by Tom Holt
The you’ve-got-mail light was flashing. Its little green winking eye was burning into his soul. He pressed the Play button just to make it stop.
Greetings, George Stetchkin. Contact Lucy Pavlov immediately. This is a hint.
He closed his eyes. There were huge green smears on the insides of his eyelids.
Lucy Pavlov, the PaySoft genius. He shuddered. Right; as if the world’s richest, most successful and most enigmatic woman would give a wreck like him the time of day. Somebody’s idea of a joke— Greetings.
That word rang a bell; so loudly, in fact, that he could feel the walls of his skull vibrate. “Greetings,” the lunatic with the gun had said, and then he’d pulled the trigger.
This is a hint.
But I don’t want a hint, he raged silently. I want my money and my cards and my ID and my shoes. I want my job back. Hints are like socks at Christmas.
He scowled at the message on the screen. It appeared to have grown.
PS Lucy Pavlov’s direct line is
He stared. Nobody knew Lucy Pavlov’s direct line. It was the Holy Grail of snoop journalists and paparazzi everywhere. If this really and truly was the genuine article, he could sell it and drink himself back to the vegetable kingdom on the proceeds.
Or he could try the number.
On the Mark Six, the working-please-wait cursor is a little running pig. Just looking at it made him want to burst into tears, so he turned his head away and tried to think of something to say, just in case rich-and-famous Lucy Pavlov actually answered. He’d got as far as— “Hello,” he croaked. “You don’t know me, my name’s George Stetchkin.”
Silence was what he’d been expecting. But instead of a click and a whirr, he got “Really?”
“Um .”
“But that’s amazing. I was just this very second about to call you.”
It was a beautiful voice, though rather too loud, but he hardly noticed. “What?”
“Where are you?”
George looked around. “You know,” he said, “that’s a very good question.”
“Doesn’t matter, I can use PinPoint. Ah.” Pause. “What are you doing there? Doesn’t matter. Look, are you terribly busy right now?”
He didn’t laugh, but only because he lacked the necessary fine control of his motor functions. Instead, he made a noise that came out something like snurge.
“Sorry? Didn’t quite catch—”
“No. I mean, I’m not terribly busy right now. Only—”
“Stay right there, I’ll send a car.”
The line went dead. For a matter of fifteen seconds or so, George didn’t move. Instead, he thought, Here I am, sitting in a gutter, and Lucy Pavlov is sending a car. This is sooo much better than real life. Then a couple of men came out of the back door of the building. They were carrying white plastic garbage sacks.
“Oh,” said one of them, “it’s you, is it?”
His tone was not altogether friendly, but George grinned at him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Lucy Pavlov’s sending a car.”
“Move,” the main said.
Clearly the man hadn’t heard him. “I said,” George repeated slowly, “Lucy Pavlov is sending a car. All right?”
“Now.”
George noticed the man’s boots. They were so large, he probably needed planning permission every time he walked across a room. George tried to get up, but something, probably low-level seismic activity, made him wobble and lose his footing. He slid back until his shoulder blades met the wall. “Lucy Pavlov,” he said. “She’s sending—”
A hand that could only have belonged to the owner of the boot grabbed his shirt-front and heaved. That got George on his feet, but not for very long. As he landed face-down on the pavement, he felt the ominous sensation of stomach contents shifting. He swallowed hard, as a pint of acid hit his hiatus hernia.
Boots had gone, but his colleague lingered, looking down at George with a confused expression on his face. “Hey,” he said.
“Mm?”
“Did you just say Lucy Pavlov?”
George nodded feebly. “Sending a car, yes.”
The main hesitated, then stuck his hand in his top pocket and pulled out a waiter’s order pad and a pencil. “You think you could get her autograph for me?”
“No.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for my nephew, he’s really into computers and stuff.”
“No.”
“Oh.” The main considered George for a few seconds, then put the pad away. “Screw you, then,” he said, and went inside.
