To Hold Infinity

by John Meaney

  “Her exact words, I take it.”

  “More or less. She said it was bloody dangerous.”

  “That I can believe.” He touched the healing gel which Dhana had applied to his forehead. “She could be right.”

  “Believe it.” Brevan sat back, and took another sip from his mug. “On the other hand, if you feel you have to interface with something—”

  “Yes?”

  “—Try the autofact. Perhaps you can get it to make a decent cup of daistral.”

  The purple snow-capped ridge dropped away beneath them. Yoshiko leaned over to get a better view from the small flyer's cabin, and saw a flash of light in a silver thread of water far down the escarpment slope. Aquatic life?

  Sitting back, she saw higher mountains on the horizon, and below them forested hills and a vast bowl of fertile land.

  “We'll be there in twenty minutes.” Vin sounded distracted, deep in command interface.

  It struck Yoshiko for the first time how old-fashioned the Luculenti could be in this regard—as though they, themselves the products of tech, did not trust autonomous systems but had to delve into those systems’ guts.

  It was like an ancient mechanic-driver of automobiles, endlessly tuning some greasy combustion engine; or a glass-blowing alchemist or chemist creating his own apparatus; or an old-time assembler programmer hacking her low-level code.

  Fulgor had lost that first sheen of unfamiliarity, for Yoshiko.

  She felt at home in Vin's plush flyer. Outside, the bright sunlight and greenish sky, the limpid invigorating air and lower gravity, had assumed a kind of normality.

  Yet a part of her remained dislocated, out of phase with her new surroundings. Had Tetsuo ever grown to think of this world as home? She hoped he had, that he had settled in that much.

  Did he have girlfriends? She knew so little about her elder son. Though she would never dream of prying, she would have liked to know.

  She wondered how her own parents had coped with her leaving home to work and study. They had been upset when she had married Ken—fond though they were of him—and left Nihonjin Columbia to live and work in Okinawa.

  Sunk in reverie, Yoshiko was jerked into wakefulness as the flyer dipped to the right and flew past the edge of a dark green wood and glided in slowly over a long-grassed meadow, and the curving trefoil-shaped roof of Tetsuo's house.

  Their landing was a whisper on the grass.

  A young proctor, a fresh-faced boy with cropped brown hair, came down the path to meet them.

  “Morning, ma'am,” he said to Yoshiko. “Are you feeling well, today?”

  Yoshiko didn't quite remember him. He must have been one of the solicitous young men who had been kind to her before, when they had discovered Farsteen's body—

  “I'm fine. It is all right, isn't it? For me to be here? Vin, my friend here, did call Major Reilly.”

  She realized she was talking too much.

  Nervous old fool.

  “That's fine, ma'am. No problem at all. You can look around all you like.”

  “Thank you, officer.”

  Vin held Yoshiko's arm as they walked up to the house. Yoshiko patted Vin's hand, grateful for the support.

  Suppose Tetsuo's body was buried here, completely covered in a null-sheet and still undetected?

  “Which way?” asked Vin.

  They were in a short white-walled hallway with a polished wooden floor. A lifelike painting on black velvet, of a cobra curled around a rose, hung on the wall.

  The cobra's yellow eyes seemed to follow them.

  What had Tetsuo been involved in? Something worth killing for?

  “Yoshiko? Where do you want to start?”

  Yoshiko shook her head, undecided.

  Just why was she here?

  Could she somehow recreate Tetsuo's frame of mind, just by being here? And, by extension, some notion of what had occurred, and where he had gone?

  Some hope.

  “Wasn't his office down this way?” said Vin.

  “That's right.”

  “Shall we start there, then?”

  Yoshiko meekly followed Vin.

  They looked around the almost featureless room. Vin bent down to examine a stack of small black boxes, brow furrowing as she slipped into comms mode.

  “Nothing,” she said, after a while. “Nothing strange, no info, no strange devices I can't fathom.”

  “Oh. Never mind.”

