by Linda Nagata
But Gaia was old and strong and wily. She always produced corrective mechanisms. Feedback response: a predator appears. There were too many rats to exterminate, but the problem could still be neatly managed. First, disarm the rats. Then feed them, protect them, let them grow soft. See that their nascent separation from the real world is made complete. Withhold from them the power to ever threaten Gaia again. And if some among them still insist on straying outside their niche? Kirstin smiled to herself. That’s why she was here. That’s why the cops existed. To pick off the maladapted and maintain the integrity of the herd.
And if she enjoyed her work, so what? Did the wolf feel guilty about bringing down the sickly and the weak when it pursued a herd of deer? No. Like Kirstin, it happily performed its role in the body of the Goddess.
Not alone, of course. She kept herself aloof from the routine duties of the Commonwealth police, leaving the daily challenges of enforcement to the discretion of her officers. As Chief of Police, she focused her own attention on guiding the political currents of the Commonwealth, ensuring that cities and nations both inside and outside the Commonwealth were governed by reasonable individuals who respected molecular law. Cities occasionally attempted to pass a local ordinance easing some Commonwealth proscription, thinking they might develop a trade advantage. . . . Or corporations would push the boundaries of the law to impress a restless client. . . . Or one of the nations outside the Commonwealth might be persuaded to attempt the development of illicit Makers.
And why? Citizens of the Commonwealth had everything they needed: perfect health; perfect bodies; safe environments; fine homes; family life; entertainment; art; opportunities to travel. . . . They ought to want for nothing. But of course there would always be a certain percentage of the dissatisfied. Snakes in the Garden of Eden.
Fox Jiang-Tibayan was one of the worst. To even conceive of creating something like Nikko was repugnant. To have the talent to persuade a timid Congress to approve such a scheme was diabolical. But Kirstin had made Fox pay for it in the years since. She’d had him to trial three times on marginal-tolerance technologies; and charged him in at least a dozen other cases that were settled out of court. The harassment had worked. Fox had become a conservative designer—at least on the surface.
And yet—Kirstin’s lips turned in a sly, feral smile—she owed Fox a debt of gratitude. Without the research permit that permitted Nikko’s existence, she would never have been able to inspire the wave of public outrage that had carried her into the office of Chief of Police.
She chuckled softly to herself. And Fox had given her Nikko too.
Nikko wasn’t human. He was a frantic animal, amoral in his pursuit of continued life. Kirstin found him exciting, in much the same way she might find it exciting to toy with a panther. Taming it. Controlling it. There were so few challenges left. Dealing with the likes of Nikko kept her wits and her instincts sharp for the greater game of preserving the Commonwealth.
Too bad his time was almost up. She’d miss him. She’d feel his loss . . . the same way she might feel the loss of a favorite pet.
Kirstin wasn’t half through with her backlog of calls when a new one came in under priority code. It was from Allende, the Director of Internal Security for the Commonwealth Police. She frowned. Allende wasn’t one of her people. He was a Congressional appointment; a small-minded man with a tendency to work behind the back of the Chief of Police. Kirstin generally had a good relationship with the Congressional body. She’d approved of the Reform Act, which had eliminated the presidential office, decentralizing its authority across Congress. But at times there were conflicts.
While the senators were occasionally called upon to clarify existing laws, or grant approval to marginal tolerance research proposals, or to determine the eligibility of a state petitioning for Commonwealth status, their primary duty was to oversee the workings of the police. For that reason they occasionally felt the need to assert their independence from the Police Chief. The creation of a watchdog officer in the person of Allende had been their most recent rebuke. Kirstin found the situation grating. She needed to trust her officers—all of them—and she did not trust Allende. She’d been angling to get rid of him for months.
“Proceed, Allende,” she said, wondering which of her officers he was harassing this time.
The atrium acted as an interface, processing the incoming signal and feeding it directly to her brain so that she heard Allende’s voice, though her ear sensed nothing.
“Chief Adair. We’ve got a problem in our research division. Secure subject.”
“So come.” She issued him a formal invitation; Allende’s ghost arrived a few seconds later. Ensconced in her atrium, nothing he said or did could be directly detected from the outside.
He appeared in the chair Nikko had occupied: a stout, dark-skinned man with hard eyes and heavy hands, dressed in the black tunic and shorts of a police uniform. By his stiff posture, she knew he didn’t want to be here.
He nodded without smiling. “We have a serious problem.” His gaze wandered nervously. Sweat actually began to appear on his pudgy cheeks. “Jensen Van Ness, one of our senior researchers, physically resident in Southwest Australia, used his security clearance to access the Bohr files. He synthesized the Bohr Maker, destroyed the file, then skipped. That was yesterday. Almost thirty-two hours ago now. I’ve tracked him through the Gates. He left the Commonwealth last night, for Southern India . . . or perhaps the Sunda Free Trade Zone. Of course the dogs are on it. All Gates are aware of his profile. Sector commanders have been alerted and decontamination procedures are being prepared.
