“Not really. You’ll be able to assess whether somebody’s lying to you or concealing information. What foments rebellion is not what you might find, because they all know you’ll find nothing. It’s simply the fact that you are inquiring that will give them a sense of urgency. Because they’ll assume that you represent government authority.”
“Your having bodyguards accompany me will certainly lend credence to that notion.”
“Since you do represent government authority,” said Dabeet, “having been given a landing permit precisely because I need your help in resolving how Ken Argon died, they will correctly assume that the E.S. is much closer to making a final decision about the future of Tarragona.”
“Which might well be that Catalunya should be an independent world.”
“Or that it should have continuing status as a colony. Or that it should be disbanded and all colonists evacuated immediately, by force if necessary.”
“And they assume you want that last outcome?”
“They know Ken Argon wanted it.”
“How do they know that?”
“Because he told everybody. All the time. The llop had a civilization before humans came and wrecked it.”
“Civilization? The llop?” Valentine’s disbelief was exactly right. She had done her reading.
“Fingerless bone-crushing predators are what pass for civilization on Catalunya,” said Dabeet.
“They don’t even have language.”
“Neither did the Hive Queens.”
Valentine sighed. “I really will tell you everything important that I find out.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Dabeet.
“You’re sure that your recordings will give you everything,” said Valentine. “But they won’t give you what I conclude from the things I learn.”
“Which is why I so look forward to our conversation.” Dabeet smiled, rose to his feet, and ended the briefing. Not that he had called it a briefing. But Valentine certainly behaved as if she understood perfectly well what their meeting had been about.
* * *
This is not a competition, Dabeet told himself. I invited a speaker for the dead so that he might see what I have not been able to see. This means that his success is my success.
It’s Ender Wiggin, the honest part of his mind murmured.
Yes, I am competing with him. I have mastered my competitive instinct, I have subdued it, except this is Ender Wiggin. The idiotic world can revile him because of that stupid book, The Hive Queen, which was based on what, after all? Supposition about a wiped-out alien species whose arrival was the worst disaster in human history, and it destroys the reputation of a child who was the best of us, the best of the human race.
I hate him for being the best.
All right, I’ve faced it, I’ve allowed myself to think it. But now think again, because I also love him and admire him and yearn to someday be the kind of hero that he was, a savior of a lost cause.
And maybe this is it. Resolving the problems of the planet Catalunya, the city of Tarragona, or, at the very least, Kenneth Argon, who became a friend before he died. There is an answer here somewhere, and I have been entrusted by the E.S. to find it and allow this colony to move forward—into continuing status, perhaps, or into exile. Somewhere.
Watching the feed from the cameras observing Andrew Wiggin would tax anyone’s patience—the man was just sitting there, staring off into space, while the llops move around him, occasionally sniffing him and even nosing him a little. But such a deep nothing was going on that it shunted away Dabeet’s attention.
And listening to the audiofeed from Valentine’s interviews was almost as boring. She was learning what Dabeet already knew. If something surprising came up, one of his assistants would tell him.
If Dabeet was to contribute to this project, he couldn’t just delegate it to the speaker for the dead and his sister, or to Dabeet’s own staff of trained observers, scientists, and government functionaries. He had to do something or he’d drive himself crazy with trying not to watch or listen to the others.
Good thing he had never attempted cooking in any serious way. He was the ultimate watcher of not-yet-boiling pots.
Ken Argon. It all comes down to him. Those maddening gaps in the recordings of his work. What was he doing?
Dabeet got into the directories that contained the posthumous Argon archive that his staff had assembled. All the files were labeled by time and place. There was also a document—a long one—listing all the gaps, along with information from Ken’s appointment book and research notes to fill in at least some of the times he hadn’t been observed.
And finally it dawned on Dabeet how strange it was that there was a gap right at the end of Argon’s life. He had always regarded it as suspicious that this sequence was missing, but he had regarded it as evidence that Argon was murdered—his killer would have searched for and erased the relevant surveillance records. That implied that the killer was part of the E.S., because he would have had to be able to get into the surveillance files—and to do that, he’d have to know that such records existed in the first place.
But that line of thought had led nowhere. Now Dabeet realized that he was not doing enough lateral reasoning. Was there some other way that surveillance records of Ken’s activities leading up to his death might have been deleted?
No, even that is another assumption. What if there never had been any surveillance of Ken Argon during those gaps? What if he had persuaded the automatic recording systems to ignore him at certain times?
Instead of looking at the recorded surveillance, Dabeet began searching in the software that governed the surveillance systems, trying to determine how it worked. Naturally, the system resented his intrusion, and he kept getting pop-ups warning him that he was not authorized to make any copies of or alterations in the software. Finally, he logged himself in again as administrator, only this time he asserted his position as commander of this field office and claimed emergency powers. The security algorithm demanded to know what the emergency was, because it was going to make an automatic report by ansible. So Dabeet wrote: Ken Argon died without surveillance. I want to know why. The pop-ups stopped.