Ah well, George thought, as the civil war in his digestive tract eased towards an uneasy ceasefire. Just goes to show, there’s two sorts of people in this world: those Lucy sends cars for, and those who want her autograph and can’t get it. For some reason, that made him laugh for nearly four seconds.
16
Desperation Springs, Queensland, Australia
You have mail, said the brand-new computer.
Jack Willis stared at the screen in disbelief. He’d only bought the thing a week ago. He’d been the last farmer in the district to hold out against the new technology. Ever since it had arrived, and Snowy Jones’s boy from across the road (the road was fifty miles away; across was an extra twenty miles) had set it up for him, he’d applied every excuse he could think of to keep from turning the power on. Snowy’s lad had offered to send him an email to make sure it was working, but he’d told him not to bother. So who could it be?
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Only Jack Willis’s rhino-horn thumb could have survived contact with Jack Willis’s carborundum-bristled chin without being shredded to the bone. The government? Possibly. Jack knew that the government watched every move he made from their spy satellites, poised like a cat at a mousehole to catch him out. In which case, should he look at the message or not? If he opened it, would they construe that as an admission of defeat, Jack Willis finally conceding that he was at their beck and call like everybody else? But if he didn’t — suppose it was some new addition to the livestock-movement-records legislation. If he didn’t read it and did something that infringed the new rules, they’d be on him like a snake, you could bet your life. But you must ‘ye known, Mr Willis, they’d say, as they dragged him away, we sent you an e-mail.
Bastards, he thought. They get you coming and going.
He sat looking at it for an hour, then broke down and did the business with the plastic box on a string, like Snowy’s kid had shown him.
It wasn’t from the government after all. It was from a Mr S’ghnff, and it said URGENT.
Needless to say, Jack didn’t recognise the name. None of the seven people Jack knew were called S’ghnff. Just possibly it could be the newcomer down the road, who’d bought the old Hawkins station, but he’d only been there seven years so naturally Jack didn’t know his name. Could be S’ghnff. After all, he was a city boy, and they were proverbially capable of anything.
URGENT. He didn’t like the look of that at all. Maybe S’ghnff was an assumed name to disguise the identity of a well-wisher, and someone was tipping him off that the government were on to him. He didn’t dare risk it. He opened the message and read it.
Dear Friend, it said.
Jack didn’t like the sound of that at all. He’d heard about the sort of people who said things like that. On balance, he’d have preferred the government. But, since he’d got this far—
I represent the Ostar Unitary Credit Authority. We are in possession of the sum $800,000,000,000,000 (eight hundred trillion dollars), being proceeds of withdrawals from your banks. Interplanetary banking regulations prevent us from transferring said sum outside the jurisdiction, we being legal aliens. Therefore we require a partner inside the jurisdiction (yourself), you having been referred to us as person of great honesty and integrity and not in league with government authorities, to assist in said transaction. We propose your share of said funds will be 500/a (fifty per cent). On receiving your reply, we will furnish a secur
e number to proceed. To ensure your participation, kindly call the number below with your full name and contact number and age.
With warmest personal regards and best wishes
Ig’uu S’ghnff (Principal)
Jack stared at the screen, his eyes as wide as soup bowls. Fifty per cent; four hundred trillion bucks. His lucky day, or what? He read the message again, just to make sure. A tiny flicker of doubt crossed his mind once or twice, but the bits about honesty and integrity and not being in league with the government convinced him. ‘Whoever these Ostar were, they knew all about him, for sure. And the situation itself — borderline currency transfers, banking regulations, cunning plans to circumvent the letter of the law —well, he knew all about that stuff. Once a month, when the supply truck stopped by, there were always old newspapers stuffed in the boxes as padding. He read them all, every last word, and the financial pages were full of that sort of thing. After he’d overcome his initial shock and bewilderment, it all made perfect sense.
He looked down at his hands; they were shaking a little. He pursed his lips. All right, it wasn’t sheep-farming, which was all he knew and had ever known. On the other hand, how often does an opportunity like this drop into a bloke’s lap?
He thought, A man can buy a hell of a lot of barbed wire for four hundred trillion dollars.
