Strings

by Dave Duncan

  “The Institute.”

  Cedric had never dreamed that such precautions would be needed in Nauc.

  “That’s just the outer fence,” Bagshaw said. “There are two more.” The copilot was jabbering into his mike, identifying himself.

  “But…” Cedric stared at his companion in bewilderment. “If HQ is guarded like this…Does it work?”

  Bagshaw was in Security. Of course he would say it worked. “Completely. There has been no successful penetration in seventeen years—not in Zone One, anyway.”

  Cedric shook his head, hurt and baffled. “Then why Meadowdale? Why did she send me there when my folks died? Wouldn’t I have been just as safe growing up here?”

  “Safe from violence, maybe. But there’s other nasty things, that even Security can’t keep out.”

  “Like what?”

  “Drugs. Disease. Debauchery.” Bagshaw grinned mockingly.

  Cedric chewed a thumbnail. “And understanding?”

  “Yucch! Know something? You’re getting contaminated already!”

  The sheer size of HQ was astounding. It was a small city in itself. As the helicopter angled in for a landing, Cedric saw tower after tower, obviously including both offices and apartments, plus canopied playgrounds, an STOL field, and local lev stations. Yet Bagshaw said that it was not especially large, not as HQ’s went; not when compared to some of the multinationals’, like BEST Place, or Greenpeace Township, or the various media centers. After all, 4-I was only a minor research facility, an arm of Stellar Power, Inc.

  If you believed that, Cedric thought, then you’d believe that rainwater’s good for you.

  This was HQ, Bagshaw added, the political and fiscal end of things. The real work was done in Cainsville, up in Labrador. That was much bigger. And Gran ran all this? Cedric had never realized.

  By the time they landed, Bagshaw had donned his bull suit again—probably the easiest way to transport it. Cedric’s percy remained on the floor. He felt very vulnerable and shivery as he jumped down onto concrete in the misty rain to find himself facing a circle of armored men, and another fusion cannon pointing at him—he ought to be getting used to that by now. His only consolation was that Bagshaw seemed unconcerned, and even a bull suit would not stop a plasma jet. Apparently this was a standard welcome.

  The newcomers were escorted across to a doorway, and then the real trials began. Bagshaw cheerfully relinquished Cedric as though he were delivering pizza, blew into a sniffer to establish his identity, and then departed. His great bulk seemed to fill the corridor from wall to wall. Surprisingly, Cedric was sorry to see him go. The man was sarcastic and offensive, but since falling seventeen stories into his arms, Cedric was inclined to trust him.

  His new owner was saturnine, cadaverous, and not much shorter than Cedric himself. He gave no name, but his white coat was labeled McEwan. He was middle-aged and bored; his obvious indifference hurt more than Bagshaw’s sarcasm.

  The first exercise was to establish that Hubbard Cedric Dickson was truly Hubbard Cedric Dickson. A sniffer matched his exhalations against records that must have come from Meadowdale, or from hospital records of his birth. Fingerprints, footprints, and DNA came next, and then he was told to speak his name, confirming his truthfulness with a polygraph cuff and vocal stress patterns. When he had passed all those tests, the last two armed men departed, looking disappointed.

  “Why not retinas?” Cedric asked, but no one bothered to answer.

  The ensuing medical outdid any ordeal he had ever experienced, involving a dozen people and a hundred complex machines. They began by removing his clothes and continued by systematically stripping away every last shred of human dignity, as only medics could, stopping just short of skinning and gutting.

  With increasing reluctance, he submitted to the escalating humiliations until he discovered that his entire alimentary canal was to be explored in detail. It was not easy to be assertive when crouched on a table in the nude surrounded by several strangers, but at that news he lost his temper. “Why?” he shouted. “I’ve never been sick in my life.”

  “That’s not what we’re looking for,” one of the women said from somewhere in the background. “Take a deep breath and try to relax.”

  “Then what is all this—ouch!—all this about?”

  “We just want to be certain,” McEwan said.

  “Certain of—Ouch! Hell! That hurts!—certain of what?”

