3 x T

by Harry Turtledove

  "Were you?" Andrea raised an eyebrow. They watched the show sitting close together, as they had been while they were studying. When it was done, Stavros thought Andrea would leave. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and stretched lazily.

  He slid an arm around her shoulder. She moved closer to him. "What else have you learned on Hyperion?" she asked.

  "Shall we find out?"

  Some time later, she leaned up on one elbow in his narrow bed. "You picked up all that in the last few years here?"

  He sat up himself, offended. "Good God, no! After all, Andrea, I'm twenty-nine years old."

  He watched the flush rise under her fair skin as she blinked in confusion. "But you said?"

  "I said I didn't watch that kind of thing on New Thessaly. I didn't; my planet holds to keeping what it reckons private matters private. That doesn't mean we don't do them, though."

  She laughed out loud. "You don't need to sound so defensive. I'm glad, that's all."

  "Hmm. Prove it." Stavros tried to make his voice gruff, but he was laughing, too.

  She poked him in the ribs. "How am I supposed to do that?"

  "Think of something."

  She did.

  * * *

  The discreet individual was not altogether pleased with the way things were going. It was not any failure to turn a profit that disturbed him. His fees, especially lately, were keeping him in a state of luxury that satisfied even his exacting standards.

  Rather, his problem was figuring out a quiet way to earn this latest commission he had received. The woman who proposed it to him was the same person who had given him his last big job. She was so vague about this one that he was sure she was only an intermediary, and probably not the first in a chain.

  Despite such precautions, he suspected he could make a good guess about where the chain's other end lay. He tried not to make the guess, even in his own mind. Some things, he felt instinctively, were better left uncontemplated.

  The problem had two parts. Neither was easy, and the second, rare in his line of work, required him to draw his own conclusion and act on it. Bugging the comm lines into Hyperion Newsnet had been tough enough, but he was used to doing that. Now he had to decide just where Van Shui Pong was getting information he shouldn't have.

  The discreet individual punched for the latest set of playbacks. A burst of static made him scowl. The next several conversations were garbled. The newsnet had most of the latest confidentiality protectors.

  Not all of them, though. After a while, his electronics out-dueled the opposing defense systems and he was able to eavesdrop again.

  He had done some discreet checking on Van's contacts and had found that two in particular had connections of interest to his carefully unthought-about employer. He had not been able to decide which of them knew more; they both knew too much.

  He wondered whether it mattered. Dealing with one ought to teach the other to stop meddling. He was not wasteful: no point to getting rid of both of them unless he found himself without another choice.

  In spite of his income, one luxury he could not afford was impatience. He wished he could; Van Shui Pong talked with a lot of people, most of them dull and most of them absolutely unconnected with this business.

  At last Van got another call from one of the pair the discreet individual was interested in. After he finished listening to the taped conversation, he nodded thoughtfully. These people were doing their best to be difficult. In the abstract, he could almost wish their best to be good enough.

  He was not, however, given to thinking in the abstract.

  * * *

  "He'll check," Andrea said with satisfaction as she switched off the phone. "He says it may take a while to work around the Survey Service network to get in touch with the J?ng Ho's crew, but he thinks he can do it. He was boasting about his connections when he got a call on another line and had to give me a quick good-bye."

  "All right," Stavros said. "I hope those connections come through."

  "So do I. Reporters always boast about connections, whether they have them or not."

  Stavros's long, dark face wore a frown well. Not for the first time, he had the feeling of being in over his head. Actually, he'd had that feeling from the moment he'd seen the report on Bilbeis IV. Running into it when thinking about a woman he cared for, though, was different from facing it when confronting a large, powerful, hostile organization.

  He wondered how Andrea came to speak of reporters with casual familiarity. Van excepted, he had never dealt with one in his life. New Thessaly was not that kind of place. Gossip there was as incessant as anywhere else, but it was local and amateur, not industrialized.

