Pandora's Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

  In an attempt to swing the odds in her favour, she’d initiated the data analysis. Every piece of cargo arriving at the Boongate CST station came with a full complement of files on shipping details, purchase invoices, payment confirmation, packaging companies, handling agents. Adam Elvin would send the arms via a multitude of different routes over a period of time which probably stretched into years. It was a physical encryption. You just had to have the key, the knowledge of which cargo hid which components, and when it would be arriving. If you had that you could slot the whole lot together. So her programs searched routes for crates that had shared a warehouse six months ago on a planet a hundred light-years away, for payments which came from the same bank, for a freighting company which was used by different agents, for bills paid from an account which was only used once. Every time, she drew a blank. It didn’t help that eighty per cent of cargo destined for Far Away belonged to individuals or families who were emigrating there, and took all their personal belongings with them, along with an amazing list of items they considered necessary for their survival and well being.

  ‘Now that’s something I don’t see every day,’ Mel Rees said. ‘You loafing on the job.’

  Paula gave him a silent, contemptuous glance and turned back to the Eiffel Tower. Mel Rees had only been with the Directorate for forty years, reaching his current position as one of its numerous deputy directors because of his family. But then that was always the way with Earth-based Commonwealth institutions, if senior appointees didn’t come from a Grand Family, they were inevitably part of an Intersolar Dynasty. Of course, had she gone gunning for a directorship she would probably have got it; but again, ironically, that would have been because of who she was, not to mention the amount of seniority gathered from a hundred and forty-seven straight years of employment in the Directorate. But then, because of who she was, she didn’t want a post which would take her away from actual investigative work.

  Mel Rees studied the data running through the desk portals. ‘No luck, huh?’

  ‘Not with the budget you give me.’

  ‘I’ve got something else for you.’ Mel Rees never quite had the courage to summon Paula to his office if he wanted to discuss anything, he always visited her in person.

  ‘What?’

  ‘An ice case on Oaktier. Possible deliberate body kill and associated memory loss.’

  Paula couldn’t help her interest. Ice cases, which the Commonwealth classified as crimes over thirty years old, weren’t that common. ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Uncertain, but it could be forty years.’

  ‘Hum.’ Paula crinkled her nose. It wasn’t that long ago. ‘Can’t the local police deal with it?’

  ‘They tried. The results were inconclusive. That’s why we got the request for assistance. One of the possible victims, a Tara Jennifer Shaheef, has an important family on Oaktier, who have connections. You know how it works. Her family want positive results, one way or the other; so naturally I want you to have it.’

  ‘You said one of the victims?’

  ‘Yes. If it happened, there were two of them – that the police know of so far.’

  ‘Okay, now I’m interested.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Glancing round the spartan office, he saw the small bag which was kept permanently packed ready for any off-Earth assignment. It was one of three personal items she permitted herself in the plain room. On the windowsill was a rabbakas plant, a black corm sprouting a single marbled pink flower with petals that looked like feathers, which she’d been given by a Silfen on Silvergalde. On the desk was a quartz cube containing a hologram of the couple who’d brought her up on Marindra, some summer day picnic scene with Paula and her step-sister, both girls aged about five. Mel Rees always tried to avoid looking at the hologram; every time it gave him an uncomfortably powerful reminder of just how strange the Chief Investigator was. ‘Do you want to shift any of your casework while you’re away? Renne and Tarlo haven’t got much on right now.’

  She looked at him as if he had spoken some incomprehensible language. ‘I can keep up to date on everything from Oaktier, thank you. It is part of the unisphere.’

  ‘Sure. Right.’ He started to back out of the office. ‘Anything you need, just let me know.’

  Paula waited until he had gone, then permitted herself a small smile. Actually, Rees wasn’t a bad deputy director, he kept his teams happy and made sure the department received a healthy budget; but she always made sure he knew his place. After a while she pulled her chair back to the desk, and asked her e-butler to retrieve the Tara Jennifer Shaheef case files.

  *

  The Clayden Clinic was set amid twenty acres of its own grounds in one of the eastern suburbs of Darklake City. As rejuvenation facilities went, it was amongst the best on the planet. Paula had read through the Directorate’s green-code background file on the company, a typical medium-sized corporate operation, with clinics on five worlds in this sector of space.

  What she could see as the police car pulled in through the gates seemed to reflect what she’d read. A long, three-storey pearl and bamboo building standing on a slope above a small lake. One wing ended in a lattice of scaffolding, with constructionbots riding along the rails as they locked new prefab sections together.

  Her office suit gave no protection from the humid early afternoon air as she hurried from the car to the reception. Detective Hoshe Finn was a couple of paces behind her the whole way, puffing with discontent at the heat. He was from the local ice crime division, and had been assigned to assist her for the duration of the case. A duty he accepted cheerily, which was something she found refreshing. For once, someone was enjoying working with her and was actively helpful right from the start. She was sure he was mostly interested in seeing if her reputation matched up to the actual person, but she didn’t mind that. Whatever got results. Part of his acceptance no doubt came from the fact he was eighteen years on from his second rejuvenation. Older people tended to have a more phlegmatic approach.

