by Дэн Симмонс
Councillor Albedo nodded again.
“Isozaki-san, do you remember in your private office in the Torus when you had your associate, Anna Pelli Cognani, remove her clothes?”
Isozaki retained a neutral expression but only by the utmost effort of will. The fact that the Core was looking into his private office, recording every transaction, made his blood literally chill.
“You asked then,” continued Albedo, “why we had helped the Church refine the cruciform. “To what ends?” I believe you said ‘Where is the benefit to the Core?’”
Isozaki watched the man in gray, but more than ever he felt that he was locked in the little asteroid hopper with a cobra that had reared up and opened its hood.
“Have you ever owned a dog, Isozaki-san?” asked Albedo.
Still thinking about cobras, the Mercantilus CEO could only stare. “A dog?” he said after a moment. “No. Not personally. Dogs were not common on my homeworld.”
“Ah, that’s right,” said Albedo, showing his white teeth again. “Sharks were the pet of choice on your island. I believe that you had a baby shark which you tried to tame when you were about six standard years old. You named it Keigo, if I am not mistaken.” Isozaki could not have spoken if his life had depended upon it at that second. “And how did you keep your growing baby shark from eating you when you swam together in the Shioko Lagoon, Isozaki-san?”
After a moment of trying, Isozaki managed, “Collar.”
“I beg your pardon?” Councillor Albedo leaned closer.
“Collar,” said the CEO. Small, perfectly black spots were dancing in the periphery of his vision. “Shock collar. We had to carry the transmitter palmkeys. The same devices our fishermen used.”
“Ah, yes,” said Albedo, still smiling. “If your pet did something naughty, you brought it back into line. With just a touch of your finger.”
He held his hand out, cupping it as if he were cradling an invisible palmkey. His tanned finger came down on an invisible button.
It was not so much like an electrical shock passing through Kenzo Isozaki’s body, more like radiating waves of pure, unadultered agony beginning in his chest, beginning in the cruciform embedded under his skin and flesh and bone—and radiating out like telegraph signals of pain flowing through the hundreds of meters of fibers and nematodes and clustered nodes of cruciform tissue metastasized through his body like rooted tumors. Isozaki screamed and doubled over in pain.
He collapsed to the floor of the hopper. “I believe that your palmkeys could give old Keigo increasing jolts if he got aggressive,” mused Councillor Albedo. “Wasn’t that the case, Isozaki-san?” His fingers tapped at empty air again, as if cueing a palmkey. The pain grew worse.
Isozaki urinated in his shipsuit and would have voided his bowels if they had not been already empty. He tried to scream again but his jaws clamped tight, as if from violent tetanus. Enamel on his teeth cracked and chipped away. He tasted blood as he bit through a corner of his tongue. “On a scale of ten, that would have been about a two for old Keigo, I think,” said Councillor Albedo. He stood and walked to the air lock, tapping the cycling combination in. Writhing on the floor, his body and brain useless appendages to a cruciform of horrific pain radiating through his body, Isozaki tried to scream through his locked jaws. His eyes were swelling out of their sockets. Blood ran from his nose and ears.
Finished with cycling the air-lock combination, Councillor Albedo tapped at the invisible key in his palm once again.
The pain vanished. Isozaki vomited across the deckplates. Every muscle in his body twitched randomly while his nerves seemed to misfire.
“I will bring your proposal to the Three Elements of the TechnoCore,” Councillor Albedo said formally. “The proposition will be discussed and considered most seriously. In the meantime, my friend, your discretion will be counted upon.”
Isozaki tried to make an intelligible noise, but he could only curl up and retch on the metal floor. To his horror, his spasming bowels were passing wind in a ripple of flatulence.
“And there will be no more AI viral telotaxes released in anyone’s datasphere, will there, Isozaki-san?” Albedo stepped into the air lock and cycled the door shut.
Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics.
