An entire working day (and three meetings) later, Mike finally got the keys to Room 4117 and its contents, including his carefully photocopied lexicon and handwritten notes on hochsprache. There was other material, too: an intimidating row of nonclassified but obscure works on proto-Germanic and Norse linguistics. The room itself was sparsely furnished and windowless, half filled by the single desk. The PC, and an audio-typist’s tape deck, were fastened to it by steel cables, and as if to drive home the point, a framed print on the wall behind the PC reproached him: SECURITY, IT’S MORE THAN YOUR JOB THAT’S AT STAKE.
Then Marilyn brought him the box of material he was supposed to be working with.
“You’re kidding me. I’ve got to sign for a bunch of cassette tapes?”
“You got it. Here and here.” She pointed to the relevant lines on the form.
“Some of these look like they’ve been chewed by a dog.”
“You’re working with primary source material now. You’d be amazed at some of the stuff we get coming in from Pakistan and the Middle East.” She paused while he signed the clipboard. “These are originals, Mr. Fleming. They’ve been backed up—they’re in the library if anything goes wrong—but most of our analysts work with primary recordings wherever possible. Just in case anything’s missing from the backup copy. There shouldn’t be any problems of that kind, but you can never be quite sure. As to why it’s on cassette tape, I couldn’t possibly say. Perhaps that’s all the field officer had to hand. They’re still common in some parts of the world.” She smiled tightly and tapped the yellowing plastic lid on the secretarial recorder with a fingertip. “Do you remember how to use one of these?”
“I think I can cope.” Mike looked at the headset doubtfully. “What’s that?” He pointed at a hole that had been drilled through a red button on the machine’s control panel.
“That was the record button. They disconnect the erase head, too, just in case; this one’s strictly playback only.”
“What, in case I slip and accidentally delete something?”
“No, it’s in case you try to record a message for the accomplice you’ve got working down in library services to smuggle out of the establishment, Mr. Fleming. That should have been in your security briefing materials. We are very methodical here.”
“I can see that.” Mike picked up the first of the cassettes; a thin patina of dust grayed the hand-scribbled label. “Has this been in your archives for long?”
“I don’t know and I couldn’t say.”
After Marilyn left, Mike sorted through the box. There were ten cassettes in all, and some of them were clearly years old. Most were identified only by a serial number scribbled on one side; a couple of them showed signs of the tape having been crumpled, as if they had unspooled and been painstakingly reassembled from a tangle of twisted Mylar. It had been years since Mike had last bothered with a cassette tape in everyday life; his last two automobiles had come with CD players. They were an obsolete technology, analog recordings on thin ribbons of Mylar tape. It seemed very strange to be working with them again, inside a windowless cell in a huge concrete office block in Maryland. But then again, a little voice reminded him: They’re robust. The equipment’s cheap, and doesn’t have to look like a spy tool. And you can replace them easily. Why fix something if it isn’t broken?
And so he slotted the first tape into the player, donned the headset, and pressed the PLAY button.
And it made very little sense whatsoever, even on the third replay.
By the third day, Mike had just about worked out what his problem was. It wasn’t just his grasp of the language, poor as it was. It wasn’t the clarity of the recordings, either—the microphone had been reasonably well placed, and it was of adequate sensitivity. The men (and occasional women) he heard discussing things in what sounded like an office suite—these were regular business meetings, as far as he could tell—were audible enough, and he could make out most of their words with a little effort. Many of their terms were unfamiliar, but as if to balance things out, the speakers used familiar English words quite often, albeit with an accent that gave Mike some trouble at first.
“It’s the context,” he told the security awareness poster. “Knowing what they’re talking about is as important as knowing what they’re saying.” He waved his hands widely, taking in the expanse of his empire—the desk, the chair, the walls—and declaimed, “Half of what gets said in any committee meeting doesn’t get expressed verbally, it’s all body language and gestures and who’s making eye contact with whom. Jesus.” He looked at the box of tapes disgustedly. “Maybe these would be some use to a secretary who sat in on the meeting, fodder for the minutes. . . .”