  Andrea was getting to know him well enough to guess some of the things behind his silence. She said, "Don't worry. We'll just do the best we can as long as we can, with us and with Bilbeis IV."

  That was advice he might have heard on his home planet, and it was down-to-earth enough to shake him out of his apprehension. "Fair enough," he said. "I suppose that also applies to the quiz this afternoon."

  "I wish you hadn't brought it up." She made a face at him. "I was just at the point of letting myself believe I could take it without doing any more studying. Now I suppose I'll have to get back to it."

  "I know I need more work. You're good company." He turned on the computer. They sat down together. He looked at her sidelong. "Maybe you should pick out another spectacle instead."

  "Ha! Not with that damn quiz waiting for me?no, don't pout, this is what you deserve for reminding me of it."

  "All right." Stavros did get down to studying, disappointed but not really displeased. No matter what she knew about reporters, Andrea also knew what came first. That counted for more.

  * * *

  "Thank you for inviting me here today," Paulina Koch said. "It is always a privilege to provide information to this distinguished Assembly subcommittee."

  "Thank you for agreeing to appear before us on such short notice, Chairman Koch," Assemblyman Valleix replied.

  ?Here you are, snooping again.?Damn straight, and maybe we'll nail you this time, too. The Chairman knew the real meaning of the opening amenities perfectly well. So did Valleix. The Purist was a blockhead but not, she thought, that big a blockhead.

  He asked, "Have you any opening statement you care to read into the record?"

  "Perhaps it would be better merely to respond to questions." Paulina Koch smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from the collar of her gray tunic.

  "Very well. I will make the first question as general as I can, then, and ask how you respond to the allegations raised on Hyperion and other planets concerning Survey Service cultural interference on the pretechnological world Bilbeis IV."

  "To that, sir, I have only the reply I already gave in public: that the report which?as you properly said?is alleged to deal with Bilbeis IV is not a product of Survey Service personnel and was produced to denigrate and cast doubt on the numerous successful activities of the Service."

  Assemblyman Valleix nervously licked his lips. He remembered the last trap the Survey Service Chairman had set for him. If she blew him out of the water again here, not only would he look like a fool with elections coming up, but no one would dare tackle the Survey Service again for the next generation and a half.

  His voice wobbled as he asked, "Have you conducted a thorough investigation through Service records to ascertain the truth of the statement you have just made?"

  "Indeed we have, sir. Nothing in our data files gives any support whatever to the wild claims first raised on Hyperion and then copied by sensation seekers elsewhere. From that, one must conclude the supposed report to be fraudulent. The Survey Service is also conducting an investigation on Hyperion to attempt to discover the source of these scurrilous rumors."

  "Yes, I can well believe that," Valleix said dryly. Paulina Koch sat quietly, waiting for his next question. If she heard his sarcasm?and he was certain she did?she never let on. "Perhaps computer specialists from outs
ide the Service will have more luck accessing relevant documents than your own people."

  "I hope they do," Paulina Koch said. "Our records are of course at their disposal." She was the perfect witness, polite, attentive; every fact Valleix wanted was at her fingertips.

  He fought down the impulse to sigh. If anything ever had been in the Survey Service files, it was not there now, or the Chairman would never risk its being exposed. Still, he was slightly heartened. She had not flattened him by, say, producing a report on Bilbeis IV that showed everything normal there. Maybe she could not. "There remains the discrepancy between the arrival date of the J?ng Ho as first taken from Survey Service records by ah"?he paused to check his tickler screen?"by Hyperion Newsnet and that later offered as correct by your organization. Such alteration would seem to support the charge that information is being suppressed."

  "Not, I would hope, sir, in the absence of any and all other data. Electronics are fallible, as has been made evident on several painful occasions in the history of the Federacy."