It took Rhadamanth Nemes and her three siblings only a few minutes to fly the dropship from Pax Base Bombasino to the village of Lock Childe Lamonde on the slate-dry world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, but the trip was complicated by the presence of three military skimmers that that meddling fool Commander Solznykov had sent along in escort.
Nemes knew from the “secure” tightbeam traffic between the base and the skimmers that the Base Commander had sent his aide, the bumbling Colonel Vinara, to take personal charge of the expedition.
More than that, Nemes knew that the Colonel would be in charge of nothing—that is, Vinara would be so wired with real-time holosim pickups and tightbeam squirters that Solznykov would be in actual command of the Pax troopers without showing his jowled face again. By the time they were hovering over the proper village—although “village” seemed too formal a term for the four-tiered strip of adobe houses that ran along the west side of the river just as hundreds of other homes had for almost the entire way between the base and here—the skimmers had caught up and were spiraling in for a landing while Nemes looked for a site large enough and firm enough to hold the dropship.
The doors of the adobe homes were painted bright primary colors. People on the street wore robes of the same hue. Nemes knew the reason for this display of color: she had accessed both their ship’s memory and the encrypted Bombasino files on the Spectrum Helix people. The data was interesting only in that it suggested that these human oddities were slow to convert to the cross, slower still to submit to Pax control. Likely, in other words, to help a rebellious child, man, and one-armed android hide from the authorities.
The skimmers landed on the dike road bordering the canal. Nemes brought the dropship down in a park, partially destroying an artesian well.
Gyges shifted in his copilot’s seat and raised an eyebrow.
“Scylla and Briareus will go out to make the formal search,” Nemes said aloud. “You stay here with me.” She had noted with no pride or vanity that her clone-siblings had long since submitted to her authority, despite the death threat they had brought from the Three Elements and the certainty of it being carried out if she were to fail again.
The other female and male went down the ramp and through the crowd of brightly robed people. Troopers in combat armor, visors sealed, jogged to meet them.
Watching on the common optic channel, not via tightbeam or vid pickup, Nemes recognized Colonel Vinara’s voice through his helmet speaker. “The Mayor—a woman named Ses Gia—refuses permission for us to search the houses.”
Nemes could see Briareus’s contemptuous smile reflected on the Colonel’s polished visor. It was like looking at a reflection of herself with slightly stronger bone structure. “And you allow this… Mayor… to dictate to you?” said Briareus.
Colonel Vinara raised a gauntleted hand. “The Pax recognizes the indigenous authorities until they have become… part of the Pax Protectorate.”
Scylla said, “You said that Dr. Molina left a Pax trooper as guard…” Vinara nodded. His breathing was amplified through the morphic, amber helmet. “There is no sign of that trooper. We have attempted to establish communication since we left Bombasino.”
“Doesn’t this trooper have a trace chip surgically implanted?” said Scylla.
“No, it is woven into his impact armor.”
“And?”
“We found the armor in a well several streets over,” said Colonel Vinara.
Scylla’s voice remained level. “I presume the trooper was not in the armor.”
“No,” said the Colonel, “just the armor and helmet. There was no body in the well.”
“P
ity,” said Scylla. She started to turn away but then looked back at the Pax Colonel. “Just armor, you say. No weapon?”
“No.” Vinara’s voice was gloomy. “I’ve ordered a search of the streets and we will question the citizens until someone volunteers the location of the house where the missing spacer was put under arrest by Dr. Molina. Then we will surround it and demand the surrender of all inside. I have… ah… requested the civil courts in Bombasino consider our request for a search warrant.”
Briareus said, “Good plan, Colonel. If the glaciers don’t arrive first and cover the village before the warrant is issued.”
“Glaciers?” said Colonel Vinara.
“Never mind,” said Scylla. “If it is acceptable to you, we shall help you search the adjoining streets and await proper authorization for a house-to-house search.” To Nemes, she broadcast on the internal band, Now what?
