by David Drake
"I'm sorry," Lacey apologized. "Please explain." He squatted, his rump just above the floor and his face close to the geraniums. The blooms were odorless but the leaves themselves had a bitter, unexpected tang.
"I've never heard anyone insist that encephalographs think," Dormer said, not wholly mollified, "just because they register brain waves."
"But not thoughts."
"Well, Psycomps then; though perhaps you'll say they do think?" The gardener shrugged, then continued, "But machinery is Robert's field, not mine. And mind you, I'm not saying that my friends here"—he stroked the furry edge of a leaf with a finger that was stained, calloused, and very gentle—"don't think. It doesn't particularly matter to me at the moment. What does matter is that I can make any of these six raise or lower the resistance of their leaves, just by thinking at them from across the room."
For a moment the suite was so still that the drip of moisture from the plant-watering conduits was audible. Lacey rested like a mottled gray stone until he asked, "What would happen then?"
"Anything, anything," the gardener said with a trace of sharpness directed at what he saw as a silly question. "What happens when you flip any switch? The lights go on, the door opens, the, the rocket ignites. It's a control you can touch at a distance and through walls, that's what it is. What happens here is that the recorder, that's the box the electrodes hook to, marks the peak."
"Umm. And does a little coil energize when that happens?" Lacey's voice was as soft as the fur on a cat's belly.
"You'd have to ask Robert about that, of course. He built the system for me. For us, now—he's been testing a plant himself at his office for the past several weeks."
Lacey looked up at one of the level's scanning cameras. It stared straight at him and Dornier and recorded their every movement. But not their thoughts: that would have to wait for a further improvement in the machinery. "And anybody can do it?" he asked.
"I think so, at least," said Dornier cheerfully, again tracing a leaf with his fingernail. "Of course, it takes a little preparation, a, a tuning of yourself and the plant. Watering it, talking to it"—he broke off quickly and added in response to a comment that had not been made, "I'm not saying that it understands what you say any more than a chameleon understands that bricks are red and leaves are green. It's just a matter of tuning, that's all."
Lacey stood. "You've been a lot of help," he said, "and I appreciate it. And I really believe you've found something here." He walked to the door, looked out at the guard scowling through the vitril. "I'll tell you, though," he added over his shoulder before palming the latch, "I think you'll have one hell of a hard time convincing anybody else."
"Well, with Robert's backing, you know . . ." Dornier said.
"Yeah, well. Good luck, anyway."
Lacey whistled between his teeth as he walked to the aircar and ordered his driver to take him back to the State Building and wait. Still whistling, he washed his hands in the male lavatory on Level 14, returned to his desk, and made a quick check with the scanner helmet and the Net.
He was back in the air car ten minutes after he had left it, giving the driver a new destination.
* * *
Ruby Sutter found Lacey drowsing at his desk in the late afternoon. He awakened at her approach and his smile was a spreading contrast to the grim set of the woman's face. Billings had quickly ducked under his helmet at sight of his superior. Sutter sneered at his back. With a concern she tried to hide, she asked Lacey, "How close to a kill are you, Jed?"
"As close as I can come without putting Wilhoit under a Psycomp. I know why he did it and how; but to prove it, I'd have to get into his mind."
She slashed her hands and turned away. "Then it's over. There's no way to get him under a 'Comp. No way."
"Sure, that's what I thought too."
Sutter cursed, bitterly and at length. She poised her hips on the edge of the desk and looked Lacey in the eyes. "Jed, I'll be very lucky to save your job as it is. I had another talk with . . . well, several officials. They want you off this Wilhoit thing. If there was a chance you could close it, I'd . . . but if you can't. . . ."
Lacey's smile changed as all his muscles tautened. His voice burred, like a saw on hard wood as he said, "They could come to me directly, these officials. Do they think I might—might take offense at them?"
He laughed suddenly and stood, his laughter genuine—that of a cynic who sees his worst forebodings proven true. "Look," he said, "I know you'd go to the gallows with me, for me, Ruby. That wouldn't do a bit of good. So I am going to drop the investigation, mark it as an industrial accident—but I'm going to see Wilhoit one time before I do that."
"I'll come along."
"To hold my hand?" Lacey asked with a grin. "No, you can watch here just as well."
Sutter bit her lower lip. "Look, just let me run down to my desk and I'll be right back."
"Ruby, you wouldn't need a gun for this anyway—and I really don't want you to come. You'd threaten Wilhoit in the wrong way."
"I'm supposed to trust your judgment?" she asked, but she bent a smile around the question. She was watching his back as he walked through the door to the landing pad; then she covered her head with his scanner helmet.
* * *
As Lacey entered the top level of the Coeltrans Building, eyes all around the room turned toward him like filings aligned by a magnet. The man in the center of the pool of plants was no exception. He stared over the mahogany desk and the litter of charts and tools and components upon it. Paying no attention to the employees, Lacey picked his way through the snaky aisles of plants leading to Wilhoit. The silence was uncanny. Only the hiss of his clothing on the leaves seemed to mar it. "Good afternoon, Citizen Wilhoit," the agent said. "I'm Lacey."
