Analog SFF, December 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He shrugged. “It's worth a try."

  He was wrong. For eighteen years, none of us had been interested in talking to one another.

  I drummed my fingers some more. “This isn't what I do, Mr. Garcia Ortega. When somebody's antique optical-fiber extruder breaks, I track down obsolete replacement parts, or I rewrite their control software to work around the problem. When a business wants to expand, I figure out who they need to bribe. But apart from the time I helped my neighbor find her lost canary-snake, I don't do mysteries.” Or take jobs for the Central Committee—especially jobs guaranteed to stir up old memories.

  He nodded, a gesture that by now I didn't find reassuring. “I understand.” He stood. “Too bad, though. I'd heard that you're quite resourceful when it comes to finding things. And also that you're very good with software.” He gave my desk a meaningful glance.

  Damn. Over the years I'd tunneled into half the warehouse databases in the city, plus a couple of the lower-level municipal ones. The Committee never threatened idly—if he did send in the police to sift through my desk, without giving me time to tidy up first, then for the next six to twelve years my mail would be forwarded to me in care of Sandcastle labor camp.

  I said, “You were mentioning rewards..."

  He lowered himself back into the chair. “Five hundred as a retainer. Real money, of course; not rips. Another five hundred per week, as long as you've got even a hint of a lead."

  "Plus expenses."

  "I don't think so."

  It had been worth a try. “And if I actually find it for you?"

  "Seventy-five thousand for information leading to recovery. Hand it over to us yourself, a hundred fifty."

  "One hundred and fifty thousand kiloliters...” I nodded. I'm sure he thought I was working hard at my lack of enthusiasm. But, really, all I was considering was the five hundred per week.

  I shook my head. “I can't ask the right questions if I have to keep your secret."

  He spread his hands in the air above his lap. “Be as discreet as possible. In private conversations, say what you need to say. We can live with rumors."

  I pushed my palms against the desk and stood. “I'll need everything you've already got."

  He reached into a pocket, placed a data crystal onto my desk. Then he stood, too. The top of his head came almost to my chin.

  He glanced at my waist. His eyebrows lifted slightly. “No gun?"

  "No."

  His eyes narrowed, but he simply said, “Keep in touch.” He reached across the desk to shake hands. His grip was firm and dry.

  After he let himself out, I stood there a minute, eyeing the crystal. I wasn't particularly eager to review its contents. Doing that would give me a lot of things to think about—most of them things I'd spent almost two decades working hard at not thinking about.

  But finally I sat and gestured my desk to show me the crystal's directory. Most of the entries were people's names. I took a deep breath, then reached into the projected image and flipped through the listing, pausing here and there to recall a face. And although a dozen of the names did cause me to catch my breath—friends and classmates I'd managed to keep out of my thoughts for years now, at least on most days—the rest were merely people I used to know a little, a long time ago. Really no big deal at all.

  Huh.

  I pulled up some of the reports attached to the names. These were summaries of interviews—including surreptitious monitoring of pulse, respiration, and voice stress—with the Warrant showing up here and there amidst long lists of questions. Nobody ever seemed to react to its mention.

  Besides the names and reports, the crystal included a section on the Warrant itself. Its image rotated lazily above my desk—a truncated pyramid of tight-packed, knuckle-sized gems in a variety of colors and cuts. Some of the Warrant's physical measurements were included, but I could find very little about its most intriguing property.

  The Vulesk had presented the Warrant to my great-grandparents and their ten thousand fellow colonists right after delivering them here, just before the last of the huge Vulesk shuttles had restarted their mysterious engines and departed. For the first few months the Warrant received little attention, everyone being otherwise occupied in setting up the colony. And, of course, in dealing with the gradual realization that while the enigmatic Vulesk had, as contracted, dropped the colonists in a region of the planet at least marginally suited to humans and our carefully planned, decentralized agricultural settlement, nearly all of the territory's accessible water lay locked beyond a mountain range three hundred kilometers to the west—in a region considerably less suited to emigrants from Earth.

