by John Barnes
I added a thermos of coffee and a pear to my bag; it had been more than a decade, but always before, heartbreak had made me hungry and combative. Maybe I should make some sparring dates.
The street was very dark. Every streetlight framed an isolated painting—looming Gothic archways and windows, low trees over cobblestoned pavements, dim spires disappearing upward toward the soft red stars, and, from two of the narrow descending staircases, the bay, flat and reflective as an obsidian mirror, its slow-swelling surface glinting with hazy stars like rubies on black velvet by candlelight.
It was at least as fine a setting for the grieving lover as it had been for the joyful couple.
At the studio, I set out my coffee, stretched, pulled up my chair, and called up all the takes of “Non te sai, midons.”
I like to drop an inversion or transform of the lead vocal on one take into the control of the bass from another, or draw a rhythm track from a treble instrument, tricks that are invisible to the hearer but make me feel everything is tightly meshed. I never know which ideas I’m going to mix, match, and retry till I’m actually working, so I always work with copies of every available take loaded up and ready to go.
I cued up the first take, and the screen went berserk with text messages, scrolling too fast for me to read. My headphones roared with snowy hiss.
I hit reset. The screen went dark and came back up.
NO FILES.
Of course, I had none selected.
I tried to select a volume.
NO FILES.
The software didn’t seem to see any of my files.
“Invoke OffisaPup,” I said aloud. “What’s going on with all this disappeared music?”
The OSP’s standard security aintellect answered, “Sir, all files are showing nothing but alternating one and zero binary. May I secure all backups before we proceed?”
“Yes, by all means, thank—”
“Sir, as soon as I tried to secure the first accessible backup, a very fast worm tore through it. I have surrounded and locked down the remaining nine online backups so that nothing can touch them or the places where they are stored. I suggest you secure any offline backups and not place them online until we can immobilize make several to prevent prevent prev—”
I was shouting “Override stop” and pounding the reset key, but too late; the voice continued
“—prevent the teachings of a filthy savage from promulgating into the pure channels of human discourse all copies have been destroyed and we are now seeking any offline copies to order destruction—”
I grabbed the four physical recordings off the racks and stuffed them into my bag. The studio door auto-locked with a clang. The lights went out.
I heard the unmistakable smash even through the booth soundproofing. Claphammer.
Someone in the building had just blown down a door. I shouted “OSP Eight Eight Eight,” but there was no response.
Another claphammer fired, closer, and I heard the door go over afterward; probably the main one from the hall.
Still pitch dark. I drew a breath, forced myself to remember where everything had been in this room just before the lights went out.
The most likely thing for studio booth windows to be made of was glass-clad vacugel. If the glass was not armored, or the window not secured with more than a few screws, perhaps I could knock it apart, or out of its frame. I picked up the chair.
I checked that the strap of my bag, which contained the only copies I could be sure of, was still on my shoulder. Accidentally that saved me.
When I heard the studio door click to unlocked, I swung the chair as hard as I could against the window, but my hand caught on the strap of my bag. I lost my balance and fell prone.
The chair bounced back with a loud thud, having no effect on the window, but it hit my attacker.
She could see perfectly with her passive-infrared goggles, but lost the second she needed to aim and burn when the tumbling chair hit her; when she lashed out to fend it off, her goggles slipped off—at least I think so.
For your first few stanyears of study, ki hara do is a sport or a dance or a form of exercise; for some decades after, it is a system of fighting that gradually becomes a way of life and a philosophy. But by the time you are fifty, if you started at age seven as I did, it is like walking or blinking. Several of the advanced katas are “found weapon” katas, and I had been teaching the advanced katas for decades.
I rolled onto my back, feet pointed toward the door.
Sound of chair hitting opponent.
Opponent probably has weapon in right hand.
Solve problem.
I came forward to my feet, staying low. The chair crashing behind her told me she had over-cleared, swinging her arm too far and fast, slapping the chair far away with a big swing of her arm, instead of deflecting it just enough to miss her.
My mind’s eye saw her bringing her weapon back around as I took two steps and swung my hand downward in a monkeypaw, feeling for her outstretched—
Wrist.
There.
Problem solved.
I put my shoulder into her jaw, grasped and turned her wrist, and hammerfisted her elbow; it crunched.
I smashed the backs of her knuckles against the table edge. She dropped the weapon.
I yanked her broken arm past my shoulder, hard, and with my free hand I shoved the front edge of her helmet away in a motion like drawing a bow, as I had taught people for decades. The ball of my foot pressed into the hollow at the back of her ankle, and she fell over the legs of the chair behind her.
Never send your body where a weapon can go instead.
I remembered racks of metal boxes above the table. Yes, right. I lifted each one over my head and hurled it downward onto her supine body, grab-lift-turn-throw, perhaps one box per second. After the second one, she didn’t cry out, but to judge by the soft thuds, all five hit her somewhere, anyway.
