” He held up a hand as Dhana started to speak. “Honestly. I couldn't access it before. It's all held in intelligent facets, encrypted and protected. But I might be able to get at the info now.”

  He pointed at his Luculentus headgear. He had no idea whether his mindware, which had come with his prime—and so far only—plexcore, embedded in his torso, was still active in the background at some deep neural level.

  He desperately needed training ware and Luculentus guidance. But there was a chance he had integrated enough to access the infocrystals’ contents: he was sure that the strange info-formats were LuxPrime design, for Luculentus access.

  “Where did it come from?” asked Dhana. “This info, that you couldn't read?”

  He closed his eyes and let out a long breath.

  “Stolen from LuxPrime, I think.”

  “You're kidding. From LuxPrime?”

  “I think so.”

  “That's impossible.”

  “Is it? Their staff are only human.”

  “Incorruptible, more like.”

  “Perhaps—” Tetsuo looked hard at Dhana, willing her to trust him. “I was visiting the Bureau for Offworld Affairs,” he said slowly. “A Captain Rogers was giving me clearance for the upraise. Pretty much a formality if you already have a work permit; they do a full check on you when you apply for that.”

  Dhana leaned her head to one side. “What's this got to do
with LuxPrime?”

  “Well—I was waiting outside his office,” Tetsuo said, “and I could hear a blazing row between two men going on inside, though I couldn't make out what they were shouting about. After a while, the door opened and a tall thin guy stormed out, wearing LuxPrime colours, and then Captain Rogers came puffing out after him…”

  Tetsuo swallowed. Was the LuxPrime employee the same man who had been in the video-log? Farsteen?

  Thin, fair-haired. It could have been him. Easily.

  Tetsuo shook his head. If only he hadn't left the video-log crystal in his house…

  “Go on,” Dhana said.

  Tetsuo was peripherally aware of the intent concentration in her eyes.

  “Rogers pounded off down the corridor. And I—couldn't resist the temptation.”

  “You stole infocrystals from a proctor's office?”

  “Copied them,” Tetsuo said simply. “I had a wrist terminal and a set of crystals on me.”

  “I wouldn't have thought,” said Dhana, “that you could copy something in Luculentus formats.”

  Tetsuo smiled sadly.

  “Cracking systems,” he said, “is the one thing I'm really good at. Besides, the first crystal was easy—a different format, relatively unprotected. That just made the remaining crystals a challenge I couldn't ignore, don't you see?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Ah, well. When Rogers came back, we both pretended nothing had happened, and he rushed through the procedures in ten minutes flat, told me I was authorized as far as he was concerned, and saw me out of the building. He locked his door that time, too.”

  “A bit late,” said Dhana.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So there's at least one crystal in the flyer which we, you, can read?”

  Tetsuo shook his head. “I left two crystals at home. I hid the unprotected one: it seemed to be a LuxPrime diagram of how a nexus works, but I didn't spend much time looking at it. I was far too busy.”

  “Busy?”

  “With work, you know?” Tetsuo shook his head. “Funny, how all that suddenly seems a bad dream, when I've only been here a few days.”