His eyes widened as he remembered lying on the floor in an empty office, Matthias—source GREENSLEEVES—standing over him with a gun: “If you’d gone after the Clan as a police operation, that would have given the thin white duke something more urgent to worry about than a missing secretary, no?”
Jesus. He stared at the tapes in surprise. Matthias was their boss man’s—the thin white duke’s—secretary, wasn’t he? These are probably his transcripts. Not that he’d recognized the defector’s voice—it had been months since he’d died, and Matt’s voice wasn’t distinctive enough to draw his attention, not on an elderly tape recording of a meeting—but the implications . . . GREENSLEEVES didn’t bring any tapes with him when he defected, so how did these get here? We have a spy in the Clan’s security apparatus, high enough up to get us these tapes. I wonder who they are? And what else they’ve brought over? . . .
In a shack attached to the stables at the back of Helge’s temporary palace, a man in combat fatigues sat on a swivel chair and contemplated failure.
“It’s not working,” he complained, and rubbed his aching forehead. “What am I doing wrong, bro?”
“Patience.” Huw carried on typing notes on a laptop perched precariously on one knee.
This experiment was Helge’s idea. “The first time I world-walked I was sitting down,” she’d told him. “That’s not supposed to be possible, is it? And then, later, I”—a shadow crossed her face—“I was brought across. In a wheelchair.” Her frown deepened. “There’s stuff we’ve been lied to about, Huw. I don’t know whether it’s from ignorance or deliberate, but we ought to find out, don’t you think?”
Angbard had said get to the bottom of it, and while the duke was hors de combat, Huw was more than happy to keep on following the same line of inquiry for Helge. “Okay, that’s test number four. Let’s try out the next set of casters. You want to stand up while I fit them?”
“Yah.” Yul stood, then picked up the chair, inverted it, and planted it on the workbench.
Huw put down the laptop then went to work on the upturned chair’s wheels with a multi-tool, worrying them until they came loose. He pulled another set of feet from a box and began installing them. “This set should work better, if I’m right,” he explained as he worked. “High density polyethylene is a very good insulator, and they’re hard—reducing the contact area with the ground.”
“What about the mat?” asked Yul.
“That, too. We’ll try that first: you, me, then Elena. Then without the mat.”
“You think the mat has something to do with it?”
“I’m not sure.” Huw straightened up. “She world-walked in an office chair. We don’t do that because it never occurred to anyone. They tried wheelbarrows, and on horseback, back in the day. Even a carriage plus four. All we know is that nobody world-walks in a vehicle, because when they tried to do it, it didn’t work. But we do it on foot, wearing shoes or boots. So what’s going on? What’s different about boots and wheels?”
“Horses weigh a lot,” Yul pointed out. “So do wooden barrows, or carriages.”
“Yes, but.” Huw reached for a mallet and a wooden dowel, lined them up carefully, and gave a recalcitrant caster a whack. “We don’t know. There are other explanations, like: Most shoes are made to be waterproof, yes? Whi
ch makes them nonconductive. Whereas anyone who tried horses would have used one that was properly shod. . . . I just want to try again, from first principles.”
“Why not get Rudi to try it in midair?” asked Yul.
Huw snorted. “Would you like to give yourself a world-walker’s head in midair, while trying to fly a plane? And what if it works but doesn’t take the plane with the pilot?”
“Oh.” Yul looked thoughtful. “Could he try it in a balloon? With a parachute, set up to unfold immediately if he fell? Or maybe a passenger to do the world-walking?”
Huw stopped dead. “That’s a good idea. Hold this.” He passed the chair to his brother while he opened up the laptop again and hastily tapped out a note. “You volunteering?”
“What, me? No! I can’t skydive! I get dizzy wearing platform soles!”
“Just asking.” Huw shut the laptop again. “Whoever does it, that intrepid adventurer, they’ll get lots of attention from the ladies.”
“You think?” Yul brightened slightly.