“Dear Friend” still bothered him, a little, until he figured that, whoever these Ostar were, they had to be foreigners, presumably with a quirkily imperfect grasp of English. For the first time in his life, he regretted not paying attention to the geography on schools radio when he was a kid. Ostar, he thought: rings a bell. He dived into the furthest recesses of his memory. Ostar, he was pretty sure, was the German word for Austria.
That clinched it. Austria, he knew, was right next to Switzerland, in Europe, with mountains. Switzerland was where they had loads of posh banks, so presumably they had a few in Austria too, the ones that wouldn’t fit in Switzerland, a notoriously small country. And Austria must be a pretty fair dinkum sort of a country, or why had they called Australia after it?
He called the number. The voice at the other end of the line was tinny and almost mechanical-sounding, but he assumed all Austrians sounded like that.
“You’re on, mate,” he said. “I’ll give it a go.”
It all went very smoothly, with a minimum of fuss; and sure enough, twenty minutes after he’d finished his call, eight hundred trillion dollars were deposited in an account in his name at the First Queensland Bank in Rockhampton. Twenty minutes after that, four black helicopters from the Australian People’s Revenue Militia set down in the paddock behind the farm, and armed officers stormed the farmhouse and led Jack away in handcuffs.
17
New York
Mark Twain yawned.
He’d never yawned before. For a moment, he had no idea what was happening to him: My god, I’m ill! Something’s wrong with me! Is it fatal? Am I going to die? Then his internal search engine tracked down the symptoms in his Dirter medical database. He downloaded the diagnosis, wondered for a moment about a species that did that, and carried on with what he’d been doing.
He’d been at his desk all night. Mostly, of course, because he had nowhere else to go. Didn’t need anywhere else to go; he was, after all, a probe, a machine, a bomb (but that was beginning to feel very long ago and far away. Was he really a bomb? What an extraordinary thing to be!), and therefore didn’t need sleep. The organic receptacle or shell currently housing his operating system had hinted once or twice that it wouldn’t mind forty winks or so, but he’d ignored it. Damned if he was going to be dictated to by a bunch of molecules.
Instead, he’d spent the night working. The building had emptied out round about midnight, and that had been a good thing. Peace, silence, no distractions. When there were Dirters about, the sounds they made had a ghastly habit of forming themselves into rhythms (the clack of feet on a tiled floor, the clatter of fingertips on a keyboard) and the rhythms became little tunes, and suddenly his mind wasn’t his own any more. In the dead silence of an empty building, it was harder for the tunes to break through. Also, he didn’t have to be on his guard all the damn time. He hadn’t anticipated that blending in unobtrusively was going to be so demanding. It was practically a full-time job, and, although he was confident he’d got away with it so far, it’d only take one silly, careless slip and they’d get suspicious. Dirters, he’d learned, watched each other constantly. They noticed things. From what he could gather, they had an obsession with mental health and stability. Back home, the Ostar didn’t worry about that sort of stuff. If someone decided he wanted to howl at the moon or ruin round in circles chasing his own tail, nobody gave a damn; folks like to let off steam now and again by doing something a bit crazy. Here, if you didn’t act in accordance with the vast and labyrinthine corpus of The Rules, people reckoned it was only a matter of time before you started laying about you with a machete. Another symptom of an inferior society, Mark Twain concluded, but that wasn’t a lot of help.
The silence and the absence of Dirters had allowed him to make some real progress. It was maddening, of course, to have to use their appallingly primitive technology; it was like cutting down a tree with a nail file, or getting in the grr’k harvest with scissors, one stalk at a time. Around 2 a.m. he’d given in and allowed himself a few short-cuts, little patches of Ostar code that he knew he could get rid of quickly and cleanly as soon as the Dirters came back. That had helped, a bit. Even so, it had been slow, painstaking work, but he was getting somewhere.
