The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He was very conscious of Liscard, the general manager, tracking his progress. Liscard had been on edge ever since a couple of Special Branch cops had paid Jude’s Eworld a visit. They’d taken the manager back into her office, and spoken to her for over an hour. Whatever they said, her suppresser programs couldn’t get a grip on her subsequent nerves. She’d certainly given Andy a hard time all day, snarling at him for little or no reason.

  Andy had a horrible feeling it might all be connected with Louise.

  Specifically de-stinging her and Genevieve. If they had been Govcentral bugs, then Jude’s Eworld had probably broken the law removing them. But there’d been no real reprimand. The sellrats had been nibbling on curiosity and rumour ever since. Each of them bragged about their own special shady customer who was the probable cause.

  The shop’s inventory flashed up in Andy’s head, and he ran through the specs for questors. “I expect half of your trouble is that the 2600 questor only reviews current file indexes,” he told Louise. “What we need to do is get you one that’ll review entire files and disregard data status, that should help with obscure references.” Andy ducked down below the counter top, and looked at the clutter of fleks stacked up on the shelves below. “Here we go.” He surfaced, holding up a flek case.

  “Killabyte. It’s almost an AI in its own right. A one shot request that operates on fuzzy breeder intuition, which means it can utilise whatever references it finds to build new associations which you haven’t loaded in, and search through them. It won’t taxi back until it’s found the answer, no matter how long it takes. Tenacious little bugger.”

  “That’s good. Thank you, Andy.”

  “What I’d really like to give you is the Hyperpeadia, but we haven’t got any fleks of it in stock right now. If it’s used in tandem with Killabyte I’d guarantee you’ll find your friend. They’re the two market leaders right now.”

  “I’m sure Killabyte will be fine.”

  “I’ll put in an order for Hyperpeadia. The software collective won’t datavise it to us, they’re worried about bootlegs.” He put his elbows on the counter and leaned towards her in a confidential fashion. “Course, the encryption has already been cracked. You can get a pirate clone at any stall in Chelsea market, but it’ll probably have transcription degradation. Best you have an original. It’ll be here tomorrow morning. I can have it delivered straight to wherever you’re staying.”

  “I’m at the Ritz.” Louise fished round in her shoulder bag and produced the hotel’s courtesy collection disk.

  “Ah.” Andy held up the counter’s delivery log block to accept the Ritz’s code. “Your fiancé hasn’t arrived yet, then?” Genevieve had to bend over and hide her face in her hands to stop the giggles.

  “No, not yet,” Louise answered levelly. “But I’m expecting him any day now. He’s already in the solar system. I was wondering if you could help me with something else?”

  “Sure. Anything!”

  Louise smiled demurely at his enthusiasm. I ought to be firmer with him.

  But somehow being firm with Andy Behoo would be like drowning kittens.

  “It’s just in case the questors can’t find what I want. You said some private detectives use the store. Could you recommend one?”

  “I can ask,” he said thoughtfully. “Hang on a minute.”

  Liscard gave him an alarmed look as he walked over to her. “A private dick?” she mumbled when Andy asked which one he should recommend.

  “Yeah,” Andy said. “One that’s good at finding people. Do you know if any of them are?”

  “I think so,” Liscard stammered. She waited apprehensively. As soon as the Kavanagh girls had come back into the store, she’d established a sensevise link to the eddress which the Special Branch officers had given her. Her retinas and audio discrimination program had been capturing the scene for whoever was at the other end of the link. She didn’t have the nerve to load any of the tracer programs available to employees of Jude’s Eworld. The software houses who produced them guaranteed they would be completely undetectable, but she wasn’t about to take the risk. Not with the people who claimed they were from Special Branch. When she asked her fixer in the local police about them he’d abruptly told her never to contact him again, and cut the datavise.

  “What do you want me to say?” she datavised to the anonymous receiver.

  “There’s someone I know who can help the girl,” came the answer.

  Liscard datavised the information directly into Andy’s neural nanonics.

  He took his time walking back across the shop, a measured approach allowed him to savour her shape. The images he’d snatched before were fine as far as they went, but they amounted to little more than photonic dolls in his sensenviron. After conjuring them up he was left craving for more substantial replicants. Now, with his retinas switched to infrared, and feeding through discrimination program, he could trace her abdominal muscle pattern and rib cage through the fabric of her dress. A scan grid overlay revealed the precise three-dimensional measurements of those wonderful breasts. And her skin tone spectrum was already on file; that would be a simple continuation for the sculptor program, extending up from the legs, and down from her bare shoulders. That just left the taste of her as he ran his tongue along her belly and down between her thighs.

  The correct pitch as she cried out in gratitude, the praise she would moan to him, her greatest ever lover.

  Andy hated himself for resorting to sensenviron sprites. It was the final humiliating proof that he was a complete loser. But she was so fantastic.

  Better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all. Even if that love was purely digital.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Genevieve asked loudly. “Why’s he looking at you all funny?”

  Andy’s smile was a thin mask over his horror as her piping voice broke through his distracted thoughts. Cool sweat was beading across his flushed skin. His neural nanonics couldn’t help dispel the blush, they were too busy fighting down his erection.