Soon Dabeet identified the changes Ken had made. First, he had turned off the automatic warning system, so that after the first time, the security system would not notify headquarters when Ken signed on to alter the software. Then he made a few simple changes that allowed him to switch off or destructively erase any recording he wished to eliminate.
Much later, there was one final change. Ken had permanently blocked all surveillance in one lab in the ALR—the Alien Life Repository.
Ken’s body had been found in that building. But not in that lab.
Dabeet called up a visual sequence that he and everybody else who had investigated Ken’s death had looked at repeatedly: Ken’s actual death. He staggered out of his office into the common area, empty because it was about three in the morning. He fell to the ground as if his legs had turned to liquid, and lay there whimpering in agony and murmuring something that no amount of analysis of either sound or lip movements could turn into any discernible language.
He came out of his office. Dabeet checked, and whatever happened in the office had been deleted.
That was Ken’s last action: the deletion of surveillance records. He had deleted the recording of himself deleting the recording.
Too recursive. Analysis of the toxin had revealed that Ken Argon died in unimaginable pain, but there would have been no impairment of mental function. Ken might have been frantic and distracted by the pain, but he wasn’t crazy. So he would not have gone into his office just to delete a record of himself going into his office.
What was he trying to hide?
Dabeet used his deep-diagnostic software—the analytic programs he had access to only because he asserted an emergency—to search for the automatic backups of file allocation tables. He wanted to verify when the surveillance footage had been deleted,
and then to see what else had been deleted around the same time.
But one of the deletions had been the very allocation table backup that he had been looking for.
How could Ken have deleted that? The diagnostics Dabeet was using did not give him the power to delete the diagnostic backups. Nothing gave that power.
Except that obviously something did, because it had happened.
Dabeet wrote a quick message to the head of the ITDS—Info Tech Diagnostic Service—asking how that particular backup allocation table came to be deleted. Because Dabeet had asserted emergency mode, his question would be given urgent priority—the head of ITDS would be called out of any meeting, or wakened out of a sound sleep. And Dabeet wasn’t afraid of any resentment over this, because the disappearance of a backup diagnostic file would cause even more consternation at ITDS than it was causing Dabeet here.
Meanwhile, though, Dabeet still had his best diagnostic tool—his brain, with its ability to remember pretty much everything, even things that he had not paid attention to. He put himself into what he called “calendar mode,” thinking through events during the last few days before Ken died. It had been a tricky time for both Dabeet and Ken, because they both knew that even though Ken was still nominally in charge of the local E.S., which meant the whole human presence on Catalunya, Dabeet had been sent there to investigate him, and Dabeet could countermand any order or action by Ken.
Why hadn’t Dabeet been notified that Ken took the system into emergency mode?
Because that’s not what Ken had done. However he got the power to alter and delete files, Ken had accomplished it in a way that left no marks behind, a way that notified nobody.
What was Ken so determined to hide?
His tracks, that’s for sure. Whatever he was hiding, he also went to some effort to hide the fact that he had hidden it. He might even have hoped that it would look like a system malfunction, and not a deliberate action at all. For all Dabeet knew, that’s the answer the ITDS would return to him: system malfunction, cause unknown.
Dabeet felt a kind of excitement grow inside him. It wasn’t the excitement of knowing that the solution was within his grasp. Rather it was the deep satisfaction of knowing that he had found a new question, one that might lead him to find out what was, after all, one of the most important questions facing him: How and when did that toxin enter Ken Argon’s body?
And now his mind put together two newly acquired facts and brought them to the forefront of Dabeet’s attention: Ken was hiding the activity that killed him, and kept hiding it even when it must have been obvious that he was dying.
Ken had fairly recently blanked out all recording in Lab 3 of the ALR.
Dabeet thought about these two facts. Because nothing was recorded in Lab 3, there would have been nothing for Ken to erase, if that had some significance in the last hours of his life.
Ah, but there would have been video of Ken emerging from Lab 3, perhaps in visible distress from the toxin, if he acquired it there. Lab 3 was important to Ken—and it was important to him that no one see what he did in there. Was it even more important than that? So important that when Ken got envenomated, instead of seeking any kind of treatment he staggered to his office and spent his last minutes of life erasing his trail so that no one would be led back to that lab?
Somebody must have seen this already. After Ken’s death, some offworld investigator would have uploaded all the surveillance records and tried, at least, to track Ken’s movements. It was impossible that nobody had attempted this, so they must surely have noticed the gaps.
Dabeet brought up the raw data from the coroner’s investigation and, yes, there it was, a report on surveillance of Ken Argon’s movements in the hours prior to his death. Leaving his rooms. Then “missing record.” Then his appearance in the common room, dying.
And that’s where they had left it. Nobody—including Dabeet, he had to admit—had thought to figure out why those records were missing. Dabeet left that kind of thing to the offworld investigators, because they had diagnostic tools that he could only access by calling for emergency powers. Now that he was thinking about it, he remembered wondering when they would inform him of what happened to the missing records.