  So the Warrant was put into storage and ignored while the colonists erected their habitats in a tight cluster around the few local water sources, and while they established a committee to organize the building of aqueducts. And it remained in storage two years later, when that committee requested its own police squad to enforce equitable water distribution. By the time things eventually settled down enough for scientific inquiry, not much remained of the colony's original plans for a sparsely rural, loose-knit, barter-based community.

  Once taken out and finally studied, the Warrant quickly disclosed its nature—it was an active electromagnetic transponder. Expose it to a beam of light, or of radio or x-rays, and the Warrant bounced back a new beam—but with a frequency shifted slightly from the original. While any particular incoming frequency would always shift by a reproducible amount, though, a closely neighboring frequency would be altered to a completely different degree. Overall the shifts followed no pattern; the Warrant behaved as if it held a vast, randomly generated table of incoming frequencies and their corresponding shifts.

  Some experiments also suggested that the Warrant possessed similar frequency-shifting properties in other domains. For example, subatomic particles, when bounced off the Warrant's surface, changed their velocities in an unpredictable but reproducible fashion.

  But before long, the Central Committee halted further research into the Warrant. Fake Vulesk Warrants, they argued, were supposed to be impossible for an unauthorized colony to forge. Now that we understood why—our Warrant's specific electromagnetic frequency shifts, plus whatever other properties it might prove to manifest, added up to a unique signature that a Vulesk inspector could verify—we would be acting against our own interests if we continued to accumulate exactly the data that a hypothetical forger would love to steal from us.

  Nobody knew for sure what the Vulesk would do upon finding a colony that couldn't prove it had been authorized by a Vulesk representative. The Vulesk's apparent aversion to aggression and chaos, which seemed to lay behind their monopolistic control of colonization in this part of the galaxy, had led to a general human expectation that unauthorized colonies would be shipped back to their homeworlds—as opposed, say, to simply being incinerated in place. But in their characteristically oblique communications, the Vulesk had never unambiguously confirmed our guesses.

  Given the Committee's attitude toward the Warrant's secrets, I wasn't surprised that Garcia Ortega's crystal failed to list any details of the Warrant's frequency shifts. But he had, it turned out, given me more than merely data. According to an explanatory file, his crystal, socketed into a standard handheld scanner, could program that scanner to generate a short sequence of radio frequencies and then check the shifts of any returned signals. Should I actually come across what appeared to be the Warrant, I'd at least be able to rule out a gross forgery.

  Shaking my head at the impossibility of this entire job, I plucked the data crystal from my desk and for a few seconds tossed it back and forth between my hands. Then I shrugged. I rummaged through desk drawers until I found a beat-up scanner. I inserted the crystal. Then, for lack of any better target, I pointed the scanner at my travel poster and triggered the sequence.

  The scanner's display read “negative"—apparently this particular ski lodge held no Warrants. Oh well. I powered off the scanner and, after
another shrug, dropped it into a pocket of my shorts.

  It occurred to me that hidden beneath the false bottom of my middle drawer lay a few other items that might come in handy. Given to me four years ago by one of my less savory but unfortunately well-connected clients, in appreciation of my obtaining—to my subsequent regret—a certain pharmaceutical for him, they weren't anything I'd ever had a use for. But if now I was to play private investigator, then I supposed that a few basic breaking-and-entering tools might prove helpful. I added them to my pockets.

  I sat back and considered where to begin my investigation. The obvious approach would be to start with the Thirty. Review everything I could find or remember about each of them; try to guess who might have been involved in stealing the Warrant. Then determine their closest associates among the survivors and start interviewing.

  But that was exactly the approach Garcia Ortega's people would have already tried. I could fall back to that strategy later; for now it didn't excite me.