  It was strange, knowing she was walking through her son's home, yet not seeing his round, smiling face, his cheerful voice—

  “Perhaps we should look somewhere else.”

  Yoshiko nodded, and followed Vin out of the room.

  Next down the hallway was a gallery of holo stills: landscapes and animals and fanciful abstracts of light. Vin bent over the nearest one.

  “This one's done by your son. There's his ID.” Vin looked down the gallery. “In fact, it looks like he created most of them.”

  Yoshiko felt…empty. Tetsuo had created these works of art? Her Tetsuo?

  She was in a stranger's house, but the stranger was her own son.

  It tugged at her: a leaping lynxette, frozen in flight, eyes wide and big paws spread ready to down her prey. Streaks of white across left foreleg and belly, the rest a fiery orange and glowing yellowish fur.

  Yoshiko felt her stomach flip as she examined the exquisite detail, combined with the almost-living spirit the artist, her son, had captured.

  It was more than that. Something, something about this holo spoke very deeply to her.

  “Look,” said Vin. “Isn't this owl something?”

  As Yoshiko turned, a big tawny owl swivelled its head and looked straight at her with round night-hunter's eyes, its body perfectly still. For a moment, she did not know whether the owl was real or holo, but Vin passed her hand disconcertingly straight through the image.

  “Marvellous.” Yoshiko's own voice sounded distant to her.

  A proctor passed the doorway, not the young man who had greeted them but another youngster. He paid Yoshiko and Vin no heed as he passed on into the central portion of the house.

  Something about that lynxette…

  Yoshiko tagged along as Vin made a tour of the rest of the house. In the kitchen, they stopped and used the autofact to make daistral. The drink made Yoshiko immediately feel better.

  “Solo,” she said suddenly.

  The lynxette.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Vin.

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  Could it be a message just for her? Or was it just a coincidence?

  Or an old woman's stupid fantasy?

  Poor old Solo was decades dead of a feline retrovirus, but he had always been Tetsuo's favourite lynxette, curling up on Tetsuo's bed and following him like a shadow around the house.

  The thing was, Solo had been grey. The white markings in the holo were true to life, but the orange tigerish fur was the wrong colouration. Either something had glitched the display program code, or it was a deliberate alteration.

  A message? Had he known that Yoshiko would be here, and that she—and only she—would spot the fault in the image?

  “More daistral?” asked Vin.

  Vin had passed her hand through the image of the owl…

  An object could be concealed inside a holo. Coated in null-gel, the ingredient used for null-sheets, it would have escaped detection by the proctors’ scans.

  “I need some fresh air.”

  The sloping meadow dropped away from the house. Yoshiko and Vin walked slowly, breathing the clear air beneath a green and turquoise sky.

  “Hard to imagine,” said Vin, “that something bad could happen here.”

  Yoshiko looked around. The proctors were all inside the house, or behind it.

  “Vin? What's the penalty here for murder?”

  “Penalty?” said Vin. “Nothing fixed. That would be determined by the hearing-committee for each separate case. They can recommend anything.”

>   “Anything?”

  “Each case is seen as dependent on context. Likewise, the penalty can be incarceration, readjustment, financial reparation or brainwipe. Or whatever they come up with.”

  It did not sound promising. Yoshiko could not decide whether this was a harsh regime or enlightened, strict or forgiving.

  What was inside the holo? Anything?

  They walked back to the house, and took the meandering path which encircled it.

  Around a jutting curve of the tripartite house, they came across the young proctor who had greeted them. His back was to them, and his left arm was held crooked in front of him. A three-dimensional array of white and black ellipsoids above a fine golden grid floated over his forearm.

  “A tough position,” said Vin softly.

  The proctor spun round, face flushing guiltily. He waved the display away.

  “Are you white or black?” asked Yoshiko.

  “White.”

  “Looked like you had the advantage,” said Vin.

  “Only just. You guys play solid go?”

