The Elysium Commission

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Donne might not even have made it to the lake. If he had, the various authorities would cause more difficulties for him, particularly explaining his movements and the pres­ence of the wasps. Shadows can be stung.

  In the darkness, I let myself out of my spaces in the labo­ratory and took the underground maglev back to the main estate complex. The entrance was hidden amid the statuary and the hedge maze below the pool, a melange of the ov-erendowed and overindulged in a setting of impeccable tastelessness. I could have walked around the overlarge pool, but at this time of evening, with no other real souls about, crossing the stone pavement was amusing.

  A naked nymph with a perfect figure—in Legaar's esti­mation, at least—rose sinuously from a couch tucked inside a grotto just away from the pool itself. "Could I pleasure you, noble sir?" Blond hair with a tinge of green flowed over her shoulders.

  "How would you pleasure me?"

  "Any way you like, noble sir."

  "Then lick my boots."

  "As you wish, sir." Her voice remained sultry as she crouched to do as I had commanded. She moved her funda­ment suggestively, but not suggestively enough.

  She ticked the boots clean. "Is there anything else you wish?"

  I thought about some variant on having her pleasure her­self, but she didn't deserve anything that might cause her enjoyment. None of Legaar's nymphs did, but he'd conditioned them so any sexual encounter gave them pleasure.

  "Hide in your grotto and defer your enjoyment until someone seeks you out."

  That was an appropriate punishment for a wanton nymph, as well as a small frustration for Legaar, who enjoyed hav­ing his nymphs fawn over him. Besides, she was not Mag-dalena, who was serving her repentance, unlike this nymph who deserved no mercies, only dust and derision.

  As she turned and retreated, I walked around the east end of the pool, constructed in the shape of an overlarge sycamore leaf, all too common on Devanta and anywhere else in the Assembly of Worlds—and even in the Frankan Alliance. Supposedly, Legaar had stipulated a maple leaf, extinct even on Old Earth, because of a distant ancestor, but the designer had come up with the sycamore. Legaar had the man biosculpted into a trollish dwarf of some sort, his intelligence burned out, and sent to Pelesian as a miner of red basalt.

  As with everything Legaar did, it was excessive. There weren't ten people on Devanta who would have known the difference between a sycamore leaf or a maple leaf, and fewer than that would have cared—if they even had been able to see the oversized pool from an altitude sufficient to discern the shape. At that, their interest would have been far more centered on the naked nymphs and youthful and equally nude gods waiting to pleasure whoever requested their services.

  Time's End was Legaar's pride, although I doubted he took joy in anything except bending others to his will, whereas I did take joy in Elysium, certainly a far-more-rewarding creation than a mere estate—for Elysium was an entire world time-backshaped into what it now was. Unfor­tunately, that would not have been possible without Time's End, as Legaar had so often reminded me.

  I glanced up at the dark balcony of the suite assigned to me—overlooking the pool, not that I would bother to watch, not that the circular world would stand still.

  15

  Humans require certainty to function individually, and shared certainty to maintain a viable society. Technology requires knowledge, and knowledge enables understanding. True understanding destroys certainty.

  I slept a stan later on Sabaten morning. I also woke up with a headache and the half memories of nightmares, scarcely the tender grace of past days dead to me. Those days were still far too alive, for all the years they lay behind me.

  Max... interrogative house and systems status?

  All systems are green, sir. The repairs have also been completed. The villa operating account has been debited three thousand two hundred credits. You have ten pending messages.

  Ten? Since the night before? I struggled into a steaming shower. No matter what anyone says, neither ultrasound nor nanite-scrubs give you the clean feeling of a good shower. They also don't help with headaches.

  I ignored the messages until after I'd dressed, eaten, and drunk two cups of earlgrey. Max would have alerted me to anything urgent The more I thought about it the more puz­zled and concerned I was about whatever had displaced me from the limousine to the edge of the reservoir. I could only think of three possibilities. I didn't like any of them. A fast flitter might have been able to transport me, but only if someone had literally suspended my thoughts and moved me and if they'd been able to avoid Special Ops surveil­lance. The second was that someone had some sort of tech­nology that could literally lift someone from one place to another instandy—within a gravity well. The third alterna­tive was that I'd imagined it all.

  I walked from the breakfast room to my study. I could have accessed the messages anywhere in the villa, but I felt more professional in the study. The first was a confirmation that I'd been cited for trespassing in restricted waters and that I had paid my fine. It also contained a warning that a second trespassing offense within three years would not be a misdemeanor but a felony. That eliminated the third alter­native. It didn't make me feel any better.

  The second message was a request from my neighbor— Soror Celestina—that I reimburse her for the damage to her wall. I replied politely with a delayed response that since I was not responsible I could only refer her to my indemni-fier, Gallian Re.

  The third was another message from Tony diVeau, po­litely beefing that he felt that I was letting him down after he'd offered such a wonderful recreational opportunity. I deleted it and didn't reply.

  The fourth was a reminder from Krij about brunch on Senen morning.

  The fifth was a notice of a surcharge from the limo hire outfit because I'd left the limousine without notice—yet an­other suggestion of the impossibility of what had happened.