  Hoshe Finn’s last rejuvenation had given him a thin face. He wore his black hair drawn up into a neat single curl at the back, held in place with an elaborate silver ring clip. Just about the first thing he said to her was an admission he was overweight, though his shiny green silk suit was cut to de-emphasize his waist and stomach.

  ‘This way,’ Hoshe Finn said once they were indoors. He led off down one of the long corridors leading away from reception. They passed several recent rejuvees being helped along by staff.

  ‘Have you handled many ice cases?’ Paula asked.

  ‘Three,’ he shrugged. ‘Including this one. My success rate is not high. Most of the time I work for the main criminal investigation department. It’s only when we get a crime that’s over thirty years old that we actually bother to activate the ice division. This kind of allegation doesn’t occur very often.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there aren’t many ice crimes which get solved.’

  ‘Yeah. Even with our data storage capacity, digging up the past is difficult.’

  ‘It’s not that, exactly.’ She paused. ‘The information you gather from the past has to be related to human behaviour. It’s a holistic picture we’re looking for. Law enforcement today relies too much on digital evidence.’

  ‘And that’s where you come in.’ He smiled at the suspicious look she gave him. ‘A true detective.’

  ‘I do what I can.’

  They had to put on clean coveralls to enter Wyobie Cotal’s room through its small decontamination lock. The light was low and pink inside, so it didn’t place undue strain on his eyes. Paula steeled herself behind her face filter mask as the second set of doors slid open. Something about emergency re-life cases always left her feeling queasy. Even though Cotal’s new clone had been out of the womb tank for five weeks now, she found the body unpleasant to look at.

  The clone had been initiated two years ago, after Cotal’s insurance company array had conducted a legally required attempt to contact him through the u
nisphere. Subsequently, a more detailed search involving human researchers had also failed to locate any trace of him since he left Oaktier forty years earlier. At that time sixty-five years had elapsed since his birth, and he should have booked in to the clinic for his first rejuvenation in accordance with the policy which his reason-ably wealthy parents had taken out at conception. As he didn’t appear, the courts granted the insurance company a body-death certificate on the grounds that he had either been illegally killed or had been involved in some freak accident which had gone unreported. The re-life procedure was activated a week later.

  Although not too common, the operation was relatively straightforward for a facility as well equipped as the Clayden Clinic. Cotal’s DNA was subtly modified to produce accelerated growth, and the foetus kept in the womb-tank for just over twenty-three months. During the last five months, the clinic had inserted a neural link, and started to download Cotal’s stored memories into his new brain. There weren’t many; although he had regularly updated his secure store every couple of months, he’d stopped when he left Oaktier, aged twenty-three.

  Lying on his bed bathed in mock-twilight, he looked like a fourteen-year-old famine victim. His body was dreadfully thin, with skin stretched tight over ribs and limbs. Some kind of gel had been applied to prevent excessive flaking, though several large areas were raw and crusting beneath the glistening substance. There was almost no muscle on his arms and legs, leaving his knees and elbows as knobbly protrusions. It meant he had to wear an electromuscle mobility suit to move, which looked as if he was imprisoned in a wire exoskeleton cage. But it was his head which was the most ungainly aspect. It was almost adult-size, leaving it far too big for his spindly neck to support without the mobility suit.

  Wyobie Cotal’s large sunken eyes followed them as they came into the room. He made no attempt to move his head. Every now and then he would open his lips a fraction, and a nipple would deploy from the side of the suit, pushing into his mouth so he could suck on it. Paula refused to look at the tubes around his waist, and the arrangement for connecting them to his penis and anus.

  And I used to think recovering from an ordinary rejuvenation was humiliating enough.

  ‘Hello Wyobie,’ Hoshe Finn said. ‘You’re looking better this time. Remember me?’

  ‘Policeman,’ Wyobie Cotal whispered. His voice was amplified by the suit, producing a weird echo effect.

  ‘That’s right, Detective Finn. And this is Chief Investigator Paula Myo from the Serious Crimes Directorate. She’s come all the way from Earth to look into your death.’

  Wyobie Cotal’s weary eyes focused on Paula. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘No.’ She wasn’t about to start explaining her notoriety to someone who was struggling to make sense of his small stock of memories. ‘But I would like to help you.’

  He smiled, which allowed drool to leak from his mouth. ‘You’re going to break me out of here?’

  ‘It won’t be much longer.’

  ‘Liar!’ He said it loud enough that the amplification circuit wasn’t triggered. ‘They said I’ll be here for months while my muscles grow. Then I’ll just have a kid’s body. The speed-up growing part has stopped now.’

  ‘But you’re alive again.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Find them. Find who did this to me.’

  ‘If you were killed, I will find them. I always do.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I understand you and Tara Jennifer Shaheef were sex partners.’ Paula ignored the way Hoshe Finn winced behind his filter mask. The amount of time they could spend with Cotal was limited by his condition, she didn’t intend wasting any of it.

