Sea of Silver Light

by Tad Williams

  "Of course I did." For a moment he showed a flash of genuine hurt. "What do you take me for, Skouros? But she pointed out that while we were devoting so much time to this five-year-old case, people were getting murdered in new and original ways all the time, and the department is understaffed as it is. It was hard to argue with her."

  "Yeah. I'm sorry, Stan. You were the one who had to listen to it." She scowled and picked a piece of ice out of her drink, rubbing it along the table so it left a trail of moisture. "It's probably just as well I wasn't there. I probably would have screamed at her."

  "Well, did you put the afternoon to some other good use? Besides inviting people over to use your shower?"

  She winced. That hurt—despite all the unpaid overtime she had put in lately, she had fretted over leaving half an hour early just to catch the end of Elisabetta's shift at Bondi Baby. "I didn't just spend the entire day trying to get laid, Chan, honestly. But if they're going to pull us off Merapanui, there's not much point talking about what I found, because it isn't much."

  "Not pull—pulled."

  "You mean . . . we're off it?"

  "We're reassigned as of 1800 hours today." Stan did not often show real emotion, but his quicksilver features turned leaden. "It's over, Calliope. Sorry, but the captain made it very clear. Merapanui goes back in the 'do not resuscitate' file and Monday morning we go back to work on the latest street-beast bashings and alley slashings." He grinned bleakly. "We would have solved it, partner. We just ran out of time."

  "Shit." Calliope was not going to cry, even in front of Stan, but the wave of frustration and anger that washed through her definitely made her eyes smart. She slammed the piece of ice down on the tabletop; it squirted from her fingers and caromed off a napkin holder onto the floor. "Shit."

  There wasn't much else to say.

  It was always strange, this sensation of intrusion. She thought of it as being somehow very male, which probably explained why most hackers and crackers were men. Burglars, too. And explorers. And rapists, of course.

  Which did not really explain where she herself fit in, but it was hard to deny the wired-up pleasure Dulcie always felt when she found her way into someone else's system.

  Her system was chewing up machine language, but it was slow going; not only did the J Corporation have all the usual state-of-the-art security gear, but the really important stuff she wanted was also buried under a tremendous amount of VR code. This made breaking into the vaults of the J Corporation even more like burglary than the usual foray: information could actually be seen as old-fashioned paper files in cabinets, the different sections of the massive system as rooms in some near-endless office building. Not that Dulcie bothered with any of these real-world imitations, but she could tell that if she wanted to, a few adjustments would set the whole thing unrolling in front of her like a game, virtual representations of gates and vault doors, steely-eyed security guards, and all kinds of things. Was it just that in fifty years of living entirely online Felix Jongleur had found time to add a human-friendly facade to everything? Or was something more complicated at work?

  Maybe he's like Dread, she thought. A bit of an illiterate when it comes to technology, but still wants to be able to access everything because he doesn't really trust anybody but himself. That would certainly make sense if the stories about his immense age were true, since Jongleur would have been an old man already by the time the Information Era had begun.

  She filed these questions about Jongleur away for possible later use, but the idea had set off a few interesting sparks. Could something like that be the key to unlock Dread's own hidden storage? Some obvious thing that a technophile like Dulcie Anwin wouldn't normally consider—something that might not even occur to her? Several days had passed since she had stumbled across her employer's hiding place, but it still nagged her thoughts.

  Not now, she told herself. There's work to do here, with Jongleur's files. And I sure don't want Dread scorched at me.

  Not only that, she realized—she wanted to impress him. Something in Dread's self-confidence and self-involvement pulled up a corresponding need in her, a need to prove herself.

  Well, even if he's the toughest, coldest son of a bitch in the world, he couldn't get into the J Corporation files by himself. But I can. And I will.

  She did, eventually, but it took almost twenty-four hours.

  As it turned out, none of the passwords or other bits of Grail network information that Dread had passed along to her proved much use at all. She was thrown back on old-fashioned methods and was glad she had come prepared. But even with the best gear that money and shady connections could provide, there was still a great deal of waiting. She left the building several times to take walks—trips she kept short, despite her need for fresh air and sunshine, because the neighborhood made her nervous—and curled up once for a couple of hours of uneasy sleep, which was punctuated by a dream of long hospital corridors, in the dream she was searching for a little animal of some kind that had been lost, but the corridors were starkly white and empty and the search seemed endless.

  When her customized Krypton gearstripper finally gave her the hole she needed, she jumped up, clapped her hands, and whooped, riding an electrifying surge of adrenaline—but the elation did not last long. The actual truth of breaking into the J Corporation's information system was in some way worse than the grim hospital dream. At least there she had been searching for something, however hard to find; now, with the break-in accomplished, she was forced to confront the ridiculous complexity of the task before her.

  Dread, with the nonchalance of someone who didn't understand what he was asking, had told her he wanted anything of interest about the Grail network, but especially anything pertaining to the Otherland operating system. At the same time, he had made it very clear that he didn't want her examining the data too closely herself—a stricture which had made her snort loudly while listening to his original message.

