The boy’s face was transparent; Michael watched him reevaluate the situation. Haggling over an indiscretion that could get your registration canceled was one thing. Professional gossip was something else.
Gian said, “What’s it worth?”
“You tell me.”
“I can’t till I know what you want.”
“He left Valentine the day after you had him. Private ship, private business, no flight plan. I want to know if he said anything, did anything, if you noticed anything, that’d tell me where he was going next.”
“Why?” The boy was curious; almost impudent, now.
“He owes me money,” Michael lied.
“How much?”
“None of yours. You’re not in for shares. Give me a flat.”
“I’ll think about it,” said the boy. “Throw me in?”
“In already, infant. Can’t hook me thisway.”
The patois came easily. Gian was visibly relaxing. He said, “How’d you target me?”
“Security. A favor.”
Gian nodded. Shoreground security officers were almost incorruptible—because very little was considered corrupt. The woman who had found Gian was near retiring. Not much provision was made for security personnel after they retired. As a rule not much was necessary; with a little initiative, an enterprising officer could provide well for the future. Gian understood, and took it as a matter of course.
Michael came all the way into the circle of light. He picked up an object from the table and held it out. Slender vase with graceful lines, a little darker than turquoise; it looked like glass, but it was not. The material was thin, and opaline sparks danced in its fragile skin. There was considerable value in the medium, but Michael held it so that Gian saw the bottom and the finely etched mark that referred to an embedded electronic pattern worth a great deal more.
Gian looked at it appreciatively. “One of a kind. You got more?”
“Sure. Some better than others. But ones, yes.”
“I got a couple.”
“What you got?”
“Sisty Whitemore from Earth, you heard of her? She does ones for walls. Programs a robo, that’s what you get, the robo does it all. Got a big bonus once, flashed it all on that. You got a Whitemore?”
“Downstairs. Show you later.”
“The robo self-destructs.”
“Yeah. You have to jet it out fast.”
Gian took the vase and held it lovingly. A work like this, like Sisty Whitemore’s multidimensional walls, like anybody’s work of art, could be reproduced down to the last molecule. Most were. Those that were not, that were certified as one-of-a-kinds, were prized.
“You want it?” Michael said.
“Sure. Sure I do.”
“You know how to get it.”
Gian made up his mind. “He was going by the name of Pallin.”
“Just that night. Just with you.”
“So it doesn’t mate. All right. Didn’t say much. Just told me what he wanted. You know how some are? Better than the talky kind, though. But no repeat for this one. Too rough. Don’t mind if I flap him. He made a call.”
“Who to?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t hear a name, couldn’t see the face. He thought I was asleep. I didn’t hear much,” Gian said apologetically.
“Anything about where he’s headed?”
“Yeah. He said—” Gian thought about it, caressing the blue vase. “He said, ‘When we get to the Rose we’ll start the countdown.’”
“The what?”
“The Rose. Like the flower.”
“Sure?”
“As tomorrow.”
“What else?”
“That’s all.”
Gian got anxious. It wasn’t much. He held the vase harder, wondering if Michael would take it away from him. But Michael was only thoughtful. “Have to do,” he said.
He showed Gian around and called an autocab for him. At the last a streak of conscience pricked Gian. He said, “I could stay. You paid for the night.”
“Never mind. Go on back. Take that pretty home.”
“You don’t like boys?”
“Not especially.”
“Is it good being rich?”
“Very good.”
“I guess you get anything you want.” Gian said with greed. Nothing like, Michael thought, but he did not say so to Gian.
I&S patiently turned over pebbles. All the project personnel had been investigated before; now they were screened again. Toward the end Vickery said to Jameson. “It’s just what you’d expect if there was nothing to it. We’re talking about an impossibility to begin with, you know.”
Gil Figueiredo, who had been in charge of security for the aliens since Rubee’s first incomprehensible call touched the edge of human space, sat in front of Vickery’s desk. Jameson stood at the outer edge of the room and looked at the river going on its peaceful way. Vickery’s office was on the lowest level of the fifty-story administration complex. The other forty-nine were heavy as a mountain overhead. You could walk through their passages for days and never find the place where you had started.
“We’re missing something.” Jameson said. “Is there, anywhere, another source for the program?”
“No,” Vickery and Figueiredo said together.
“There’s the Bird herself. She’s been studied.”
“Only the Inspace engineering,” Figueiredo said.
“Could anyone have gotten into the navigation computers that way, without breaking the seals?”
“No,” Figueiredo said positively.
Jameson stared across the water, where trees dreamed in the summer heat. The nights had gotten cooler, and the mass of green was softened by hints of gold. He said, “What I’d really like to do is get Kristofik under probe.”
Vickery said, “You’ve got him on the brain,” but Figueiredo laughed out loud and said, “That’s been the dearest wish of some people at I&S for fifteen years.”
Jameson’s tenure on the Coordinating Commission had given him a certain disregard for the law. He said, “There ought to be a way to do it.”