“I expect to have him in custody within the hour. In the meantime I think we should review our internal security arrangements. This incident only proves what I’ve said in the past: our researchers are allowed far too many liberties with classified files.”
Kirstin listened in silent fury while Allende’s spiel ran out. The Bohr Maker. Hadn’t she warned the Congressional Committee on Molecular Law time and time again to get rid of that obscene file? But Van Ness had always gotten in her way. Now he was gone and the trail was cold and Allende was sitting here, trying to shift the blame to her account.
She leaned forward, fixing him with an icy glare. “You pompous bastard. You tried to handle this on your own, didn’t you? How many hours has it been since you knew Van Ness was gone?” Allende seemed to shrink as every muscle in his body tensed. “How many hours?” Kirstin snapped.
“Ten.” He sat up a little straighter. “It’s been ten hours. My staff has pursued every investigative channel in that time and we’ll have him in custody—”
“You didn’t think I needed to know this immediately? The Bohr Maker was stolen, and you didn’t inform me?”
“My staff—”
“You wanted to bring him in on your own, didn’t you? You wanted to grab a little glory. But you’ve put the police in jeopardy, instead. Van Ness possesses a terrible weapon. And because he destroyed the file, we can’t duplicate it. We can’t use it against him. But you didn’t think I needed to know.”
“We’ll have him within the hour,” Allende insisted.
But Kirstin knew he wouldn’t have come to her unless the trail was stone-cold. “You’d better bring him home within an hour, Allende, or I’ll have your head.”
After Allende’s ghost had gone, Kirstin abandoned the rest of her calls to the holding tank, changed into police uniform, and headed for the office.
The Bohr Maker. Her lips twisted as she thought about it. It was an obscenity before nature. An affront to the Mother. An evolutionary bomb that could explode in the body of Gaia, destroying the natural order, ripping through the soul of a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old goddess.
Leander had understood that. He’d never copied the Maker. He’d kept it to himself. He’d respected and loved the Mother, just as Kirstin had, and he’d used the Maker only in her defense. Leander Bohr had been a great man. But life as a fugitive had begun to weigh on him. H
e’d begun to talk to Kirstin of abandoning the Mother, of using the Maker to create an artificial world far from the sun, just large enough for the two of them. . . .
Kirstin had betrayed him to the police, feeling sure the Maker would be destroyed. But Van Ness had fought against that and now the Maker was loose again.
Van Ness didn’t possess Leander’s ethical sense. In his hands, the Maker might soon be running wild.
She found Allende physically present at the office. He told her: “The dogs in Sunda have scented a peculiar line of sub-Makers that may be associated with Bohr’s Maker.”
“There are records on this,” Kirstin said. “Can you confirm the link?”
“We’re working on it.” His eyes glazed as he accessed police files through his atrium.
Leander had designed his Maker to create molecular machines less sophisticated than itself. These sub-Makers could be sent out into the world as microscopic information-gathering systems. Of the millions of copies it might generate, most would be lost, and after a preprogrammed period of time they would self-destruct. But a few would drift home to the Maker. The lineage of these molecular complexes was well-known.
Allende’s attention returned to the real world. “With minor discrepancies, they match the patterns of known Bohr sub-Makers. Van Ness is in Sunda.”
Kirstin smiled. So the thief hadn’t left Earth. That was something—though he might be hard to find in Sunda, a primitive political entity that existed outside the network of nations comprising the Earth-bound members of the Commonwealth. Some nonmember states objected to police activities within their territories . . . not that they could stop an investigation. The Commonwealth police recognized no political boundaries in the enforcement of molecular law. How could they? Illegal technologies weren’t made safer by being developed outside the Commonwealth. And if a feral technology superseded the police arsenal and made the cops obsolete, who would be left to enforce the law? No one. The stability and security of the Commonwealth could vanish—literally—overnight.
So the police recognized no territorial limitations, and consequently, even the most disaffected member-states remained firmly within the coalition. They had no realistic option. Secession wouldn’t gain them technological freedom, but it would deprive them of a political voice within the Congress of the Commonwealth.
Kirstin called up a chair. She dropped slowly into it, facing Allende, her arms crossed over her chest while she waited for his hour to run down. In an hour she’d be rid of him. She’d dismiss him for dereliction of duty—and let the Congress try to argue with her!
She waited, watching him with a raptor’s intense stare as he continued his investigation. He worked without console or voice, his attention fading in and out as he consulted with his officers through his atrium. As time grew short, the sheen of sweat on his face grew heavier. He glanced at Kirstin more and more often, with the white-eyed look of a frightened herbivore. His reactions actually gave her physical pleasure, and she grinned at him, which only fed his nervous state.
Then, with only three minutes left on his time he suddenly sagged forward, expelling a mighty breath of relief. Kirstin scowled. He noted the expression and responded with a triumphant grin. “The dogs have found Van Ness.”
A few minutes later, Kirstin stood between the huge animals. It was early morning in Sunda, and she waded hip-deep in the crystal-clear waters of a river that flowed beneath the decaying hulk of an old warehouse—or at least that was the illusion generated for her by the atrium of the alpha dog.