  “Certain that the Sierra Club has not packed you full of explosives, that you contain no Greenpeace transmitters, Earthfirster receivers, BEST’s little silicon wonders, unaccountable radioactive materials, custom-designed viruses, or toxic wastes. Little things like that.”

  “Do try to relax,” the woman said.

  And once they had counted and tagged every corpuscle, they made a small incision behind his ear and drove a screw into his skull. That was an earpatch, they told him, so that System could talk to him in private. System was fortunate, Cedric thought, that it could not hear his feelings at the moment.

  When all that was over he was sent to a cubicle to dress—a sop to modesty that seemed strangely unnecessary after his public ordeal. He had never worn formal city clothes before. He had known that he would have to do so in Nauc, and the outfit hanging there was worse even than he had feared. System knew his size, of course—System no doubt knew the size and shape of every organ in his body by now—so the fit was perfect. Perfect fit in a business suit meant no room to breathe. Formal clothes fitted tighter than skin. That was okay, Cedric supposed. But the color was an eye-jarring fluorescent green. Hideous!

  As he heaved the last zipper closed and straightened up to regard himself in the mirror, the drape over the door was thrown aside.

  “Great Merciful Heavens—the leek that ate Denver!” Bagshaw was resplendent in an equally snug uniform of brick red, and Cedric suppressed a comment that his bodyguard resembled a mutant beetroot. Neither of them looked good in skintight suits, he thought, but scrawny was surely no worse than bulging. Bagshaw carried his fearsome Hardwave slung on his shoulder, and he sported several impressive badges. His bald scalp was concealed by a red helmet.

  “I could eat a fair piece of Denver about now,” Cedric remarked hopefully.

  “Your decision. Next thing we have to do is code you into System, but I was told that Grandma’s waiting to meet her darling. You decide, after this.” Bagshaw wheeled and strode away. A few oversize strides put Cedric level with him.

  “What happened to my coins?”

  “The data will be inserted into System keyed to your voice, file name ‘Baby Talk.’ The originals will be destroyed.”

  “Why? You frightened that they might be booby-trapped, too?”

  “They were.”

  “What?”

  Bagshaw glanced up at him with a grimace. “Physically you were clean, but not your coins. We’ll be finding out who arranged that, and how. We ran a decon program on them. They were hot. In here.”

  Computer viruses? Who could have tampered with Cedric’s coins? No one. There comes a time when a man just stops believing…

  “Speak your name,” said the tall, saturnine man in the coat named McEwan. He was seated at a comset that seemed more complex than most.

  “Hubbard Cedric Dickson.”

  “In command mode.” McEwan was obviously eager to be off doing something else. Rapidly he ran through a routine to introduce Cedric to the Institute’s System. Its responses all seemed much the same as Meadowdale’s, except its voice was male and had an Eastern accent. It had no trouble distinguishing the intonation of Cedric’s command tone. He was given a wrist mike.

  “Up in Cainsville you’re almost never more than a few steps from a wall unit,” McEwan explained in a fast monotone. “Confidential replies come through the earpatch. Confidential questions you input with a keyboard, right?”

  “Right.” Cedric was careful not to catch Bagshaw’s eye.

  “You do understand about ranking?”

>   “He doesn’t understand anything,” Bagshaw said.

  The tall man frowned as though he also was long overdue for breakfast. “There are nine grades. As a beginner you’ll probably start as a Nine, but you may have a work grade that’s higher, depending on what they give you to do. You’ll learn that later.”

  Cedric had learned one thing already: that he was going to be asking a lot of questions. “What’s the difference?”

  “You’re not supposed to use the higher rank for personal prying.”

  “Who knows?”

  “System does, of course, and your supervisor will be informed. Look…say I’m a Five—”

  “Not a chance,” Bagshaw remarked nastily. “I’m only a Six, and I sure as hell outrank you.”

  McEwan shot him a glance of powerful distaste. “All right, I’m a Seven. I can call Six-level data, though, if I need it for my job. Sometimes system will ask me to justify my request.” He turned to the com and asked in command tone: “What grade is Hubbard Cedric Dickson?”