  Yoshiko shook her head, and Vin gave a small shrug.

  “Not really,” said Vin. “I just—”

  “—Know the rules.” The young man grinned. “Sure. I've heard that one before.”

  Vin grinned in reply, and Yoshiko realized for the first time that they were of an age, these two. And immediately easy in each other's company, despite Vin's Luculenta status.

  “Would you like a game?” Vin asked. “When you've finished that one?”

  “OK,” said the young man. “Can I call you?”

  “My ident.”

  The proctor held up his wrist, which was encircled by a narrow black bracelet. When Vin nodded, he dropped his hand back to his side, having downloaded her ident code.

  “I'm Brian Donnelly,” he said.

  “Vin Maximilian.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  Yoshiko slipped away from them quietly.

  She went into the kitchen and fetched a glass of water and carried it with her into the art gallery.

  “So you did these, my son?” she asked the empty room, loud enough for a surveillance system to pick up her words.

  The floor was polished tiles on which lay a woven Navajo rug. As Yoshiko stepped onto the rug her foot slid forwards—accidentally on purpose—and she dropped the glass of water to the floor and grabbed a pedestal for support.

  Her hand sank into the image of the orange lynxette, and she felt a small walnut-sized lump on the flat surface and palmed it quickly.

  “Damn!”

  The glass rang as it hit the floor, but did not break.

  “Oh, hell.”

  She held the strange object hidden between her curled fingers. It felt small and hard and dry.

  “Hi—” Vin's voice came from the doorway.

  “I am a clumsy old fool.” Yoshiko bent down, unobtrusively tucking the small object into her waistband, and picked up the glass. “So—I thought you were still outside.”

  “I—just followed you.”

  Had she seen Yoshiko palm the concealed object?

  No matter. Vin was her friend and ally. If she had seen it, she would not tell anyone. Or would she? There had been a crime committed here, after all.

  “You seemed to be getting on quite well with that young man. Brian, was it?”

  Vin nodded, reddening slightly, and turned away.

  “He's OK.”

  Yoshiko put down the glass and with her other hand slipped the small object into her jumpsuit's thigh pocket. Now it was safe.

  “Will you be seeing this, ah, Brian again?”

  “Physically? I don't know,” said Vin. “We'll be playing solid go tomorrow or the day after, in Skein.”

  “Good luck,” said Yoshiko. “Though I don't suppose you need it.”

  “I won't be using my extended plexcore routines—”

  Yoshiko nodded, as though she understood what that meant.

  “—And Brian's free to augment his game with strategy adviser modules. And he is a third dan, apparently.”

  “Isn't he rather young to have reached that grade?”

  “Exactly. We may have quite an interesting game after all.”

  “I hope you enjoy it.” Yoshiko looked around her. “You know, I think I'm finished here. What about you?”

  Vin shrugged. “Whatever you say. We can be home in time for dinner. Septor's going to be there, though.”

  “That'll be nice,” said Yoshiko.

  “For him, anyway.”

  The simulation pulsed with light.

  It was a conversation, a , but it was taking place only in the vivid space of Rafael's augmented imagination. Both -participants, and the watching third party, were ghost-Rafaels.

  Lying, in reality, on a floating lounger in his hothouse pool, Rafael was only peripherally aware of the drip of water from wet leaves, the warm lapping of the pool, the cloying odour of wild orchids.

  In his mind, he saw complex billowing clouds, each a hundred shades of glowing blue twisting through a thirty-dimensional phase space.

  Two of the clouds were linked by an arrow-straight shaft of white light. It simulated two Luculenti in conversation.

  Would it work?

  A black bat stirred, in the third cloud. The Luculentus mind which was not conversing: simulating Rafael, about to launch his infiltration code.

  The bat spread its wings, then arrowed into one of the conversing ghost-Rafaels. Immediately, the white shaft of light disappeared, as the channel dropped.

  So far, as he had expected.