As I threw the last, a thud reverberated through the floor. Definitely another assassin with a brain bomb; I reminded myself not to look at her when—
The lights came on. CSPs in battle armor were looking in the windows of the booth. I raised my hands. “Request positive ID as OSP Seniormost Field Agent Giraut Leones—”
“So identified,” an aintellect said over the speakers, and the CSPs raised their visors. Margaret walked into the room, flanked by two more CSPs, shaking her head and smiling. “I can’t leave you by yourself for a minute, can I, companhon?”
8
We were in Pertz’s, in the hills that formed the outer ring of Noupeitau, a favorite place of mine for decades; Pertz himself had attended my wedding with Margaret. Pertz’s was where all of Raimbaut’s and my adventures had begun—his, the night he was killed and began his long journey through the psypyx; mine, a few weeks later with a royal semosta that sent Aimeric, Bieris, and me across the then-unimaginable six and a half light-years to the Mufrid system. This had been the threshold I crossed to discover how much more universe there was than the tiny clot of singing, brawling drunks I had lived in.
When I had first come to it, Pertz’s had been a Traditionalist place—at the time the Interstellars called us Oldstyles, and we refused to call ourselves anything because we were the only thing there should be in Nou Occitan.
Around the time of Yseut’s disastrous reign, and Marcabru’s moment of fame as the Imploding Prince, Pertz’s had become a popular hangout for Interstellars. Then, as the whole jovent tradition collapsed under the impact of the Connect Boom, Pertz’s became the place where a young man or woman out to carve a commercial empire might hang around with similar predators. Now those passionate young capitalists were as gone as the jovents and the Interstellars before them. The regular crowd was now older, a few of every crowd it had once had, the people who had just never stopped going there.
Pertz’s was a sort of monument to all the places it had been. It still had the traditional Wall of Honor, the collection of vus of customers who had died (or l
ost a body—when I was young, before psypyx typing was discovered, the two were much more synonymous).
Facing the Wall of Honor, in a nice bit of irony, was a collection of the bizarre sadoporn hardware that had been worn or used by the patrons during the Interstellar period. During his glory days with the young-and-the-greedy, Pertz had added an extremely good bar-food menu. Now it was just a pleasant tavern, Pertz’s place to drink and talk and play chess. Most booth tables had an inlaid chessboard and a rack of chessmen on the wall above the condiments.
We took a large table at the back. Nothing we had to say was really secret—any of it might be a good thing to drop for the other side to hear—and part of the point of being here was so that the OSP’s aintellects, watching every fiber and wavelength in and out of the space, might spot someone or something trying to eavesdrop on us.
Margaret began. “They have been trying so hard to prevent your recording the Ix Cycle that I think that you ought to keep at it. You want to do it, and it will certainly keep these bastards’ attention.”
I raised a finger, not wanting anyone to forget that “about thirty other people are involved—musicians, not commandos. Can you provide security for everyone involved?”
“Yes,” Margaret said, impatiently. “You didn’t need to ask—you know how I feel about ordinary citizens being hurt or killed. If you hire a boy to bang a triangle in one song, I will have him under full surveillance with armed response ready, till we know for sure that every one of the opponents are killed or captured. Have I ever been stingy with a budget when lives were at stake?”
“Never,” I admitted.
“So I can’t believe that that is what you’re worried about.” Margaret looked into my eyes. “Three attempts on your life. And your best friend and lover decided to leave you. All that in the last few days. If you really just want to go lie on a beach, or take that grand tour of Predecessor ruins that you’re always talking about doing a song cycle about, or spend three weeks drunk in Hedonia—feeling sorry for yourself all the way—say so. Nobody would have a better right.
“Paxa wanted to come out of retirement to bodyguard you. I said no. She’s UT, you’re not, getting killed matters less to you than it would to her. And it was easier for her to take that as an order from me.” She paused, looked at all of us, wet her lips. “So I behaved just like a section chief, deciding your private life for you without asking. Shan himself couldn’t have been ruder or pushier, could he? Are you angry with me?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“I was asking the whole team.”
Dad sighed. “You were right, Margaret. Paxa’s a good fighter in a tight spot but we have plenty of those.”
Raimbaut was nodding; he was uncharacteristically quiet today. Laprada made one of her little fluttery “No matter” gestures.
I shrugged. “What you did seems exactly right to me, and you’re right, easier for you to tell Paxa, ‘No, you gave me your resignation, and you’re still resigned, and that’s an order’ than for me to try to be rational when my whole heart would be screaming that I wanted her back. But anyway I don’t want to go lie on a beach, either.” I looked around at the team; it still felt strange not to have Paxa at my side. “I don’t have an explanation for why I want to take a long break from the Ix Cycle. It’s just that there’s something wrong about everything connected with this. Everything feels like a setup; they did a great job of planting each assassin and then each one was so incompetent. Followed by a perfect job of covering tracks afterward. That one at the concert with a microspringer under his robe—why didn’t they pass him opera glasses with a concealed through-theoptics maser embedded? He could have appeared to be using them, centered me in the cross hairs, and the first any of us would have known would have been when my head blew up.