Stay with him and do just what you offered, sent Nemes. Be courteous and law-abiding. We don’t want to find Endymion or the girl with these idiots around. Gyges and I will go to fast time.
Good hunting, sent Briareus.
Gyges was already waiting at the dropship lock. Nemes said, “I’ll take the town, you move downriver to the farcaster arch and make sure that nothing gets through—going upriver or down—without your checking it out. Phase down to send a squirt message and I’ll shift periodically to check the band. If you find him or the girl, ping me.” It was possible to communicate via common band while phase-shifted, but the energy expenditure was so horribly high—above and beyond the unimaginable energy needed just for the phase-shift—that it was infinitely more economical to shift down at intervals to check the common band. Even a ping alarm would use the equivalent of this world’s entire energy budget for a year.
Gyges nodded and the two phase-shifted in unison, becoming chrome sculptures of a naked male and female. Outside the lock, the air seemed to thicken and the light deepen. Sound ceased. Movement stopped. Human figures became slightly out-of-focus statues with their wind-rippled robes stiff and frozen like the trappings on bronze sculptures.
Nemes did not understand the physics of phase shifting. She did not have to understand it in order to use it. She knew that it was neither the antientropic nor hyperentropic manipulation of time—although the future UI had both of those seemingly magical technologies at its command—nor some sort of “speeding up” that would have had sonic booms crashing and the air temperature boiling in their wake, but that phase shifting was a sort of sidestepping into the hollowed-out boundaries of space-time. “You will become—in the nicest sense—rats scurrying in the walls of the rooms of time,” had said the Core entity most responsible for her creation.
Nemes was not offended by the comparison. She knew the unimaginable amounts of energy that had to be transferred from the Core via the Void Which Binds to her or her siblings when they phase-shifted. The Elements had to respect even their own instruments to divert so much energy in their direction.
The two reflective figures jogged down the ramp and went opposite directions—Gyges south toward the farcaster, Nemes past her frozen siblings and the sculptures of Pax troopers and Spectrum citizens, into the adobe city.
It took her literally no time at all to find the house with the handcuffed Pax trooper asleep in the corner bedroom facing the canal. She rummaged through the downloaded Pax Base Bombasino files to identify the sleeping trooper—a Lusian named Gerrin Pawtz, thirty-eight standard years old, a lazy, initiative-free alcohol addict, two years away from retirement, six demotions and three sentences to brigtime in his file, assignments relegated to garrison duty and the most mundane base tasks—and then she deleted the file. The trooper was of no interest to her.
Checking once to make sure that the house was empty, Rhadamanth Nemes dropped out of phase shift and stood a moment in the bedroom.
Sound and movement returned: the snoring of the handcuffed trooper, movement of pedestrians along the canal walk, a soft breeze stirring white curtains, the rumble of distant traffic, and even the samurai-armor rustles of the Pax troopers jogging through adjoining streets and alleys in their useless search.
Standing over the Pax trooper, Nemes extended her hand and first finger as if pointing at the man’s neck. A needle emerged from under her fingernail and extended the ten centimeters to the sleeping man’s neck, sliding under the skin and flesh with only the slightest speck of blood to show the intrusion. The trooper did not wake. Nemes withdrew the needle and examined the blood within: dangerous levels of C-H-OH—Lusians frequently were at risk from high cholesterol—as well as a low platelet count suggesting the presence of incipient immune thrombocytopenic purpura, probably brought about by the trooper’s early years in hard-radiation environments on any of several garrison worlds, a blood alcohol level of 122 mg/100 ml—the trooper was drunk, although his alcoholic past probably allowed him to hide most of the effects—and—voilá!—the presence of the artificial opiate called ultramorph mixed with heightened levels of caffeine. Nemes smiled. Someone had drugged the trooper with sleep-inducing amounts of ultramorph mixed with tea or coffee—but had done so while taking care to keep the levels below a dangerous overdose.