“Oh, it could be done. He doesn’t bother with personal security on Valentine. But we’ve never tried it because even if we probed him there, we couldn’t get him back to the Polity without creating a hell of an incident. If we couldn’t transport him for trial, there’s no point starting it. You remember his name didn’t surface for something like five years after the Pavonis Queen robbery, when he was already established on Valentine. There were talks then, and Valentine shut us down. And that was fifteen years ago. He’s an important citizen now.”
“He is also back on Valentine where he belongs,” Jameson said. “Perhaps we’ve gone wrong there instead. Perhaps he’s not the man we should be looking at.”
Figueiredo said impatiently, “You saw the reports on the other names. He’s the only one left.”
“It’s too neat.”
“All we have to deal with is known factors. That’s what the known factors give us.”
Jameson almost heard Hanna’s laughter. Figueiredo could not know what it was like to specialize in the unknown. Figueiredo added, “Don’t forget the Golden Girl. It fits.”
“What is that?” Vickery said a little wearily.
“Kristofik bought a yacht a few months ago. Dru class, beautiful thing. Six staterooms, two lounges, gymnasium, staff quarters. He refitted it and named it the Golden Girl. The color’s not really gold, though—more like brass.”
“Appropriate,” Jameson murmured, but Figueiredo went on, “He provisioned it for a long, long voyage. He hasn’t taken one yet. But there are indications he’s planning to leave Valentine again and be away some time. He’s turned over his business interests almost entirely to his head manager, Kareem Mar-Kize, for one thing.”
“The Golden Girl is not armed,” Jameson said quietly, but Vickery was more interested now.
“Is he in financial trouble?”
“N
o. And that’s where it doesn’t fit,” Figueiredo admitted. “He just keeps getting richer. He might be crazy enough to want the cargo for himself, though. From what we know of him, he’d appreciate it.”
Vickery’s interest waned. He shook his head. “Chances are he’s just like everybody else in human space. One, all he knows about the Bird’s course is what direction she’s going and what star she’s headed for. And two, he doesn’t care.”
“Maybe,” Figueiredo said. “All the same, if Director Jameson could get them to agree to an armed escort, it would solve everything.”
Jameson said, “I will push Hanna as hard as I can. She will, in turn, push Rubee and Awnlee as far as possible. I doubt very greatly that she could under any conceivable circumstance get that result.”
Vickery said, “She’s under your direct supervision.”
“The aliens are not.”
Figueiredo said, “There’s another option. If we didn’t send any gifts, there wouldn’t be a target.”
Jameson said, “If the gifts go, Hanna goes. It’s a package. And the Commssion strongly favors her preceding a diplomatic party by some months, since that’s what Rubee wants.”
“Very advantageous for her. Her professional reputation, I mean. The gifts—is that how she persuaded them to take her along?”
Jameson turned around at last. His eyes were so cold that Figueiredo shut up abruptly. He said, “Perhaps it’s time I&S officers charged with protecting aliens spent some time at D’vornan under Hanna’s tutelage. The arrangement was Rubee’s suggestion. It has to do with the Travels of Erell. If you don’t know what that means, you had better find out. Check out the navigational systems once more, if you please. I will see to it that Hanna knows as much as possible about this man Kristofik. She may have to negotiate with him.”
Figueiredo was not happy, but he nodded.
* * *
Now there were no more places to go. The aliens and Hanna stayed on Earth. For their protection—and to their bewilderment—they were placed under the surveillance of bugs, spyeyes, airspace monitors; the aliens could ignore them and forget that they were there, but Hanna could not. She thought of them as everything that was worst about Earth, about Polity Admin for that matter. They gave you no privacy, if they thought they had a good reason to take it away. What if she needed real aloneness? What if she were to take a lover?—an academic question, because she had had no lover since Jameson. She had discovered in herself, with him, an unsuspected capacity for exclusive love. Passion had no power to touch her now, and after five years celibacy had become a habit, so that she had nothing to be private about. There was a principle involved, though, and she had good-byes to say. She would have liked having privacy for that.
“I found I liked teaching better than running things, but you will listen to one more suggestion, won’t you? Institute the program in F’thalian mathematical thought, and get Tai-Tai Ling out from Earth to teach it. You will? Good, oh, good. And, oh, if you should hear from my mother, tell her I tried to find her…”
Communications that ducked through Inspace—that disappeared at one point in realspace and appeared in another—never reappeared at all if they were sent too far, and over long distances had to be transmitted from one automatic relay to another, just as a spacecraft could not go from star to star with a single Jump and so made each journey piecemeal. Rubee and Awnlee had left no relays behind them. They had not been able to speak to Uskos for nearly four years. As the day for departure came close, Hanna thought of her own voyage on the exploratory vessel Endeavor, the one that had led to contact with Zeig-Daru. She had never examined her dependence on the relays that marked Endeavor’s path. The controllers of Endeavor’s voyage—among them Jameson, a commissioner then—had always know what was going on. Endeavor had always been able to shout for help. Its crewmen had remained in contact with their homeworlds, though the contacts had been censored. It had not occurred to Hanna that space exploration could proceed in any other way.