  "That is true, Chairman Koch. Sometimes I think we rely too much on electronics. You would not take it amiss, then, if we were to summon some of the crew members of the J?ng Ho from, ah"?he glanced down at the note screen again?"Topanga, so they can testify as to what they witnessed on Bilbeis IV? Surely their ship will be in by this time."

  "I would think so, sir. Of course I have no objection to such an action. Do whatever you can to uncover the truth here. That is also what we are trying to do, for the sake of our own good name. The wild claims this report makes are wholly inconsistent with the principles upon which we are conducting our operation."

  "Thank you, Madam Chairman. I shall instruct the clerk of the subcommittee to issue and serve the appropriate subpoenas." This time Assemblyman Valleix did sigh. If the Chairman was so eager to let the crew people appear, odds were they'd back her up. Valleix turned to the head of the subcommittee. "I have no further questions of the witness at this time."

  "Very well. Assemblywoman O'Kelly, you may proceed."

  * * *

  The clerk she had dealt with the day before looked up sourly from his tea as Magda came in. He grew even more unhappy when she walked around to his side of the desk. She took a data card out of her holdall and handed it to him. "I just want to make sure you don't have any trouble copying the document to the data base," she said innocently.

  "I'm sure there will be no problem." He looked as if he wanted to erase her card but didn't quite dare. Instead, he put it in his terminal, punched two buttons, waited for a light to go from red to green, and handed it back to her. "It's in the system."

  "Good. I hope that wasn't too difficult for you." Now the clerk looked as though he wished he had scrubbed the data card. She tossed him a note handwritten on a memo form. "This outlines the foulup and your part in it. Take it to your supervisor and be careful with it till she gets it?it's the only copy." Of course the memo would end up in the nearest trash can, but getting the report on Bilbeis IV to the attention of the Survey Service?and the public beyond the Service?counted for more than making a functionary's life miserable, however much fun the latter was.

  After that, as had happened after the first time the J?ng Ho's crew sent in the report, she had nothing to do but sit around and wait for the roof to blow off Survey Service Central. Even if a new assignment came through, she wouldn't be able to do anything about it until the rest of the crew got back from Carson Planet. But if she had to vegetate, Topanga was a nice place to do it. The climate was warmer and drier than she cared for. The locals had adapted. They never hurried; they made a point of taking things easy and viewed life with a relaxed detachment Magda envied without wanting to emulate.

  She also did not care for the way they baked themselves under the sun. She preferred pale skin to bronze, and also preferred not to have to undergo skin cancer therapy every so often. The locals took that annoyance in stride, as they did everything else.

  Thinking about the Topangans' indifference to malignancy brought Magda back inevitably to Queen Sabium. Had David Ware not meddled with her fate, she would have been a millennium and a half dead, and Bilbeis IV would be like any other pretechnological world.

  Having met Sabium, though, Magda could understand his interference, if not condone it. Sabium was?something else. With time on her hands, Magda began a monograph detailing the effect of her reign. The work progressed only by fits and starts; Topanga's easygoing style proved infectious. Eventually Magda realized with a guilty start that a couple of weeks had gone by without her checking on what was happening with the report she had refiled. She went down to the field office to see what was up.

  The clerk was friendlier than he had been the last time she had come in. Amazing what giving him something to throw away could do. He didn't even seem unwilling to check on the status of the report. "There shouldn't be anything wrong," he said reassuringly as he punched buttons. "Survey Service Central is a busy place, you know, and sometimes these things take a while to get a reaction."

  "This one will get a reaction," Magda said.

  The clerk's look said that Magda thought her little concerns were a lot more important in the grand scheme of things than they really were. She glared at him. Then the screen on his terminal lit. His brown face went smug as he glanced over to it?here he was, handing down the word from on high, Magda thought scornfully. His smugness abruptly shattered. "What the?" he said, startled into a purely human reaction.

  Magda walked around to see the screen for herself. He didn't scowl at her the way he had before when she took such liberties. report from survey service ship j?ng ho: not in files, she read.