  Right, she had thought. Like they're just going to label all their file material to facilitate easier industrial theft. "Don't bother to read this: trust us, it's important."

  Now that the exhilaration of cracking the system was gone, the weight of the actual task depressed her. She had no idea how she'd ever find the things Dread wanted. The amount of information that lay before her was staggering, the accumulated institutional knowledge of one of the world's larger multinational corporations. And the Grail network information might not even be included—it was an important secret, after all, wasn't it? At the very least, it certainly wasn't going to be helpfully labeled.

  Almost two hours of browsing the system indexes confirmed her fears. She sighed, disconnected, and got up to rip open another coffee pack. There had to be a way to narrow things down.

  It came to her as the cup was still bubbling. It wasn't the J Corporation she really wanted—it was Jongleur's own personal system. None of the Otherland information, or at least very little of it, would need to be available to J Corporation employees, since the bulk of the network administration seemed to be handled by Robert Wells' Telemorphix, and even though Jongleur owned the J Corporation completely, it was still a quasi-public entity and presumably available to government audits. Jongleur couldn't have bribed everyone, could he? She thought the chances were very strong that someone who lived nearly his entire existence online would have his own separate system containing all the most important information, and certainly anything as vital to him as the secrets of the Grail network. The question was, how to find Felix Jongleur's personal system.

  The solution, when it came, pleased her sense of irony and confirmed her earlier hunch: Jongleur's own eccentricities would give her the tools to defeat his security.

  Jongleur's peculiar use of the VR interface slowed down her initial experiments, but since they were going to be the key to her success, she felt no urge to complain. She put her best analysis gear to work on the places where use of the clumsy, humanizing interface seemed most counterintuitive, guess
ing that these would be the most likely spots to find Jongleur's own connections to the J Corporation system. The gear did its job. Within an hour the links began to turn up—conduits for information to be siphoned out of the corporate system on a regular basis, data pipelines custom-tailored for Jongleur's own idiosyncratic use. Dulcie felt a buzz of pride. Dread might have his weird little tricks that he would not share or explain—he was clearly using something out of the ordinary to have breached the Otherland security so easily—but she had tricks of her own.

  I'm good, damn it. I'm good at this. I'm one of the best.

  As her gear tracked the smaller, capillary links to larger links, pursuing their mazelike course through rerouters and firewalls, her excitement continued to rise. This was what it was all about. This was better than anything—better than money, better than sex. When the larger links converged into a single broadband data tap, she was so excited she had to get up and take another walk just to pump some of the nervous energy out of her system so she wouldn't explode. As she paced along the slick, shiny streets in the wake of one of the city's unmanned cleaning trucks, she felt her heart racing as though she had just finished a marathon. All by herself, she was making a billion-credit incursion. If this had been her own play, this would be what others in her business called a retirement strike—she would never have had to work again.

  She came back to the loft to find that the tracking gear had located its quarry and finished its work: she was spiked into Jongleur's personal system. There was still work to be done, of course. If it had been a true cold call, Dulcie would have needed weeks just to get into the simplest and least important levels, but now the passwords and other bits and pieces Dread had picked up enabled her to start nibbling away like a mouse in the wall-wiring. It still wasn't easy—the security mechanisms behind the ancient mogul's virtual playground were tough, smart, and adaptive—but because Dread's information was like having a fifth column inside the besieged system, the hardest part was now finished.

  A management specialist would be in heaven here, she thought as she surveyed what now lay spread before her. You could spend days—weeks!—just tracking the custodial staff in that big tower of his. And look at this! Personal security—it's an entire subsection. He's got a damned army out there on his island. Just the quartermaster's requisitions take up ten times the storage I have in my entire system!

  Even the most flawless spike-and-siphon had a time limit, of course, and even as she rode the crest of her triumph, Dulcie was keenly aware that things could go south very quickly.

  Dread says Jongleur's out of contact, somehow—but someone must be in charge. You don't just leave a multi-trillion dollar enterprise empty like a laundromat while you step out for a few days. Good God, if J Corporation missed their payroll, the Slate of Louisiana would collapse.

  Contemplating the corporate immensity spread before her, the thought of Dread's own hidden files plucked at her like a beggar's hand. How much is he hiding from me, anyway? How much can I trust him? I'm putting my life on the line doing this—what if he's wrong? What if his boss is onto him already?

  Looking over Jongleur's empire, she had no doubt that at least one thing Dread had already told her was true: if they wanted to, Jongleur and his associates could make her vanish so quickly and thoroughly that Dulcinea Anwin might as well not have existed.

  Only my mom will even notice. And she'll get over it.

  In a way, she quickly realized. Dread had been right and she had been wrong. It was possible to copy information without surveying it first. In fact, it was imperative. There were so many thousands of files that seemed like they might have something to do with Dread's rather broad mandate, she could only designate whole blocks for duplication and send the data shooting down the high-speed links to the storage space Dread had given her—memory he had partitioned off for her from the Grail Network, because nothing she or Dread had access to would have given her anywhere near enough room.