The gulf Rubee and Awnlee had crossed—silent, beyond help, incredibly vast—was a gulf indeed. The way they had done it marked them alien more clearly than anything else Hanna had learned about them. They did not even know how courageous they were. They did not think about it. They followed in the footsteps of Erell, and Erell had not said, “Good-bye until I think of calling home.” He had only said: “Good-bye.”
“I noticed the stoneveins were fading in the snow. They need to be cut back. You will? Oh, thank you, thank you. You can keep the fish. And, oh, if my mother comes by, give her my love…Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye…”
Jameson wanted her to come to his office. He wanted her to study a file which could not be transmitted out of Admin. She did not want to spend any more time in offices. Her days in human space were going away quickly. She would be isolated for the last seven of them, having her immunities (as she thought of it) fine-tuned. She had paid no more attention than she had to the army of biotechs who at the start had tampered first with her, then with Rubee and Awnlee, then with all of them, then with the Bird itself; now they were going to do it all over again, in reverse. So she would spend a week in a sealed environment and go straight from that to the Bird, and she did not want to waste time at Admin.
“I will have plenty of time to study whatever you want when I can’t go anywhere,” she told Jameson.
“You have to see it here,” he said stubbornly.
“Nothing I have to do with now is that highly classified.”
“When it comes from I&S it is.”
“You weren’t always so careful about regulations!”
“I wasn’t always accountable to Vickery,” he said.
Hanna had had an inadvertent hand in Jameson’s fall from power. She took his last remark as a reproach, though perhaps it was not meant to be one.
“Dear Samuel, I didn’t know you felt that way for me. You didn’t when I left, did you? It’s just missing me? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I never thought of you that way. Don’t wait for me. Go on to someone else. But please say you’ll still be my friend. Good-bye, good-bye.”
“How can you negotiate with a man you know nothing about?” Jameson asked another day.
“The same way,” Hanna nearly snarled—she had been saying good-byes all the morning—“I negotiated with the People on Zeig-Daru. And with Rubee and Awnlee. Do you think I can’t assess a human being?”
“It’s never been your strong point in the past!” Jameson’s temper was frayed, too.
“From what I remember about the Pavonis Queen, there won’t be time to negotiate. You can’t negotiate when you’re full of sleepygas!”
“He has left Valentine again. His offices there say he may be away some time. He filed no flight plan; Valentine does not require the filing of flight plans by private pilots. You have never met anyone like him before.”
“There are not that many varieties of true-humans.”
“He was a Registered Friend at seventeen. He must have known every worst thing there is to know about men, yes, both men and women, before he was twenty-one. He put much of his earnings into education, and saved the rest: an aberration in a Friend. He also cultivated extralegal contacts from the day he came to Valentine. When he met Tonson—who made several trips to Valentine in those years, and was Kristofik’s client—he was ready. I&S believes he had been searching for such an opportunity from the start. You need to know about him, Hanna.”
“I do not.” She smiled; not a pretty smile; savage. “I’d like to meet him, though. He’d be a refreshing change, don’t you think? I have some calls to make. If I come see you it will be from curiosity.”
Jameson’s smile was not pleasant either. “I don’t care about your motives. Just do it.”
“I hope that when relations are established and I can come home, I can come back to the House and do my work for Koroth. I have worked so much for the Polity that I have been useless at home. If I cannot end it, perhaps I should leave the House altogether. If
you find out where my mother is, would you please tell her I love her? And say good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye.”
Something tickled the far reaches of Michael’s memory from time to time. The Rose. He could almost remember something it meant. When he repeated the phrase it had an edge to it, as if there were connotations buried in his mind that distorted the common flower name.
He might have started a search program for The Rose as soon as Gian left, but the general access information networks would have a billion references to roses. He did not even know what category to start with.
In the night he woke to a thought that stopped his breath: might The Rose be one of the things he could not remember, the whole reason for the search for the many-named man?
But then he started breathing again. He was certain that wherever he had heard of The Rose, it had been recently; part of his adulthood, at least.
The next day he searched a few classes at random. Planets?—he had never heard of one so named, but it might be a variant or the local name for a world known officially as something else. It might be a star or a satellite or an asteroid. But it was not, or so the networks told him.
“Spaceships?” said Theo, and got a quick response, and tied up data retrieval the rest of the day tracking down forty-two vessels named Rose, none of which were likely to have anything to do with the man Michael wanted.
“People,” Shen suggested the morning after that.
“Bars,” said Theo wistfully.
“I don’t think we’re getting anywhere,” Michael said.
He got them back to work, with some difficulty—it was this week’s day for an army of housekeepers and groundskeepers to descend on the estate and impose order on it—and tried to work himself. He had investments to look after. It was hard to keep his mind on them, though, and anyway he was not necessary to their success.
“In fact,” said the man who managed most of them, “I was looking forward to that long trip you were talking about.”
Michael smiled at the dark face on the telescreen. “I just couldn’t stay away, Kareem. I’ll leave again; any day now.”
“The sooner the better!”
The D’neeran Factor Page 48