  “Information confidential below Grade Three,” System told them.

  “See? You’ll have to ask it yourself.”

  “What grade am I?” Cedric inquired.

  Through the bones of his skull came a spectral reply: “Four.”

  “What did it say?” McEwan asked innocently.

  Cedric might be dressed as a two-meter leprechaun, but he was not green enough to answer that query—not after Bagshaw’s careful hint. “Nine,” he lied. “What’s my work ranking?”

  Again the hollow voice echoed in his head, creepy but quite distinguishable—and completely unbelievable.

  “Eight,” he told the waiting men. He might have hidden his shock from McEwan, but Bagshaw was appraising him with eyes like awls.

  “Where now, Sprout? Hotcakes, bacon, steak, coffee, toast, eggs—or Grandma?”

  Cedric shrugged sadly. “What big teeth you have.”

  “Right!” Bagshaw wheeled and headed off along the corridor. Cedric followed blindly, wondering if this was a test, wondering again what was in store for him, and totally unable to imagine what sort of job he could handle that would require a Grade One ranking on System.

  8

  Nauc, April 7

  HASTINGS WILLOUGHBY HAD not ridden in a percy since being blown up in one, back in 2036. On that occasion his leg bones had been reduced to gravel and later replaced by synfab, but he had not felt right down there since. He rarely traveled at all anymore, and when he did he preferred a cavalcade of armored Caddies. In any case, other people usually came to call on him. He was Secretary General.

  Any message from Agnes carried supreme priority, and that morning he had been awakened at dawn to receive one. It had come in one of their private codes, a code simple enough to require only a pocket computer. Even the smartest Systems still had trouble with homonyms, and the text he finally deciphered said merely, “Cum heer gude noos.”

  Come here—good news? Come, hear good news?

  It had taken even Willoughby some time to work that out. Only when his regular early-morning briefing told him of the media reception she had scheduled for noon did he understand. She wanted him there, but she was not about to tell him why. The cloaking-and-daggering might be to tell him that it was important without saying so over a public com. Or she might be playing some sort of double game.

  Even God would never guess at what devious mischief Agnes might get up to. Willoughby ranked her as one of the greatest schemers the world had ever known; he felt privileged to have worked with her for so many years, and the thought of observing her in action just one more time was irresistible. Moreover, in an odd sort of way he still felt affection for Hubbard Agnes Murray. No one else had ever bested him at bedroom politics. Certainly no one else could summon him like a whistled dog, as she still could.

  Within seconds of receiving enlightenment, therefore, Willoughby had made his decision, summoned transportation, and canceled a dozen scheduled commeetings. He chuckled when he saw the squad of bleary, half-shaven, half-zipped bulls that gathered to escort him. One of the prerogatives of power had always been the right to rattle one’s subordinates. Some men took it as a duty.

  His Caddy had hardly crossed the outermost mine field before he began to have second thoughts. Cold introspection soon told him he was indulging in self-deception. He was not rushing to Agnes’s side to assist her, nor out of old friendship, nor—truly—to observe her in action one more time. He was going there in the hope that she had found a lifeboat and would make room in it for him. He should have called her first and argued. To seem too eager might arouse her suspicions.

  He was old and tired, and he needed solace. Folly, folly! No one appealed for help to Hubbard Agnes. She despised weakness. If she concluded that he had become too feeble to be a reliable ally, she would turn on him herself. Possibly she already had, and he was heading to his own execution.

  The sharks were closing. He had known it for months, and this time he could see no raft to hand. China was poised to recognize the World Chamber. Then the U.N. would vanish overnight, or at least as soon as Cheung Olsen Paraschuk had called and won a global election. When the U.N. went, so would Hastings Willoughby; and so, too, would Hubbard Agnes. She must see the danger as well as he did. There was the real reason he was so eagerly answering her call—for comfort, to be told that once again she had found a plan that would save them both.