“Absolutely,” Huw said blandly. Especially from her majesty, but best not to swell Yul’s head. “Hand me that test meter then get the carpet protector. . . .”
It was, he figured, a matter of getting the conditions right.
“There are a couple of possibilities,” he’d told Helge earlier in the morning, when she’d appeared in the stables, unannounced and unexpected, just like any other country squire’s wife making her daily rounds of the estate. “It could be the exclusion effect.” It was well known that you couldn’t world-walk if there was a solid object in the way in the destination world. “What if the ground pressure of feet or shoes doesn’t set up a potential interpenetration, but wheels do? There’s a smaller contact area, after all.”
“Can women world-walk in stiletto heels?” Helge had thrown back at him, looking half-amused.
“What? Have you—”
“I’ve never tried. I’m not good in heels, and world-walking in them isn’t something I’d do deliberately.” She paused. “But it’s one for your list, isn’t it?”
“I’ll do that,” he agreed. “Would you like to sit in on the experiment today? You might spot something I wouldn’t. . . .”
“I wish I could.” A pained expression crept across her face. “They’re keeping me busy, Huw, lots of protocol crap and meetings with tedious fools I can’t afford not to be nice to. In fact, I’d better be going now—otherwise I’ll be late for this morning’s first appointment. I think I’ve got an hour free before dinner, maybe you could fill me in on the day’s progress then?”
He’d asked Lady d’Ost about the stiletto thing over lunch: The answer turned out to be “yes—but if you’re drunk you’ll likely twist an ankle, so you take your shoes off first.”
As for the chair and the matters in hand . . . “I’m seeing no conductivity at all,” Huw muttered. “Good insulators.” Bare feet were insulators, too, of course, albeit not that good, and damp leather shoes were piss-poor, but dry rubber-soled boots or bare feet didn’t seem to make any difference to world-walking. “Okay, you want to try these?”
“Alright.” Yul sighed and tugged the chair onto the middle of the plastic carpet-protector mat. “I’m getting tired, though, bro.” He sat down and glanced at the back of his left wrist.
Huw looked at the floor. “Hey, you’re off the target—”
He stopped. Yul, and the chair, had disappeared.
“Shit.” Elena will fucking kill me, he thought incoherently. He slid a foot forward, then stopped. Opening the laptop again, he tapped out a quick note. Then he stood on the correct spot—not a foot to one side, where Yul had been—and looked at the knotwork he carried on a laminated badge, ready to world-walk.
The headache was sudden and harsh, a classic interpenetration blast. “Ow.” He’s moving about. Huw swore a bit more, then went and stood precisely where Yul had put the chair, and tried again.
The walls of the shack vanished, replaced by trees and sunlight and a warm summer breeze. Huw staggered, jostling Yul, who spun round with pistol drawn. “Joker’s bane, bro! Don’t do that!”
“Sorry.” Huw bent double, the headache and visual distortions coinciding with a huge wave of nausea. He barely noticed the chair, lying to its side. The grass around its wheels was almost knee-length. Should have surveyed more thoroughly, he thought, then lost his attention to the desperate problem of hanging onto his lunch.
After a minute, he got things under control. “You going to be alright?” Yul asked anxiously. “Because one of us needs to go back.”
“Yes.” Huw stayed bent over. “Not just yet.”
“I fell over when I came across. I think I bruised my ass.”
“I’m not surprised.” He retched again, then wiped his mouth. “Ow.” Shuffling round, he knelt, facing the tussock Yul had stood in. “We missed an angle.”
“We did?”
“Yeah.” Huw pointed. “You had a foot on the ground.”
“So?”
“So you brought the chair over. And you were grounded. When you sat in it, you were fiddling with one armrest.” Huw shuffled towards it. “Right. You had your fingers curled under it. Were you touching it?”
“I think so.” Yul frowned.
“Show me.” Huw was nearly dancing with impatience.
Hulius raised the chair and sat in it slowly. He lowered one foot to touch the ground, then shuffled for comfort, leaned forward with the fingers of his left hand curled under the armrest.