  ‘Yes.’ The expression on the strange child-face softened. ‘We’d just started seeing each other.’

  ‘You know she left Oaktier as well.’

  ‘I know. But I can’t believe I ran off with her, there was too much for me here. I told the police before. I was seeing another girl, too.’

  ‘Philippa Yoi, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was she the jealous type?’

  ‘No no, I’ve been through all this before. It was all just fun, nothing too serious. We all knew that. Philippa and I were first-lifers, we wanted to . . . live.’

  ‘It was just fun at the time of your last memory back-up into the clinic’s secure store. But you didn’t leave Oaktier for another nine weeks after that. A lot could have happened in that time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have left,’ he repeated stubbornly.

  ‘Had anybody mentioned taking any trips? Were any friends planning a holiday on another planet?’

  ‘No. I’m sure. My head’s all weird, you know. This was just five weeks ago for me. But my whole life is jumbled up. Some of the childhood stuff is clearer than Philippa and Tara. Oh fuck. I can’t believe anybody would want to kill me.’

  ‘Do you know anything about Tampico?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Why?’

  ‘It was the planet you bought a ticket for.’

  Wyobie Cotal closed his eyes. Tears squeezed out to wet the fine lashes. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember any of this. This has to be a mistake. One giant mother of a mistake. I’m still out there somewhere. I must be. I just forgot to come back for my rejuvenation, that’s all. Find me, please. Find me!’ He started to lift his back up off the pillow, juvenile features straining hard. ‘Do something.’

  A nurse came in as Wyobie Cotal sank back down again. He was unconscious before the electromuscle suit finished lowering back flat onto the bed.

  ‘He’s been sedated,’ the nurse said. ‘It’ll be another three hours before he’s conscious again. You can come back then if you have to, but he can’t be exposed to an unlimited number of sessions like this. His personality is still very fragile, he’s completely immature emotionally.’

  ‘I understand,’ Paula said. She and Hoshe Finn left the room together.

  ‘What do you think?’ the detective asked as they took their coveralls off.

  ‘Taken alone, I would have said it was a clear-cut case. First-lifers are always excitable. He went off on an adventure holiday with a girl and drowned or crashed or flew into a hill, something reckless and stupid. But with Shaheef as well, we have to consider the circumstances.’

  Hoshe Finn nodded and threw his overalls into a bin. The cooler air outside Cotal’s room made him shiver. ‘That’s what alerted us to this in the first place. Tara Jennifer Shaheef was re-lifed twenty years ago. She was written off as having an accident.’

  ‘So who made the connection?’

  ‘Morton, her past husband. Apparently, Cotal was named on the divorce papers, he was the one she was shacking up with on Tampico.’

  ‘So it did get serious between Cotal and Shaheef?’

  ‘Looks like it, but not on this planet. She filed the papers on Tampico. Once the divorce was arranged, Morton never heard anything from her again until her re-life. My division investigated her re-life as a matter of course, but there was nothing unduly suspicious other than the lack of a body. Accidents do happen.’

  ‘So, after the divorce Cotal and Shaheef went on holiday, or even honeymoon, together. They had the same accident.’

  ‘Could be. Except there really is no trace of them after they left Oaktier.’

  ‘Apart from the divorce petition.’

  ‘Yes. And there certainly isn’t a motive for killing them. All we have are a lot of suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘I need to see Shaheef next.’

  ‘She’s expecting us.’

  6

  The message was loaded into the unisphere through a planetary cybersphere node in Hemeleum, a small inland farming town on Westwould. It remained in a one-time address file for five hours, long enough for whoever loaded it to have travelled clear across the Commonwealth. After five hours were up, the message’s sender segment activated. The program distributed the message to every e-butler address code in the unisphere, an annoying method of advertising called shotgunning. As a me
thod of commercial promotion it had fallen into disuse centuries ago. Every modern e-butler program had filters which could bounce the spam right back to its sender, although as most shotgunners used a one-time address there was little point. The e-butlers also automatically notified the RIs controlling the unisphere routing protocols, who immediately wiped the offending message from every node. And under Intersolar law, finally passed in 2174, anyone shotgunning the unisphere was liable to a large irritant fine that could be applied to every message which was received by an e-butler, so the penalty was never less than a couple of billion dollars. No company could survive that. Subsequently, shotgunning was kept alive by underground organizations or individuals who had ideologies, disreputable financial schemes, religious visions, or political revolutions that they wanted the rest of the Commonwealth to know about. Given how quickly the unisphere RIs could identify shotgun spread patterns and block them, any software writer capable of composing a decent new shotgun sender could earn themselves a lucrative fee – cash, of course.

  In this case, the factor which allowed the shotgunned message to get round most e-butler filters was that it had a genuine author certificate. On the arrival of any message, that was the first thing an e-butler would query. This one had the certificate of April Gallar Halgarth, a twenty-year-old resident of Solidade, the private world owned by the Halgarth dynasty. Over ten billion e-butlers allowed it to go forward into their hold file.