  Sprawled out across the seat at full length, he gloomed for a long while in lonely luxury, ignoring the cityscape hurtling by, debating whether he dared cancel and return. Inevitably he concluded that to start displaying indecision would only make things worse.

  It was a fine day: the rain was classed as “harmless,” and the UV flux was as low as it ever got at that time of year. He saw endless miles of shanty towns, and estuaries that had once been valleys, and salt marsh that had once been farmland. None of them warmed his blue mood. He watched holo. He received bulletins from his office. The Indian government in Delhi had announced that it was withdrawing its U.N. delegation and allowing elections for Chamber representation. But the Delhi government controlled little or none of the country, and the other claimants had been Chamber supporters for years. One of the two rival Japanese governments might follow; that would be more serious.

  Nor did his first glimpse of Institute HQ do anything to banish his sulks—it all looked so old now. Many of the buildings dated from the early twenties. By the time 4-I had been born, the need for cities to move to higher ground had been obvious, and thus, unlike most other large organizations, the Institute had never been forced into a massive relocation. Its shabbiness was one more reminder of the years that had died since Hastings Willoughby and Hubbard Agnes had together lifted the world by the scruff of its neck and shaken a little sense into it—not enough sense, but some.

  The Institute was old, more than thirty years old, and he had already been into his fifties when he slid its charter through an unsuspecting General Assembly one sleepy August afternoon. He could still remember the bulging veins, the purpling complexion on old DeJong, who had been S.G. then.

  “I turn mine back for one hour,” the fat Dutchman had screamed. But by then the deed had been done. The charter for Stellar Power had been approved, Agnes installed as director.

  A few years later she had applied enough bribery to return the favor, pulling strings to install Willoughby in DeJong’s chair.

  The good old days, alas!

  He was old. He would cheerfully retire in a day, except he knew he would be dead in a week. He had made far too many enemies.

  Age showed in his sagging belly, pitilessly revealed by the present fashion for absurdly tight clothes. Surgery would help, of course, had he not sickened of surgeons long ago. Modern sartorial engineers could do wonders, but he was old-fashioned enough to despise their mechanized corsets as shameless fakery. So he stayed his own prehistoric shape.

  He showed age also in petty irritation at having to wait until the s
ecurity forces completed their inevitable wrangling. U.N. cops in sky blue, 4-I’s in dark red—bulls well named, they glowered at one another, huffing and puffing and pawing the rug. Legal fantasy made him the director’s superior, and inevitably that fiction prolonged the dispute. The arguments were settled at last in the way they always were—his own guards could accompany him, but they must go unarmed, and a batch of 4-I’s goons would in turn “guard” them.

  Age showed even in his foolish embarrassment when his false bones rang scan alarms, as they always did, requiring explanation. And when at last he limped along the corridor, peering over the heads of a dozen angry young grizzlies, he was very conscious of a steady click from his right knee. His prostheses were aging, too.

  The decor was outmoded, almost shabby. Even new it had been little more than adequate, he recalled, and now the executive suite of the world’s richest organization seemed blowsy and cheap and old-fashioned. Agnes had never cared much for ostentation. One day some unscrupulous whippersnapper would seize power and clean house. Then she would be gone, and probably Hasting Willoughby also, at much the same time. They had climbed to power on the same rope, and they would fall in the same coup, leaving nothing but their names collecting static in libraries.

  He was ushered at last into the big, familiar, five-sided office. How many of the current day’s rebels would recognize the deliberate irony in that design? If she had changed the carpet since he had last been there, then she had stayed with the same bland peach, and the ebony pentagonal table in the center was still the only large piece of furniture.

  Agnes came forward to greet him. She was wearing powder blue, as she so often did, to match her eyes, and her outfit could only be a Kaing original, or perhaps a Dom Lumi. Her hair was pure white, her gaze as sharp as ever, and her appearance immaculate. She had weathered well, but then Agnes’s dislike of ostentation had never extended to personal grooming. Her facial texture would have flattered a woman a generation younger, and modern medicine had preserved her figure.