  Louise gave him a vaguely suspicious look. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” Andy mumbled. He scurried back behind the counter, ignoring Genevieve’s frown. “I think the person you want is Ivanov Robson. He specializes in missing persons, both kinds.”

  “Both kinds?”

  “Yeah. Some people are genuinely missing; they drop out of life, or haven’t updated their directory entries—like your friend. Then there’s the kind who’re deliberately trying to vanish; debtors, unfaithful partners, criminals. You know.”

  “I see. Well thank you, this Mr. Robson sounds about right.”

  Andy datavised the detective’s address and eddress over. Louise smiled and gave him an uncertain wave as she walked out. Breath whistled out between Andy’s crooked teeth. His hands were shaking again, forcing him to grip the edge of the counter. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot! But she hadn’t stormed out, or made an issue of his stupid erotic daydreaming. There was still a chance.

  Yeah, about the same as me getting crowned King of Kulu.

  He looked down to double check. The counter’s middle shelf held a stack of fifteen Hyperpeadia fleks, all with their wrapping intact. His one and only excuse to see her again.

  The taxi pulled up at the end of Fernshaw Road, where it intersected with Edith Terrace. Louise and Genevieve stepped out, and the door slid shut behind them. The vehicle accelerated away silently down the road. It had deposited them in a quiet residential street, where the pavements were actually made from slabs of stone rather than a simple band of carbon-concrete. Silver birch and sycamore trees that must have been a couple of centuries old lined both sides of the road, their giant boughs merging together to provide a gentle emerald shield against the fierce sunlight. The houses were all ancient two or three storey affairs, painted white or cream. Bricks and slate roofs were betraying their age by sagging and bulging; centuries of subsidence and environmental decline had distorted every wall and support timber. Window frames w
ere tilted at the oddest angles. There wasn’t a straight line to be seen anywhere in the street. Each house had a tiny front garden, though they’d all been paved over; the massive trees absorbed so much light they prevented any shrubs or vines from growing underneath.

  “This must be it,” Louise said dubiously. She faced a high wall with a single golden oak door in it, heavily tarnished with age. There was a brass panel with a grill on one side. It looked far too primitive to datavise at. She pressed the ivory button on top.

  “Yes?” the grille squealed.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Robson,” she said. “I called before. I’m Louise Kavanagh.”

  The door buzzed loudly, and she pushed it open. There was a rectangular patio beyond, running along the front of the building; home to a set of wrought iron furniture and a couple of dead conifer bushes in cracked pots. The front door, a duplicate of the one behind, was open. Louise peered cautiously into the small hallway. A blonde girl, barely older than she, was standing behind a reception desk whose surface was smothered with folders, flek cases, and china coffee mugs. She was staring into a small AV pillar that protruded from the top of a very expensive-looking stack of processor blocks. Pale turquoise light from the sparkling pillar was reflected in her narrow, brown eyes. Her frozen posture was one of shock.

  Her only acknowledgement of the sisters’ entry was to ask: “Have you accessed it?” in a hoarse voice.

  “What?” Genevieve asked.

  The receptionist gestured at the pillar. “The news.”

  Both sisters stared straight into the pillar’s haze of light. They were looking out across a broad park under a typical arcology dome. Right across the centre of their view, a big tapering tower of metal girders had collapsed to lie in a lengthy sprawl of contorted wreckage across the immaculate emerald grass. Several of the tall, cheerfully shaggy trees that surrounded it had been smashed and buried beneath the splinters of rusty metal. A vast crowd encircled the wreckage, with thousands more making their way along the paths to swell their numbers. They were people in profound mourning, as if the tower had been some precious relative.

  Louise could see they all had their heads bowed, most were weeping. Thin cries of grief wove together through the air.

  “Bastards,” the receptionist said. “Those utter bastards.”

  “What is that thing?” Genevieve asked. The receptionist gave her a startled look.

  “We’re from Norfolk,” Louise explained.

  “That’s the Eiffel Tower,” the receptionist said. “In Paris. And the Nightfall anarchists blew it up. They’re a bunch of crazies who’re going round wrecking things over there. It’s their mission, they say, preparing the world for the fall of Night. But everyone knows they’re just a front for the possessed. Bastards.”

  “Was the tower really important?” Genevieve asked.

  “The Eiffel Tower was over seven hundred years old. What do you think?”

  The little girl looked back into the projection. “How horrid of them.”

  “Yes. I think that’s why there is a beyond. So that people who do things like that can suffer in it until the end of time.”

  A glassed-in spiral stair took Louise up to the first floor. Ivanov Robson was waiting for the sisters on the landing. Travelling in the Far Realm had accustomed Louise to people who didn’t share the bodyform template she’d grown up with. And of course, London had an astonishing variety of people. Even so, she nearly jumped when she first saw Robson.

  He was the biggest man she’d ever seen. Easily over seven feet tall, and a body that seemed bulky even for that height. Not that any of it was fat, she noticed. He was frighteningly powerful, with arms thicker than her legs. His skin was the deepest ebony, glossy from a health club’s spar treatment. With thick gold-tinted auburn hair twirled into a tiny pony tail, and wearing a stylish yellow silk business suit, he looked amazingly dapper.