She’d gone Earth-side as a ghost, to observe the progress of the investigation. The dog’s atrium had reconstructed for her the smell of the falling rain, the sound of treading feet in the structure overhead, the taste of the slightly bitter water, and the feel of the river’s current as it washed past her legs. She gazed at the young boy who clung to one of the building’s vertical supports, seeing him just as the dogs saw him with their artificial eyes. But the boy couldn’t see her.
Nevertheless, she scowled at him, thinking Parasite. He was one of the millions of unwanted children infesting this backward country, plaguing the city, a scourge of human rats. An older girl had abandoned him beneath the structure when the dogs showed up. She’d screamed in fear, then shinnied up a rope that hung from a trapdoor, before slamming it shut behind her. Kirstin could still hear her screaming, somewhere in the structure overhead.
The boy—he couldn’t be more than six or seven—was trying to hide from the dogs behind the column, but his hands and legs were shaking so badly he kept slipping and splashing into the water. Kirstin grunted in satisfaction. The police dogs were designed to intimidate. They were a terrible derivation of mastiff and Great Dane. Their huge square heads reached a man’s shoulder and they massed nearly seventy kilograms apiece. The Sunda government permitted them in its territory in exchange for certain trade concessions—primarily molecular technologies that kept the present rulers in power.
Kirstin shifted her gaze back to the body of Jensen Van Ness. He’d been secured to the riverbed—sometime yesterday, judging by the body’s state of decomposition. The microscopic Makers that kept the water clean had already dissolved a good twenty percent of the flesh, converting it into edible fluff; white ribs glinted brightly through tattered muscle. The skull was almost completely exposed. The body had been stripped.
She watched thoughtfully as a bit of fluff floated downriver. The current swept it up against a long boom constructed of old plastic bottles that had been cut in half. Many of the bottles were full of fluff. Kirstin glanced at the body again, then chuckled in grim amusement. Rats would eat anything.
She ordered one of the dogs underwater, then dove after it, down to the river bottom to get a closer look at Van Ness’s body. The atrium collected enough data through the dog’s eyes to extrapolate a palpable model. She was able to probe the skull with her fingers. Van Ness had suffered a massive head wound.
She surfaced, throwing her head back in a great arc to clear the water from her eyes. The drops splashed against the structure overhead, but they left no wet marks. Those could be added, but on an investigation she preferred the environmental mock-up to accurately reflect the outside world. The only phony thing she wanted in it was her own apparent presence.
She sniffed the air, searching through the dogs’ enhanced senses for a trace of the Bohr Maker. The body was free of it; Van Ness had not inoculated himself. Then where had he kept the stolen sample? Had he forced someone else to carry it for him? (Someone who objected?)
She waded through the water, the dogs at her heels, until she stood at the foot of the column, staring up at the boy. What had the child been doing down here? One of the dogs stood on its hind legs, stretching its head upward until it could run its sensitive nostrils across the boy’s leg. The child moaned in fear; but the dog found nothing. It dropped back down into the water.
Yet the Bohr Maker still existed. Somewhere, someone had a sample of it because every now and then as the dogs patrolled the riverfront they’d detected its telltale sub-Makers. Leander had designed the Maker to be elusive, almost undetectable without a sample of the infected cells. Leander had been a genius.
She turned, ready to wade back to the concrete riverbank when the trapdoor opened. The dogs turned around.
A swollen, luminescent yellow face with a great hooked nose and comically rounded cheeks looked through the opening. Nature stop us, Kirstin thought in disgust. In the celestial cities of the conservative Commonwealth mutagenic Makers had long ago been outlawed. But they were still common in the Free Trade Zones, generally used against some poor, unsuspecting sap for the amusement of minor powers. So long as the mutations were harmless and limited to somatic cells, Kirstin had agreed the police should tolerate them—for diplomatic reasons.
She started to whistle for the dogs when suddenly she noticed their tense posture, their flaring nostrils. Had they picked up a trace of the Bohr Maker? From this goon?
One of the dogs
growled and surged through the water, then leapt for the open trapdoor. The goon ducked out of sight while Kirstin looked on, laughing in delighted disbelief. Surely the beast was too large to fit through the opening? But no. It caught itself with its forepaws and hung dangling, its head and shoulders through the hole. Its mate came up underneath it, reared up on its hind legs and offered its great head as a platform. The first dog kicked off and vanished inside the building.
Screams rang out overhead, the cries of children shrieking in terror. The pounding of running feet on unpadded floors rolled like thunder. Kirstin slogged through the water, grabbed the rope, and pulled herself up after the first dog.
Back on Castle, Kirstin’s corporeal self sat with Allende, reviewing Van Ness’s communications log. He’d entertained a lot of visitors. Some of them as famous as himself. Others unknown. She had officers tracking down the records of everyone who’d visited him in the last three years. “No way he did this alone,” she muttered.
Allende grunted agreement. “It’s not in his psychological profile.”
In a way, this exercise was a waste of time. They’d know who his accomplice was as soon as his atrium notebook was removed from the body and translated.