  One Rafael with infiltration code had attacked a Luculentus. The target had been in conversation with another. Would that other have detected what had occurred?

  No feedback.

  He was safe.

  Even if Xanthia were linked in at the moment he launched his code, she would still succumb without anyone else being aware of what had happened.

  He banished the three ghost-Rafaels from his mind.

  There was a sick, excited feeling in his stomach. He was going to do it.

  A ghost-Rafael stood in front of him.

  For a moment, he thought he had made some mistake in clearing the simulation. Then he realized: this was a returning NetAngel.

  Rafael interfaced, and found himself floating in an endless space of vaulted spheres, among which tiny polygons swam. A SatScan dataseam.

  He/the ghost-Rafael reached out to a tiny tile in the intricate mosaic which walled the sphere. Instantly a picture unfurled, and a text-tesseract blossomed to one side.

  [[ident Terra:98227A21 Sunadomari Yoshiko]]

  Oh, really?

  As the SatScan image grew, he recognized the Maltese-cross outline immediately.

  An aerial view of the Maximilians’ home.

  He overlaid the image with a sheaf of escape trajectories, depending on which flyer he might use to go to the Aphelion Ball tonight. No harm in planning for contingencies. If things got that desperate, he would return here as well, to the SatScan dataseams, to wipe out the scan-images.

  That would be the last resort, a most boring and unsubtle way of covering his traces. He hoped he could complete his task with rather more finesse than that. The beautiful Xanthia deserved better.

  So why was a Sunadomari associated with the Maximilian home?

  He wiped away the glowing trajectory-lines, and zoomed in on the realtime image like a hawk swooping down upon its prey.

  Movement.

  In the grounds, two dots of motion on an emerald lawn.

  From above, the image looked like a whirling dance, and it was a moment before Rafael realized what he was watching. The white-clad person was Sunadomari Yoshiko, and she was wielding a long slender staff—no, a narrow-bladed halberd.

  Her black-clad opponent beat back her attack, sunlight flashing from his sword-blade.

  Tetsuo's mother. Awesomely agile, fo
r her age.

  Not much like her son.

  There was a fierce exchange of blows, then Yoshiko jumped forward, whipping her halberd through a horizontal arc passing beneath her opponent's weapon and cutting into his body.

  The black-clad swordsman did not crumple: he vanished.

  An image. Rafael felt a spurt of anger at having been deceived, then he let the feeling go and chuckled to himself.

  He turned away, and the image folded itself up into a tiny square tile, and inserted itself into the mosaic of the spherical hall.

  Hardly a coincidence, that Yoshiko was staying at the Maximilians’ home, when Rafael had just been invited there for the Aphelion Ball.

  Rafael floated, thinking, to the next sphere, and drifted slowly along the mosaic of its wall.

  Here.

  He touched a tile, and it unfurled around him to form an aerial view of the del'Ortega property. It was time-stamped the night he had plundered Marianan's tomb, and subsumed all the fragmentary code within her plexcore.

  There was a heat trace crossing the gardens, but it was unresolved. Nothing to indicate a human presence, much less identify it as Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega. Excellent.

  He turned away, and allowed the image to fold up into a tile and replace itself in the mosaic.

  One last thing to try, though he did not expect success.

  Guessing the most probable date of Tetsuo's disappearance, he floated through to the relevant hall. Remembering the coordinates of Tetsuo's house, he swam closer to the tile he needed.

  Pale shapes, near-invisible distortions, hung near the tile.

  Surveillance NetSprites. Watching and waiting.

  Taking a deep breath, Rafael turned and exited Skein completely.

  “Why the hell are we doing this?” Dhana's voice was edged with tension.

  Tetsuo, who had left Brevan's study to use the bathroom, hung around outside and listened.

  “Well, for one thing, it's another four bloody days till the demonstration—”

  What demonstration? wondered Tetsuo.

  “—And for another, when it's over, we've still got to come back and carry on with our work, haven't we?”

  “I suppose so.”