In fact, he’d assumed that the records would have been backed up offworld, the way everything was supposed to be from a world still officially in the exploratory phase. But it had slipped away from his attention. He had deceived himself by looking elsewhere with too much concentration.
Staying out of the way of the speaker for the dead and his historian sister had, perhaps, freed up Dabeet’s attention so he could look elsewhere.
Ken could not have imagined that nobody would ever notice his deletions. The missing records were noticed in the first ten minutes after E.S. headquarters was notified of Ken’s troubling death. Before any analysis of the toxins in his system—before it was known that there were toxins—those missing surveillance records should have been the primary focus of the investigation, because if Ken had been murdered, the assumption would be that the killer or killers had pulled off the computational coup of hiding their tracks so thoroughly.
Another realization: I no longer believe that Ken was murdered.
From the moment Dabeet had discovered how thoroughly the surveillance of Ken’s last minutes had been erased, it never crossed his mind that someone other than Ken had done the deletion.
That didn’t mean that Dabeet was right—he knew perfectly well that just because he had unconsciously excluded murder as a possibility did not mean that Ken wasn’t murdered. But Dabeet had learned in early childhood to trust the “intuitions” that arose from his unconscious mind. For the time being, Dabeet would continue to act on the assumption that Ken Argon died from something other than a human attack on his body.
Whatever killed Ken, he wanted to hide it from those who would inevitably investigate his death.
No. Get rid of the abstraction. Ken spent his last moments hiding the manner of his death from me.
And because of my inattention, he has succeeded for months. It could easily have been forever. I conspired with him to hide this from myself.
The report on the missing files was there, much later in the investigation. And, as Dabeet had guessed, there was no cause assigned. Suspected: local system malfunction, perhaps caused by human action of unknown nature.
That was the lazy initial report, but there was no other. No doubt whoever made this report expected to be ordered to follow up and identify the system malfunction. He probably didn’t have the authority to initiate a deeper investigation without orders. And the orders had never come.
I could have given exactly those orders. But I paid no attention.
What am I paying no attention to now?
Even as he was forming this question, he noticed that there was a second page to this minimal report. Since the first page had only three lines of text, and there was no reference to further material, Dabeet might have looked at this report a dozen times without noticing the existence of another page.
He flipped to that page. It was full. Not of the data the investigator had been assigned to look for, but rather a complete description of what he had not found.
You were better than I was, Dabeet said silently to this unknown investigator. Without orders, you documented all the gaps in all the surveillance systems.
We couldn’t track when the deletions took place, but this investigator had tracked all the times and places that had been blanked out of the record.
It was a kind of path. The start and end times of the deletions were identical, rounded to the exact half-hour on the start time, and to a sequence of end times that moved forward minute by minute until the last one, completed just seconds before Ken staggered out of his office.
And now we know when the deletions took place. Ken couldn’t delete surveillance footage that didn’t yet exist. So every deletion had been marked from the same start time until “now”—the exact moment Ken performed the
deletion.
He could have grouped all the deletions into a single operation, so they would all have the same end time. Why didn’t Ken—obviously, because he didn’t know when he would die. He didn’t know if he could finish the deletions. If he started marking all the deletions in a group, but died before he finished, then none of the deletions would have taken place, and he would have been found with the group definition still on the screen. The files would exist, and Ken’s actions would have called particular attention to the very surveillance records he wanted to eliminate.
So Ken had deleted them one at a time.
Most important ones first. That’s how he would have done it. So which was the oldest deletion?
The corridor outside Labs 3 and 4. Then the catalog room in the ALR. Then the entrance foyer. Then…
Obviously, Ken had erased his trail from Lab 3.
The last two deletions were unrelated to the path between Lab 3 and Ken’s office. Dabeet spent a while wondering what possible connection they had to anything else that Ken was doing, but then it occurred to him that Ken probably realized that his deletions also marked his path, so he was going on to delete other surveillance zones as red herrings. But then the pain got so bad, he was so close to death, that he gave up. He had done all that was possible. He blanked his computer, staggered out of his office, and then—was he trying to get help? No. He could have gotten help much faster by calling someone from his office. He just wanted his body to be found.
He wanted his body to be found because he wanted the toxins to be found, before they broke down. He wasn’t trying to hide the manner of his death—just the manner of his acquisition of the venom that killed him.
It was time to find out what was in Lab 3.
The answer was simple.
Nothing.
The samples of alien life had been scanned in every way possible, with the data uploaded to many offworld sites. Scientists and students all over the Hundred Worlds were studying them, printing 3D and 2D models, analyzing the chemistry, and then writing detailed reports. And as each sample was scanned and uploaded, the physical sample was incinerated, unless it was flagged for another option, like “release into wild”—that was only for living samples—or “return to natural environment.”
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