The executive nodded. "You were here this morning, too, while I was in a board meeting. I would have expected you to check through your—cameras to see if I was here before you came."
"I did." Lacey poised the fingers of his left hand on the desk for support. He looked at ease but the scar on his neck burned like a magnesium flare. "I've been investigating your murder of Terry Silvers—but that's not news either, is it?"
Wilhoit picked up a delicate construct of glass and etched metal. His short, capable fingers turned it over for his inspection. Without looking away from his hands, he said, "I didn't kill Terry Silvers. Or anybody."
"But there's evidence, isn't there?" Lacey pressed. "There's all the records you could ask for that he was blackmailing you—"
"Citizen," Wilhoit said, now staring in the agent's face. His voice was no less vibrant for being pitched too low to pass beyond the circles of plants surrounding him. "You can prove my—orientation, if you want. And you can prove that Silvers was using the threat of exposing it to extort things from me that he would not have been granted otherwise. He was an animal, yes, a predator more interested in the fact that he could ruin a powerful man than in any real benefits the fact brought him, but yes. . . . What you don't have proof of, because it doesn't exist, not in any form the Justice computers could accept, is that I killed him. And so you can't arrest me, and you may as well leave."
"Oh, I can arrest you, all right," chuckled Lacey. "If you're right, of course, you'd be released as soon as you had your preliminary hearing at the State Building."
"And you would be fired, perhaps even prosecuted under the circumstances."
Lacey ignored the comment. "You gave Silvers a key to the elevator," he said. "You knew how the support rods were constructed—you're the sort who would—but I'll bet you checked the working drawings anyway before you ordered the work done on the elevator. That I could prove."
"It wouldn't mean anything." Wilhoit had set his electronic tracery back on his desk.
"Then you rigged the recorder for your geranium experiment," Lacey went on, "so that it had a coil of the right frequency to trip the Dorafeen in the column. You could have used an electronic trigger instead of the plant, but computers understand
electronics. Sure, the coil'd do something reasonable as well, move a stylus or the like—but you're used to thinking about multi-use components, aren't you? And then you waited for the right time and . . . conducted your experiment. Quite a job of planning." He looked sidelong at Wilhoit. "What, ah, formula did you use to send the plant off? I think I'd try something like, 'You are life; I am life; we are one in the universe', since the idea is to blend with the plant."
"You too," Wilhoit said. His breath was hissing as he rose to his feet, his flesh gone sallow and trembling. "Just like Terry, aren't you? The lust for a chance to bring down someone who really can do something important in this wretched world. But you won't do it, either—if your scanners don't show a damned thing, you can't prove a damned thing. Now get out!"
Lacey straightened. His face was a mask. "Robert Sawney Wilhoit," he said, "by virtue of the authority vested in me by the State of North America, I hereby direct you to accompany me in order to be formally charged in connection with the murder of Terrence Oscar Silvers."
Wilhoit slammed the desk with his fist. "You're going to play this farce to the end? I'll be released as soon as your Receiving Unit processes the charges. Do you think that people of the level who could override the computer's decisions are going to want to, to destroy me just so that you could win your game?"
"It's not a game, Citizen," said the agent with a smile as stark as a naked skull's. "It's my life. Winning, beating people like you, is about the only thing I've got left since they put me under the Psycomp. I can't lose. I can't afford to lose." He took a breath that shuddered like the wind in a loose-braced sail. "Come up to the air car."
"No!" Wilhoit shouted. He looked around, saw the open mouths of his staff gaping at him. "No," he repeated in a lower voice, "I'll meet you at the State Building if you must, but I won't ride in an air car. You'll have to shoot me to get me in one."
"Suit yourself," the agent shrugged as if it did not matter. "I'm not worried that you'll try to run. Go on down to your own vehicle, then."
Feet clattered on the stairs from the roof pad—Ruby Sutter, wearing a high-necked sheath of red and orange and a death mask in place of a normal expression. Lacey moved to her swiftly while Wilhoit, still standing, began to poke buttons recessed into his desk and speak soft commands to the microphones they activated.
"I was watching you," Sutter said. They were in the middle of hundreds of clerks, all straining to hear but afraid to look up at the two intruders. "You know that Receiving can't hold him. Jed, for god's sake don't throw yourself away! There's still time—"
"There's no time." Lacey looked back at Wilhoit who, his conversation with attorney or politician finished, had shrugged on an outer jacket and stepped to his elevator. Lacey took from his side pocket an empty plastic bag with a sealable edge and the glitter of a few drops of water within. His fingers toyed with it as he concentrated on something else.
Sutter bore his silence briefly, then demanded, "What've you got there?"