  No, I decided, it wasn't time yet for analytic approaches. What I needed to do at this stage was poke around randomly in the problem space. Build up my knowledge base, give my subconscious something to work with.

  I pulled up the twelve names that had struck me earlier. For each one, I told the desk to fetch anything it could find from the public nets.

  I spent the next hour flipping through the results. And felt a growing claustrophobia as I read through a dozen very different life stories up until eighteen years ago—and then, apart from variations in names and places and occupations, the same too-familiar story a dozen times over.

  I picked one of the names: Paul Stein. He'd been a grad student in physics; his department, like mine, had required a year of applied math. I remembered getting together a few times after class for lunch, where we'd argued about politics. I told my desk to phone him.

  He answered right away. “Yes?” From the images my desk had retrieved, I already knew to expect the beard he'd acquired somewhere over the years. But he needed more than a few seconds to extrapolate my short, faded hair backwards in time—he frowned, obviously trying to place me.

  "Paul,” I said.

  My voice, apparently, sufficed as a final clue. He leaned forward. "Jenna?"

  I forced myself to smile. “How have you been?"

  His eyes widened. “Why are you calling?"

  "I've just been thinking that, maybe, it would be good for some of us to get together. Just to talk, you know?"

  "No, I—” He pulled back, and his hand came up to tug at his beard. “This isn't a good time."

  "I can call back later. When would—"

  He shook his head. “Sorry.” His breaths now were faster, shallow. “Some other time, maybe. I just—” He wiped his forehead. “Sorry,” he repeated, and then he hung up.

  I sat there, staring through the space where his image had floated and cursed my stupidity. Okay, so maybe I finally seemed to be ready to start coping with the past—how did that imply that anyone else was on the same schedule?

  I got up and paced for a few minutes. Then I returned to my desk and put together a text message. I tweaked the wording several times, keeping it short, trying to remove anything potentially threatening, any sensory hooks to past events:

  Former colleague interested in getting together with others to talk, catch up. Will not contact you again, unless you reply to indicate your own interest.

  I gave it one more read, then gestured my desk to send it to the eleven remaining addresses. But my nervousness made my hand shaky; I had to take a long breath and then repeat my gestures before the desk understood.

  I tilted my chair back, wondering what else I could pursue over the coming hours. The desk chimed. Incoming text:

  yes yes yes! when? today?

  Huh. Apparently somebody had been following an even faster recovery schedule than I had.

  The sender was Tamiko Hoshida. Botany, I recalled. Or maybe genetics. She had lived only a few doors from my apartment; we'd often walked home together after late nights in the library.

  Sure, I sent. Lunch?

  She replied with the name and address of a restaurant. We agreed to meet in an hour.

  * * * *

  The restaurant sat beside a plaza on the south rim of Hab Town. Twice on the way there I had to pull my motorbike to the side of the road: first on a side street leading to Ventura Boulevard, where a tow truck was hauling away the remains of a delivery van and the ankylosaurid into which it had crashed—more and more fauna had been wandering into town lately, as their browse retreated underground for the summer—and then a second time, just a few blocks from the plaza, to let a double-wide mining transport trundle past on its way to the smelter.

  I parked my bike beside one of the scraggly wirewisp bushes that lined the edge of the plaza. A herd of young kids were chasing each other and a ball back and forth across the crumbling yellow bricks; their shouts’ echoes off the surrounding two-story habs seemed to triple their numbers. I paused a moment to watch. Which of them, I wondered, might children of mine have resembled? That tall girl kicking the ball past the others? Or maybe the scrawny boy lagging behind the pack? I glanced up at the cloudless sky and hoped that all of their parents had been keeping their children's skin treatments up to date.

  About half the buildings sported business signs. From my corner of the plaza I could see two dry cleaners, an appliance repair shop, and a run-down grocery. An old man sat in front of an unmarked hab, sipping from a bottle as his head swiveled to follow the kids and their ball. High upon the wall above him, something that in the city I'd barely have noticed: a camera surveilling from its windproof shell.