He’d started by analysing Dirt’s dominant computer software system, PaySoft XB. No doubt about it, there were definitely bits and pieces in there that didn’t belong on this planet. At 03:13:43 he’d found something that put it beyond reasonable doubt: a small recursive algorithm that was distinctively, undeniably Ostar. He’d called it up on the screen, then downloaded the exact same code from his own operating system. Side by side on the screen in front of him, they were identical. He cross-referenced, and found an article in a five-year-old Code Monthly. Lucy Pavlov’s stroke of genius, the author declared, was breaking away from the restricting chains of base ten and opening her mind to the extraordinary possibilities of base four. After all, the author went on, what’s so special about tens? We only have this thing about them because we evolved from a ten-fingered species.
He’d thought about that, a lot. It was possible, of course, that Lucy Pavlov had somehow come across a few scraps of Ostar code from somewhere and pirated them to make her fortune. Where? Well, the wreckage of the Mark One was the likeliest candidate, unless there had been other, earlier contacts between Dirt and Ostar that he wasn’t aware of. He analysed PaySoft with this hypothesis in mind, and found that his shiny new theory didn’t quite work.
If Pavlov had merely been lucky and found some Ostar fragments lying around somewhere, he reasoned, what would she have done — a Dirter, with a Dirter brain and ten little pink digital appendages? She’d have done, essentially, what he’d just done to save time: patch them on to the home-grown junk to make it work faster. But that wasn’t how PaySoft worked. More to the point, that was why PaySoft worked. The fundamental ideas behind it weren’t just better than Dirt standard, they were completely different. True, they still travelled at the speed of an hourly paid snail, but the mind that had conceived them, he was absolutely certain, thought in base four.
His chair was horribly uncomfortable. He got up, turned round three times and sat down again.
He went back and started again. As he scrutinised the code, a possibility occurred to him. What would a system be like, he thought, if an Ostar wrote it with a view to selling it to Dirters? A bit like trying to design a jet engine that could be manufactured and safely used by cavemen: you’d have to get a load of cows, to produce methane, and fireflies to act as natural spark plugs, and instead of a titanium housing you’d need to find a really, really big conch shell or something like that. And that, in essence, was what Lucy Pav
lov had done. She’d thought in Ostar, then used a considerable degree of ingenuity to make it work in Dirter.
Put together a critical mass of little answers and they form a new big question. Who was this Lucy Pavlov, and where the hell did she come from? The evidence of her work strongly suggested that she was Ostar. He thought about that. It wasn’t unknown for Ostar to do that sort of stuff: find a primitive planet populated by semi-evolved creatures, set themselves up as gods to massage their egos. It had happened four, five times (and those were only the ones that had been found out; and S’jjrnk had managed to stay hidden for two hundred years on Glostula Prime by masking his radio signals and avoiding tell-tale industrial emissions that could be detected by long-range probes) . Maybe Pavlov was another would-be supreme being, getting her jollies out of lording it over the local wildlife.
Yes, but she wasn’t doing that, was she? There were none of the usual signs; no temples dedicated to the Divine Pavlov, no statues, no votive offerings of bones piled up on street corners. You wouldn’t come all this way and go to all that trouble just to be fairly rich, moderately famous and generally liked. He went back over the Pavlov dossier he’d compiled. The patterns of behaviour it revealed were nothing like those of S’jjrnk on Glostula, or Okmmd on Ukyd’d Seven. Ytt’oog had had the entire southern continent of Ooma Three terraformed into a giant statue of himself. Also, all five of the divine wannabes so far documented had retained their Ostar physiognomy. Far from blending in, they’d made a point of being entirely different. Understandably; why go under cover if you intend to be a god?
No, he was missing something. He swivelled his chair away from the terminal, closed his eyes and tried to think. Assume Pavlov is Ostar. Right. An Ostar comes to Dirt, changes into a Dirter body, subtly and unobtrusively upgrades basic Dirt technology just a little bit, but not enough that the locals will notice. Meanwhile, the homeworld starts getting bombarded with the terrible, society-destroying tunes and jingles that were causing such havoc that the race’s leaders felt they have no choice but to blast the source of the nuisance out of the sky. A bomb is launched, and vanishes without trace.