  The sixth was a blank screen, with no return codes.

  Max... the blank screen message... what about it?

  That was an attempted penetration through the message system. So were the others not on the pending list. They had the format of sales presentations.

  I had my doubts about that, but the defenses had dealt with them. Hadn't they? Run a deep protocol and infiltra­tion check.

  That has been done. Nothing detected.

  That didn't mean that something hadn't gotten into my systems—only that Max hadn't detected them.

  Contact InfoSec. Have them come out and run a full decon. Soonest.

  Yes, sir.

  Have them check the device that Lemel Jerome sent also. It's here in the bookcase comm-block.

  I hated to spend those kinds of credits, but I'd hate even more to be done in through leaks bored into my system. I was just glad it wasn't Domen or Senen. End-days always meant a premium.

  At that moment, the message system reminded me, Re­turn the vid from Donacyr D'Azouza.

  I didn't want to, but he had been talking about another assignment. With all the equipment Legaar or his AIs had destroyed, more work couldn't hurt. I laughed to myself. One of the reasons I never watched vidramas—even period historical ones—about private operators and consultants was that the protagonists never had more than one client at a time. Whoever wrote that crap didn't know anything about the business. One client at a time, and I'd have been out of busi­ness years before. It was about as accurate as doctors having one patient.

  Connect.

  The figure who appeared in the projection before me had light golden chocolate skin. His coppery brown hair curled into tight ringlets against his skull. Deep-set dark brown eyes separated by a strong nose slightly wider than optimal appeared to look at me. "I may or may not be here. Leave a message."

  Honest as the talking head was, if it resembled him, I wasn't certain I wanted the job. Still... keeping up the villa and its equipment burned credits. I could always use more, and the harder I worked, the fewer the dreams.

  "Blaine Do
nne, returning your vid."

  The image vanished. It was replaced by a similar visage. The man who appeared looked the same, but for all the sim­ilarity, the "real" Donacyr carried an edginess, as well as some continued unreality.

  "Seignior Donne, can you tell me where all past years are?"

  "I wasn't the one who posed the question, slave as I may be to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men."

  "Can you?" he pressed.

  "No more than you can determine what wind serves to advance an honest mind." I didn't care much for games.

  Even those I was forced to play by virtue of a presumed heritage.

  "I have a proposition for you. It will arrive by secure courier shordy. You are not obliged to take it. I hope you will."

  The projection vanished. Max... back-trace.

  That viddress no longer exists. It was a single-reply drop.

  Whoever Donacyr D'Azouza might be, he or she had credits to burn. He or she wanted something done that was dangerous if it could be linked back. Either that or he/she was a privacy freak. The content suggested he also knew someone who'd been a former client of mine. I'd wait for the package and see what it contained.

  In the meantime, I needed to work on the projects I had. Especially the Eloi-Maraniss commission. The full impact of what had happened hadn't really struck me until I'd started thinking about the total impossibility of what had happened after I'd left Odilia's.

  I walked to the doors that led to the verandah and looked out, but turned back to the table desk and dropped into my chair. On the table was a duplicate of the hard-copy mate­rial that Odilia had slipped to me. I read it first.

  Effectively, it was two sets of listings. The first was short, nine names of higher-ups in various Eloi Enterprise opera­tions who had either vanished or been sent off-planet in the last three months. The second contained material on all the people who had crossed Legaar and Simeon Eloi... and what had happened to them. Most had been vanished. One architect was rumored to have been brain-burned and biosculpted into a troll and sent to a heavy planet as a la­borer. A Garda lieutenant's stunner had exploded. The frag­ments had shredded his upper body so badly that while his physical form had survived, little else had. A forensic ac­countant who'd successfully prosecuted the director of Classic Investment for extortion that had resulted in market manipulation on securities held by Classic Investment had died when what appeared to have been a nickel-iron meteor smasned into his villa. A public advocate had prosecuted Classic Media for wavelength violations that had disrupted competitors' offerings. Her daughter and the daughter's husband had been drowned when a rogue wave had so thor­oughly crushed their sailing craft that all safety equipment had been disabled. Her remaining daughter died of a raging infection three days later. The advocate had then walked into the courtroom and grabbed—or hugged—the director of Classic Media. Her nanoshield had crushed them both to death. She was clearly going to make someone pay, but Legaar hadn't been the one.

  How could one blame the Elois for matters such as rogue waves and meteors? Except that nickel-iron meteor or aster­oids were exceedingly rare in the Dominique system, and the planetary moons were too small for large tides, and there hadn't been a tsunami or any other wave action of that size in decades. The one factor common to all those was that they were improbable occurrences. Just like my removal from a sealed limousine.

  I went back to the first list. Three of the nine had van­ished without a trace, and six had theoretically been sent out to different sectors of the Assembly worlds to head "expan­sion efforts." That meant, I suspected, that they hadn't of­fended the Elois too badly, or that they were too well known or connected to be vanished immediately. Truly charming, the Eloi brothers, commoner than water, cruder than truth. Had they been the ones behind the morning's testing of my systems? How could they not have been?