  I skirted the game, nodding hello to a bored-looking young woman behind an ice-water cart. A whiff of fresh-baked tortillas drew me past two more buildings to the restaurant.

  The interior was dim, and about ten degrees less stifling than outdoors. I dropped my sunglasses into my shirt pocket and started to look around.

  "Jenna!” A thin woman with a long, black ponytail jumped up from her seat at one of the half dozen crowded tables, waving both arms at me. I winced—I'd forgotten about Tamiko's tendency toward enthusiasm.

  Squeezing between the tables, I reached out my hand. “Tamiko—"

  She grabbed me in a tight hug. “All these years! It's so good to see you again!” Then, maybe registering what she'd just said, she held me out at arm's-length and gazed at my face, grinning the whole time. And then she hugged me again.

  I finally managed to escape her embrace. Shaking my head, I told her, “You haven't changed at all."

  She wore a pair of emerald coveralls with Hoshida Recycling and Scrap Metals embroidered in powder blue over her left breast. Her face actually hadn't altered much over two decades; her black mane, though, now held several strands of silver.

  "You haven't changed either,” she lied. “How do you manage to—?"

  I held up a hand. “First we order. Or else we never will.” She pouted as I sat and handed her a menu. But within a few seconds she was leaning across the table and raving to me about the chef's grilled salmon-lizard with persimmons.

  Once our orders had been placed, we told each other all about our lives since we'd last been in contact—both of us politely pretending that we hadn't already looked up the other's public history an hour ago. Neither of us paid much attention to the food that we took turns consuming while the other spoke.

  After a convenient interruption by our waiter, I asked, as casually as I could, “Did you ever hear that rumor about the Warrant?"

  She looked genuinely mystified. “The Warrant? What rumor?"

  "Supposedly one of us stole it, back then, and left a replica in its place. And, supposedly, it's still missing."

  "But why...” She gave it a few seconds thought, then nodded. “Actually, that would've been a smart move, once it became obvious that we weren't going to hold onto power. If someday we ever regained control, then eventually we'd need the Warrant; bes
t to keep it close. And if not—” She grinned at me. “—well, there's always extortion, isn't there?"

  I raised my eyebrows. “Sure, if you can convince the Committee that you're prepared to suffer, or die, along with the rest of the populace. Tricky, though, to launder a ransom in such a small colony."

  She gave me a wink. “Oh, I bet that you or I might know a few people who could help with that. But I wasn't necessarily thinking money."

  Something in her tone, or the gleam in her eyes, froze my spine.

  She leaned forward, lowered her voice. “Suppose the ransomer demanded political changes? I mean real changes, like a freely elected Central Committee, or disbanding the Committee Police—not the sorts of thing you could simply reverse as soon as the Warrant was delivered."

  I sat paralyzed for a second, panicked by this turn in the conversation. Then I forced myself to exhale and smile. “Well, I guess that proves it's all just a rumor, after all. Because I sure haven't seen any changes."

  She smiled back. But she still looked thoughtful.

  Quickly, I said, “Speaking of changes, do you remember that guy who lived in the apartment above yours? What was his name—Vince? Vick?"

  "Yeah ... oh—Vincente! Wow, I haven't thought about him for a long time. You remember that mustache?"

  Eventually, after we'd finished dessert and paid—in rips, though this restaurant saw enough city customers to also list prices in kiloliters—and after the waiter had refilled our teacups for the third or fourth time, the weight of our meals and of our lives settled over us and we both fell silent for a few minutes. Tamiko toyed with a spoon, twirling it slowly against the tablecloth. I folded and refolded my napkin into random shapes.

  Her gaze on her spoon, she finally said, “Do you think they already had it all planned? When they let us go back, I mean, and finish our degrees.” She looked up. “You were doing topology or something, right?"

  "Group theory."

  She frowned. “I thought that had all been completed, back before anyone left Earth."