“Okay, hold that position.” Huw contorted himself to look under the armrest. “I see. Were you fidgeting with the post?”
“Post?”
“The metal thing—yeah, that. The fabric on the armrest cover is stapled to the underside of the arm. And that in turn is connected to the frame of the chair by a metal post. Huh. Of course if you try to world-walk home, holding the chair up by the underside of those arms, it’ll go with you, as long as the wheels aren’t fouling anything.”
“You think that’s all there is to it?” Yul looked startled.
“No, but it’s a start. We go across, we take ourselves—obviously—and also the stuff we’re carrying, the stuff we’re physically connected to, but not the earth itself. The planet is a bit too big to carry. The question is, how far does the effect propagate? I’ve been thinking electrical or capacitive, but that’s wrong. I should probably be thinking in terms of quantum state coherence. And the exclusion effect, as a separate spoiler, to make it more complicated. What is a coherent quantum state in a many-worlds Everett-Wheeler cosmology, anyway?”
Yul yawned elaborately. “Does it matter? Way I see it, the lords of the post won’t be enthusiastic about folks realizing they’re not needed for the corvée. It could be a power thing, bro, to bind us together by misleading us as to the true number of participants required to set up a splinter network. If it only takes two guys and a wheelbarrow to do the work of six . . . that might present a problem, yes? On top of which you’re the only relative I know who’s mad enough to try to disprove something that everyone knows is the way things work, just in case everyone else is wrong. Must be that fancy education of yours.” He paused. “Not that I believe a word of it, but I wouldn’t mention it to anyone except her majesty if I were you, bro. They might not understand. . . .”
The next day, Miriam received the visitor she’d been half dreading and half waiting for. Rising that morning, she’d donned Helge like a dress even as her maids were helping her into more material garments. Then she’d started the day by formally swearing Brilliana and Sir Alasdair to her service, before witnesses, followed by such of her guards as Sir Alasdair recommended to her. Then she’d gone out into the garden, just to get out of the way of the teeming servants—Brill’s self-kicking anthill was still settling down and finding itself various niches in the house—and partly to convince herself that she was free to do so. And that was where her mother found her, sitting on a bench in an ornamental gazebo. And proceeded to lecture h
er about her newfound status.
“You’re going to have to be a queen widow for a while,” the Duchess Patricia voh Hjorth d’Wu ab Thorold explained to her. Wearing a voluminous black silk dress that she had somehow squeezed into the seat of an electric wheelchair, which in turn must have taken two strapping couriers to carry across in pieces, she posed an incongruous sight. “Probably not forever, but you should plan on doing it for at least the next nine months. It’ll give you a lot of leverage, but don’t misunderstand—you won’t be ruling the country. There’s no tradition of rule by women in this culture. We—the junta—have agreed we’re going to present ourselves in public as a council of regents. They’ll be the ones who do the ruling—making policy decisions—but I’ve held out for you to have a seat on the council. You’ll have title and nobility in your own right, and the power of high justice, the ability to arraign and try nobles. You’ll sign laws agreed by the assembly of lords, as a member of the council of regents. Which in turn means the Clan council can’t ignore you.”
“Yes, Mom,” Helge said obediently.
“Don’t patronize me and I won’t patronize you, kid. The quid pro quo is that there’s a lot of ceremonial that goes with the job, a lot of face time. You’re going to have to be Helge in public for ninety percent of that. Also, the Clan council will expect you to issue decrees and perform administrative chores to order. They say rabbit, you hop—at least at first. How much input you manage to acquire into their decisions is up to you, but my advice would be to do it very slowly and carefully. Don’t risk overrunning your base, as you did last time. I’m going to be around to help. Our enemies won’t be expecting that. And you’ll have Brilliana. Olga and Riordan seem to like you, Sky Father only knows why, but that’s another immense advantage because those two are holding two whole branches of Security together right now. I’d advise against trying to swear them to you—nothing’s likely to scare the backwoods conservatives into doing something stupid like the fear that you’re trying to take over Clan Security—but Riordan leans our way and Olga is one of us.”
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