She sniffed the air. Nemes’s ability to detect and identify distinct airborne organic molecules—that is, her sense of smell—about three times more sensitive than a typical gas chromatograph mass spectrometer’s: in other words, somewhere above that of the Old Earth canine called a bloodhound.
The room was filled with the distinctive scents of many people. Some of the smells were old; a few were very recent. She identified the Lusian trooper’s alcoholic stink, several subtle, musky female scents, the molecular imprint of at least two children—one deeply into puberty and the other younger but afflicted with some cancer requiring chemotherapy—and two adult males, one bearing the distinct sweat impressions of the diet of this planet, the other being at once familiar and alien. Alien because the man still carried the scent of a world Nemes had never visited, familiar because it was the distinctive human smell she had filed away: Raul Endymion still carrying the scent of Old Earth with him.
Nemes walked from room to room, but there was no hint of the peculiar scent she had encountered four years earlier of the girl named Aenea, nor the antiseptic android smell of the servant called A. Bettik. Only Raul Endymion had been here. But he had been here only moments before.
Nemes followed the scent trail to the trapdoor beneath the hall flooring. Ripping the door open despite its multiple locks, she paused before descending the ladder. She squirted the information on the common band, not receiving a responding ping from Gyges, who was probably phase-shifted. It had been only ninety seconds since they had left the ship. Nemes smiled. She could ping Gyges, and he would be here before Raul Endymion and the others in the tunnel below had taken another ten heartbeats.
But Rhadamanth Nemes would like to settle this score alone. Still smiling, she jumped into the hole and dropped eight meters to the tunnel floor below. The tunnel was lighted. Nemes sniffed the cool air, separating the adrenaline-rich scent of Raul Endymion from the other human odors.
The Hyperion-born fugitive was nervous. And he had been ill or injured—Nemes picked up the underlying smell of sweat tinged with ultramorph. Endymion had certainly been the offworlder treated by Dr. Molina and someone had used painkillers prescribed for him on the hapless Lusian trooper.
Nemes phase-shifted and began jogging down a tunnel now filled with thickened light. No matter how much of a head start Endymion and his allies had on her, she would catch them now. It would have pleased Nemes to slice the troublemaker’s head off while she was still phase-shifted—the decapitation seeming supernatural to the realtime onlookers, performed by an invisible executioner—but she needed information from Raul Endymion. She did not need him conscious, however. The simplest plan would be to pluck him away from his Spectrum Helix friends, surrounding him with the same phased field that protected Nemes, drive a needle into his brain to immobili
ze him, return him to the dropship, stow him in the resurrection créche there, and then go through the charade of thanking Colonel Vinara and Commander Solznykov for their help. They could “interrogate” Raul Endymion once their ship had left orbit: Nemes would run microfibers into the man’s brain, extracting RNA and memories at will. Endymion would never regain consciousness: when she and her siblings had learned what they needed from his memories, she would terminate him and dump the body into space. The goal was to find the child named Aenea.
Suddenly the lights went out. While I am phase-shifted, thought Nemes. Impossible. Nothing could happen that quickly. She skidded to a halt. There was no light at all in the tunnel, nothing she could amplify. She switched to infrared, scanning the passageway ahead and behind her. Empty. She opened her mouth and emitted a sonar scream, turning quickly to do the same behind her. Emptiness, the ultrasound shriek echoing back off the ends of the tunnel. She modified the field around her to blast a deep radar pulse in both directions. The tunnel was empty, but the deep radar recorded mazes of similar tunnels for kilometers in all directions. Thirty meters ahead, beyond a thick metal door, there was an underground garage with an assortment of vehicles and human forms in it.
Still suspicious, Nemes dropped out of phase shift for an instant to see how the lights could have gone out in a microsecond. The form was directly in front of her. Nemes had less than a ten thousandth of a second to phase-shift again as four bladed fists struck her with the force of a hundred thousand pile drivers. She was driven back the length of the tunnel, through the splintering ladder, through the tunnel wall of solid rock, and deep into the stone itself. The lights stayed out.