  Still wondering, I checked the miniature datafiat—through my quarantine system. It had more information about Legaar Eloi, an expanded version of his biography and a section with miscellaneous facts about Eloi Enterprises. Some of it I knew. Most I didn't, but there was no mention of anything about Elysium or Classic Research.

  Before I got into more research, I tried a vidlink to William Ruckless. I got a talking head. I did with Theodore Elsen as well. I left messages with both.

  Halfway though my studies, I moved out to the verandah for a quarter stan or so while the InfoSec team swept the study. A good stan later, I leaned back in the chair, thinking. The more I studied about Legaar Eloi, the less I felt I knew him, but the more I detested him.

  InfoSec has completed their decon, sir. Do you want to access the report?

  I did.

  There had been three sophisticated copy-and-divert traps. The intruders hadn't managed to break deep security, but they had been well on their way to building a shadow duplicate that would have managed to create close-to-replica results. I checked the InfoSec analysis, reading the key words. "Nova-class infiltration ... highest-level expert­ise ... top corpentity shadowsystems."

  To me, that sounded like Legaar Eloi.

  "Source ... messages from Antonio diVeau ..."

  So... if Tony were the one fronting for Legaar, who else happened to be trying to get into my systems? And why now?

  I kept reading. "Physical device attached to dress trousers, recently immersed in natural water, class JJ shielded passive beacon. Self-destructed prior to examination. Sephaniah! What had she wanted? And why?

  Lemel's detection device had a burst sender, locator at­tached, but no snoop or infiltration equipment. That didn't surprise me. Lemmy wanted to know if his detector found any sign of the telltale emissions, whatever they were, and where. He didn't care much what I did, but he didn't totally trust me. In Thurene, I couldn't say I blamed him.

  Max! Where's that beacon they found?

  In the lower workoom, sir. In double comm-insulated iso­lation. It is nonfunctional now.

  Leave it there. That could wait. I might as well try out Lemmy's gadget.

  I went back to my own rooms, but through the courtyard garden, where I stopped to check the herbs, especially the lime rosemary and the emerald basil. I donned the gray jacket and trousers, and the matching shirt The fabric had been nanetically designed to shift the reflected light to allow me to blend in against most backgrounds. A silver shadow in the light, a darker shadow in the night.

  I used my own groundcar and drove to the carpark on the east end of the Left Bank. The vehicle could be destroyed but not tampered with. It was the third one I'd owned in five years. The indemnity corpentity hadn't been that thrilled with replacing the first two, and my premiums were near the max. Then, indemnity corpentities didn't care for any per­sonally owned transport equipment. That was another rea­son I hired the special limousine when I knew there would be trouble. I reserved the real indemnity for the nightflitter.

  There was no one else in the garage, and it was only a third full. Although it was already late afternoon, for the Left Bank, that was early. When I returned, I'd be lucky to see a single vacant space.

  Unlike the South Bank, the Left Bank had no gardens, no topiary. The stone walk and the stone wall that formed the embankment were both gray granite. The walk was smooth; the embankment walls were rough-cut. Most of the build­ings beyond Le Boulevard Nord, which flanked the walk, were also gray granite. The few splashes of color came from the awnings and from the flowers in the granite-edged beds in the Boulevard's median.

  I headed west on the walk.

  Ahead of me walked a couple. Both projected a muscular presence, but their movements were too delicate. They were using body-pak projectors, supposedly for protection.

  I snorted. There wasn't that much smash-and-grab stuff in Thurene. The sat-screens and the miniscanners on the Garda net made the streets among the safest places in the city—at least for avoiding small-timers. The Garda couldn't stop it, but they almost always caught the malefactors. There weren't any repeat offenses by those malefactors
.

  There were multiple legal and/or undetected offenses in the privacy of homes and corpentities. There always have been, in any time and place, because homes and businesses are far more shadowy than anyone wants to admit. That has not changed over time, either.

  The couple with the enhanced projected presence turned and waited, then crossed the Boulevard. They were headed toward the Banque du Sud. That confirmed their status.

  The next intersection was Alois. I crossed the Boulevard and kept walking west. I nodded to the woman and her son coming toward me. She did not smile or return the gesture as we passed.

  "That man there... he walked past the mirror, but I couldn't see him." The boy's words came from behind me.

  "It's just another virtie, Louis. You've seen them before."

  "Not on the street, maman."

  "There's a first time for everything."

  I couldn't help but smile inside. It didn't hurt to be taken for a virtie because weapons were useless against holo pro­jections.

  Ahead was Pier Two, an angular building a good hundred meters high that resembled an ancient warship's bow. It was one of the few without a stone facade. The green exterior captured the white-orange rays of the afternoon sun and turned them into a smoldering golden green illumination. Pier Two served as the center for commodities trades—or rather as the comm and info-storage hub for the system's commodity exchange. There were offices there, as well, be­cause there was still a certain mystique about being located close to the trading center, not because it was necessary. Humans have always been like that. It hadn't changed in the thousands of years since the Terran Diaspora, and it wouldn't change in my lifetime.