  In her mind's eye, Dulcie saw herself on one of those net game shows—what was that one, Loot?—throwing things into bags as fast as she could, stumbling over the objects of her own greed because they were too many and she was only one person.

  She worked all night, and did not realize how much coffee she had consumed until she pulled the data-spike and collapsed onto her bed. Her entire nervous system seemed made of sparking, short-circuited electrical wires; she spent three teeth-grinding hours lying on her back until sleep came to her at last.

  If she dreamed of lost animals or hospitals this time, she did not remember when she woke. The sleep just passed seemed like an impossibly long stretch of blackness, the attack on Jongleur's system weeks old, but after she had checked on Dread in his coma bed and made her way out into the gray day in search of some kind of meal that didn't come out of a wave-pak, she realized she had slept only ten hours, which wasn't too bad.

  Nah, you're getting old, Anwin, she told herself. Used to be you would have slept for two hours tops, then been up taking the data apart.

  Feeling much more substantial after the ingestion of a couple of rosella bud muffins, a fruit salad, and more coffee, she wandered back to the loft, hooked up her 'can and got into the Jongleur downloads. She had a perverse desire to wake up Dread, roust him out of his machine, and show him what she'd accomplished.

  What is that—daddy stuff? She was disgusted with herself. "Look, I'm a good girl, see what I did for you?"

  She was an hour into the preliminary investigation, and had found several of the codewords that designated Grail-related files, allowing her to pull a large number of them directly out of the mix and into the "relevant" pile without having to examine them, when she came across an anomalous object. It was a VR file, or at least it had VR code attached to it, but it also had some strange encrypted link embedded in it as well. It was in among a grouping of much more mundane files having to do with what she was loosely calling Jongleur's personal estate—powers of attorney, links to various legal firms and accounting operations, instructions to J Corporation management. She had spent time on the estate data hoping that it might contain some information on maintaining the Grail network in case of an emergency, reasoning that someone as old as Jongleur would want to make sure his pride and joy was kept running properly if he was temporarily disabled. She hadn't found anything—the material seemed quite ordinary, the kind of thing any powerful, wealthy person would have to ease the transition during illness or at death—so the odd file stuck out even more.

  It was labeled "Ushabti," a word or name Dulcie didn't recognize, but she guessed from what Dread had told her about the old man's obsessions that it might be Egyptian. It had been created three years earlier and did not seem to have been added to or changed since. She triggered a quick search through her own system, and was given the information that ushabti was indeed an ancient Egyptian word, signifying a kind of tomb-statue. There was more detail available, but a quick glance turned up nothing relevant. Dulcie frowned and opened the file itself.

  A dark-eyed man appeared before her so swiftly that she flinched. He was perhaps in his sixties, a tiny smile on his lined face, his white hair neat. The viewpoint drew back to show that he sat behind a desk in an old-fashioned office, something that might have belonged in a nineteenth-century embassy, teak furniture and heavy drapes on the windows.

  My God, she thought. That's Jongleur. But this file is only a few years old, and he can't have looked like that in a hundred years.

  Which meant nothing in VR, of course. What the hell difference when this was done—this is a guy who appears as some Egyptian god most of the time. . . .

  The old man before her nodded his head once, then spoke, the voice public-school English with a tiny hint of something else, something more foreign, beneath.

  "And so we meet, my son. Something we could never do while I was alive. I am anxious to tell you everything, and then you will understand why your life has been ordered in the way it has. But first you must tell me your name.
Your true name, as it has been given to you, then we may proceed to the more prosaic forms of verifying identity."

  My son? Dulcie sat without a thought of anything to say. She had clearly triggered the first half of some kind of dual-encryption, and now Jongleur—or his recorded sim, or his ghost, or whatever the hell this was—was waiting for the other half of the key.

  "I wait for your true name," the old man said, a bit more of an edge in his voice. His eyes were quite mesmerizing, Dulcie thought as she waited helplessly—"commanding" is what they would have been called in a romance, although there was little romantic about this flinty old monarch. If he had looked anything like that in real life, it was easy to understand how he had built himself an empire.

  "Your true name," the pseudo-Jongleur said for the third time. A moment later he was gone. The file had closed itself.

  Dulcie rubbed her hand against her forehead and felt a film of sweat. She dropped out of the system. It was definitely time to take a break.

  An hour later she sat staring at the Ushabti file. She was unwilling to open it again, or even examine it too closely, because things like this often had a built in number of attempts they would allow before simply self-destructing.

  A search of available information on Jongleur had done nothing to illuminate the mystery. Not only had his actual sons and daughters died a century ago, but according to the best sources she could find there was nothing like a direct line of succession. All of his living relatives—the oldest still generations younger than Jongleur himself—were descendants of his cousins. He was not known to be close to any of them, nor did any of them have a role in the J Corporation.