  “Miss Kavanagh, welcome.” From the confident humour in his smooth voice, it was obvious he knew the effect he had on people.

  Floorboards creaked under his feet as showed them into his office. The bookcases reminded Louise of her father’s study, although there were very few leather-bound volumes here. Ivanov Robson eased himself into a wide chair behind a smoked-glass desk. The surface was empty apart from a slimline processor block and a peculiar chrome-topped glass tube, eighteen inches high, that was full of clear liquid and illuminated from underneath. Orange blobs glided slowly up and down inside it, oscillating as they went.

  “Are they xenoc fish?” Genevieve asked. It was the first time she’d spoken. The huge man had even managed to quash her usual bravado. She’d kept well behind Louise the whole time.

  “Nothing as spectacular,” Ivanov said. “It’s an antique, a genuine Twentieth Century lava lamp. Cost me a fortune, but I love it. Now, what can I do for you?” he tented his fingers, and looked directly at Louise.

  “I have to find somebody,” she said. “Um, if you don’t want to take the case when I’ve told you who, I’ll understand. I think she’s called Banneth.” Louise launched into a recital of her journey since leaving Cricklade, not quite as heavily edited as usual.

  “I’m impressed,” Ivanov said softly when she’d finished. “You’ve come face to face with the possessed, and survived. That’s quite a feat. If you ever need money, I know a few people in the news media.”

  “I don’t want money, Mr. Robson. I just want to find Banneth. None of the questors seem to be able to do that for me.”

  “I’m almost embarrassed to take your money, but I will, of course.” He grinned broadly, revealing teeth that had been plated entirely in gold.

  “My retainer will be two thousand fuseodollars, payable in advance. If I locate Banneth, that will be another five thousand. Plus any expenses. I will provide receipts where possible.”

  “Very well.” Louise held out her Jovian Bank credit disk.

  “A couple of questions first,” Ivanov said after the money had been transferred. He tilted his chair back, and closed his eyes in thought.

  “The only thing you know for certain about Banneth is that she hurt Quinn Dexter. Correct?”

  “Yes. He said so.”

  “And Banneth definitely lives on Earth? Interesting. Whatever happened between the two of them sounds very ugly, which implies they were involved in some kind of criminal activity. I think that should provide my investigation with an adequate starting point.”

  “Oh.” Louise didn’t quite look at him. It was so obvious, laid out like that. She should have sent a questor into criminal archives.

  “I am a professional, Louise,” he said kindly. “You do know the possessed have reached Earth, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I accessed the news from New York. The mayor said they’d been eliminated, though.”

  “He would. But Govcentral still hasn’t opened the vac-train lines to New York. That should tell you something. And now we’ve had the Eiffel Tower blown up for no reason other than to demoralize and anger people. That probably means they’re in Paris as well. A feat like that is beyond the ability of some stimbrained street gang. What I’m trying to say, Louise, in my dear bumbling way, is that if Quinn Dexter is here, then he’ll be heading for Banneth as well. Now do you really want to bump into him again?”

  “No!” Genevieve squeaked.

  “Then bear in mind that’s where your current path is taking you.”

  “All I need is Banneth’s eddress,” Louise said. “Nothing else.”

  “Then I will do my best to ensure you receive it. I’ll be in touch.”

  Ivanov waited until the sisters were circling down the spiral stair before asking: <>

  <> Western Europe answered.

  <>

  Chapter 13


  The prospect of interstellar flight had been real to certain sections of the human race for a long time before Sputnik One thundered into orbit. A notion which began with visionaries like Tsiolkovskii, Goddard, and somewhat more whimsical science fiction writers of that age, was quickly taken up and promoted by obsessive space activists when the first micro-gee factories came on line, proving that orbital manufacturing was a profitable venture. With the development of the O’Neill Halo and the Jupiter mining operation in the Twenty-first Century the concept finally began to seem practical. Asteroids were already being hollowed out and made habitable. Now it was only an engineering and finance problem to propel them out of Earth orbit and across the gulf to Proxima Centauri.

  There were no theoretical show stoppers; fusion or antimatter engines could be built to accelerate the giant rocks up to speeds of anything between five and twenty per cent of lightspeed, depending on which physicist you asked. Generations of crew would live, tend their machinery, and die within the rock as they crawled across the emptiness, with the anticipation that their descendants would inherit a fresh world.

  Sadly, human nature being what it is, century-duration flights were just too long, the ideal of colonization too abstract to motivate the governments and large institutions of the time into building these proposed space arks. The real clincher, inevitably, was cost. There could never be any return on the investment. So it seemed as though the fresh start idealists would just have to go on dreaming.

  One such thwarted dreamer was Julian Wan, who, more resourceful than his colleagues, persuaded the board of the New Kong corporation to research faster than light travel. His pitch was that it would be a small, cheap project testing the more dubious equations of Quantum Unification Theory, essentially a few wild theoretical physicists with plenty of computer time. But if it could be made to work, the commercial opportunities would be phenomenal. Noble concern for human destiny and the search for pure knowledge never got a look in.