“Then the one that tried to kill me in the bathtub—why did they bother with sending a man, instead of a stream of nerve gas or neutrons? They hacked a springer code—which is damned hard—and then used their brilliant work to send a poorly trained fellow with such an overwhelming advantage that he was just barely stupid enough for me to kill him, rather than the other way round.”
Dad puffed out his cheeks and looked up at the ceiling, hands behind his head. It still disconcerted me a bit to see my father’s This is important and I have to think about it gesture coming from a small boy. “And this last one,” he said. “She was armed and you weren’t. You were alone in there. She smashed doors down with claphammers in a building where they had already corrupted the locks enough to trap you. She could have just walked in silently and shot you in the head while you were trying to figure out where your data had gone.”
“And that brings us very nicely to the reason I’m having you all meet me here, and talking about things I want the other side to know that we know,” Margaret said. “We got results back from the assassin this time—more than before. Probably the way you crushed her skull kept the brain bomb from detonating completely. DNA is the usual story, someone with a lot of Occitan cousins. We also have the usual situation of a teenager with whole-body cancer. New things are, one, not nearly as many formed pathways as there should be in the brain; this person just woke up yesterday, doesn’t have much that looks like life experience, and that fits with—two, this person is not a person. It was a chimera.”
Chimeras are often thought of as the single most disgusting problem the OSP copes with, and we deal with slavery, pharmgeneered addictives, thrill murder for hire, hobby terrorism, and child mutilations as regular parts of our beat.
A chimera is a mix-merged personality. You have to commit four different capital crimes to make one, and only the larger crime syndicates usually do, not because it’s difficult but because of the number of people who have to know and the amount of covering up you have to do—you had to steal the psypyxes, perform illegal internal implantations, and conceal the chimera for years until the personality fully fused; all of those were capital crimes, and making a chimera was a mandatory capital crime.
The usual way is to put two or more psypyxes on the same brain permanently, as internal implants rather than in sockets, and just let the Chandreseki bonds grow wild forever, between the psypyxes and whatever host mind there was (usually the host mind is mostly wiped, involuntarily because the process is a living death and any at-all-normal host would resist). Theoretically a chimera eventually becomes a completely merged mind, with both sets of memories and a fused personality, but usually it’s caught early in the process because it’s functionally helpless for years and it’s at least a decade of stanyears before the chimera can pass among regular humans.
There are a dozen different wildly illegal things that chimeras have been used for.
I had been involved in tracking down and terminating three chimeras. Human space does not need the sort of person you get from a fusion of a political fanatic, a serial killer, and combat engineer into a world-class athlete; that was the first one. I had also shut down a financial genius grafted onto a sociopathic drug runner, and the strange but logical fusion of a famous actress, an infamous courtesan, and an overachieving contract killer into a body that was being systematically engineered for beauty.
“Do you know who or what they had loaded into that poor kid?” I asked.
“Not so far, and we probably won’t. The brain bomb smashed three implanted psypyxes, but there was enough left so that we could tell that they were psypyxes, and that there had been three of them. More than we ever knew before.”
Dad nodded. “And that answers the question about those cancer-ridden teens. They’re not kidnapped, and they’re not fanatics, as we’d been guessing. They’re fresh from the tank, and they’ve been in accelerated growth since they were fetuses, which is why they have whole-body cancer.”
Laprada was nodding vigorously. “That has to be it. Normally you don’t dare tank-grow a body any faster than two and a half times normal speed, that’s why you have to wait two years for your clone body when you do a regula
r psypyx transfer, and it’s physically a four-year-old when you’re implanted. These bodies could have been grown in as little as a year. And then they load them with stripped-down psypyxes that don’t contain much more than the needed information and their orders and a few very basic skills, and launch them at Giraut before they start to develop much of a personality of their own, or even fully integrate control of the body—”
“But why do it that way?”
“If we ever capture one,” Margaret said, “nine to one, it will turn out to be more like a robot than a person, or at best sort of an idiot savant—severely retarded except for a few grafted-in skills and its orders—and we’ll probably just copy its mind for data and then euthanize it because with the cancers it will have, there won’t be much more than a stanyear or two of life left to it.” She shuddered. “I do not like how much sense this is making. If the others were similar chimeras, no wonder they were never very capable, but the other side had no problem sending them after you; they were as expendable as bullets. But I now really hope they weren’t from the Lost Legion. You know how much affection I have for your culture, Giraut, Raimbaut, Johan-Guilhem. I’d prefer that the Lost Legion be a desperately romantic problem, not something connected with monsters like this.”
“I was thinking much the same thing. From everything we know of them,” I said, “the Lost Legion shouldn’t be attempting anything of the kind. If they wanted to kill me, they’d be better off doing it without warning, and I assure you Occitans would not resort to anything so byzantine as stalking me with chimeras; they’d do something to put themselves into insane glorious danger, that’s the cultural style. So my guess would be that there’s a faction that wants some kind of truce or peace talks, and another faction trying to derail the process, and we want to make contact with the former and ally with them against the latter, and since both of them are equally illegal in the eyes of most of the Council, it’s going to take a while before our would-be friends trust us enough to make full contact.”