  "That's crazy," she muttered. She turned on the clerk. "You must have screwed up the transmission again, uh, Pandit." She had to read his name backward through the clear plastic plate on his desk; she'd never bothered noticing what it was before.

  "I did not," he said angrily. "What are you doing, saying things like that? You hovered over me like some miserable vulture, and you didn't complain then."

  "So I didn't," she admitted, taken aback by his hot response. "Well, what has gone wrong, then?"

  "How should I know? Whatever it is, as far as Survey Service Central can tell, you and your whole crew are still in space. You'll have to retransmit one more time."

  "Wonderful. The whole damn crew is in space, except for me. Captain Brusilov will nail my hide to the wall when he gets back, too. He'll have as much trouble believing back-to-back computer failures as I do."

  "What else could it be?" said the clerk?Pandit, Magda reminded herself. She could not stay irritated at him; he sounded as puzzled as she was.

  She said, "For all I know, the people at Central are scrubbing the damn thing on purpose every time it comes in." Pandit's expression said what he thought of that. Magda didn't believe it either. A little paranoia was all well and good, but letting it run wild was something else again. She sighed. "I suppose I'll have to bring it in again, won't I?"

  "Unless you'd sooner save yourself the trip and just send me a copy through your computer."

  "Not after all the trouble we've gone through already. I want to watch you again while you make the transmission to Survey Service Central."

  "Whatever you say." It wasn't Pandit's problem.

  "I'll see you tomorrow."

  Magda went back to the apartment and made another halfhearted lunge at her monograph. Before long, she was looking for an excuse to quit. She turned on the news. She did not watch often; most of the time on Topanga it was comfortable chatter and not much else. Not this afternoon. A rubble-strewn crater filled the screen; disaster crews struggled frantically amid the debris.

  The newswoman was saying, "?almost certainly dead, of course, are the 317 passengers of the ill-fated starship. The toll is expected to rise far higher as the ruins of the crowded terminal building yield their grim secrets. Here is a list of deaths confirmed by credit card recovery?"

  "Vultures," Magda muttered. She reach
ed out to switch off the screen.

  "?in the crash of the Clark County," the newswoman finished.

  Magda's hand froze in the air. The rest of her also felt as if it had turned to ice.

  Credit cards were nearly indestructible; men and women, sadly, not. Every so often, another name Magda knew would come up, setting her crying again. Irfan Kawar… Norma Anderssen… Captain Brusilov would never nail Magda's hide to the wall now. She even had tears for Atanasio Pedroza.

  Then she saw her own name.

  VI

  Stavros opened the door and stepped back in surprise. "Hello! Come in."

  "Thank you." Van Shui Pong had not phoned ahead. For that matter, he had not been back to the dormitory since the day he had first introduced himself. He nodded to Andrea, who was eating a candied orange. "Perhaps you and Stavros would like to go for a walk with me. The campus is a pleasant place; I don't get here often enough."

  "A walk?" Stavros echoed foolishly. "It's close to midnight."

  Van only waited. Andrea stood up and threw on her cloak. Muttering, Stavros got his cap and mantle out of the closet and closed the neck clasp. He and Andrea followed Van to the elevator.

  The night was just this side of chilly. The air had a cool green smell, different from the way it smelled during the day. A few lights glowed in distant labs and offices. Still, the path the three walked was to the eye merely a pale snake coiling across dark lawns.

  After a while, Van stopped. Stavros could hear the silence between the trills of Terran insects and Hyperion's own small night creatures. Van said, "I've finally managed to track down the crew of the J?ng Ho."

  "Have you? That's wonderful!" Stavros exclaimed. "Will they back their report?"

  Andrea, though, found another question. "Why did you bring us out here to tell us that?" Even before Van answered, that dampened Stavros's first rush of excitement.

  The reporter nodded somberly. "You begin to understand. Here I can hope, at least, that we are not overheard. I don't dare be so optimistic about your rooms anymore, Stavros."