"Oh, I washed my hands this morning and saved the water to pour in that geranium," Lacey said, pointing to the recorder-linked plant by the elevator shaft. Wilhoit's head had just sunk below floor level. "It struck me that wash water might be a faster way of getting in tune with a plant than what Wilhoit's gardener was mentioning."
His unit chief blinked in puzzlement. "I don't understand," she said.
"Wilhoit would," said Lacey.
A scream burst from the elevator shaft, cutting through even the roar of a high-voltage arc. It hung over the blank faces of the clerks as smoke and the stench of burned meat began to bubble out of the shaft.
"I can't afford to lose," repeated Lacey.
Sutter looked at his face and shuddered. After a time, the screaming stopped.
UNDERGROUND
Two sections of floor collapsed and armed figures began to leap upward into the electronics emporium above. Two of the three Commissioners scowled as they watched the projection sphere, though they knew that the scene had actually occurred more than a year before. Lemba, the Chief Commissioner, was fat and black and too experienced to show emotion except as a ploy. He gestured toward the sudden chaos in the sphere. "At the start, no one was killed. Knocked around, threatened if they got in the way of the looters, but—"
A red-capped policeman burst through the outside door, carrying his heavy-duty stunner at high port. The projection brightened as a dazzling crossfire cut the patrolman in half.
Arcadio, the other male Commissioner, swore under his breath. "Powerguns, when we can't get them ourselves."
Lemba nodded.
Except for the Commissioners themselves, the sixty-meter room was empty of its usual crowd. Further, though scanning cameras recorded the events of the room as they did the events of all other rooms in the State, the data of this meeting were restricted to the Security Police alone. Newshawks could appeal the Interdict to the courts, but even if they were successful, the delay of several months would kill news value in a society that lived from day to day.
Chains of pale, ragged looters were shifting equipment down through the gaps in the floor. Others guarded the hundreds of frightened hostages and the outside doors. The raiders were armed with a variety of weapons, including the powerguns which were supposedly only in the hands of the military. A stocky, red-haired woman raised her pistol and fired. One of the scanning cameras exploded into gobbets of burning plastic. The looter turned and blew apart a second camera. The scene in the projection sphere lost much of its precision, but the computer directing the simulacrum still managed to import an illusion of three-dimensionality.
The woman turned to face the remaining scanner. What looked like a bead necklace trembled on her bare bosom. As she leveled her powergun she grinned and extended the middle finger of her left hand. The whole screen spurted cyan, then went transparent.
"At the end of it there were five dead," Lemba said to his colleagues. "The one you saw, and a patrol car that exploded in the air. Red Teams were dispatched automatically, of course, and they weren't equipped to deal with powerguns."
"It isn't just the dead, though," objected Arcadio.
"That's right," agreed Kuhn, whose hair today matched the giraffe-patterned brown-on-blond polygons of her suit. She slapped the data print-out in front of her. "Of the 212 persons inside when the raid began, 27 are missing. Some—most—can be presumed to have been abducted for reasons one can guess. But there were several others, men and women who nobody'd have grabbed for a brothel or ransom. They were just ordinary people who opted to go Underground when they found the way clear. And that's the frightening thing."
"Not in comparison to the reason for this particular raid," Lemba replied equably. "Perhaps you thought this incident"—he waved at the vanished projection—"merely underscores the fact that Underground is organized and controlled by persons who are utterly ruthless?"
Arcadio and Kuhn stared at the fat man. Their expressions were compounded of disgust and irritation. "If you've requested an Interdict merely to play games—" Arcadio began.
"What's really frightening," Lemba went on, tapping his own data sheet with a callused index finger, "is that this raid provided all the necessary control components for a fusion powerplant. Coupled with other recent raids and . . . various other sources of information, Central has determined that Underground has a fusion unit in operation now. Beneath the City, where it will kill ten or twenty million people when it fails. And it's up to the three of us to decide how to shut that plant down before the disaster."
The hard faces of the subordinate Commissioners went blank. After a moment, Lemba continued, "Since I had a little advance notice of this—"
"Something this critical should have been routed to all of us, immediately!" Kuhn interrupted.
"—I was able to get a possible answer from Central Records. The data bank states that while a full-scale assault would almost certainly fail, an individual infiltrator might be able to eliminate the plant . . . and its personnel. It
's probable that we will get only one opportunity, so we need to choose the most effective person for the task. The man the data bank recommends is a Crime Service employee in Southern Region. His name is—"
* * *
"Field Agent Jed Lacey?" queried a young man in a crisp yellow uniform. The legend printed on his cap band read, "take pride in our city."
Lacey looked up abruptly. His mastoid implant was useless out of Greater Greensboro Subregion. He felt naked without it, his link to all the knowledge in the State. For that matter, Lacey missed the needle stunner which normally rode high on his hip. "Right, I'm Lacey," he said when he had identified the speaker from among the throng filling the airport terminal. "You my driver?"
"Well, I'm your guide, citizen," the City employee said with a false smile. "My name is Theron Barbee. We'll be taking public transit to the Commission offices. We don't approve of the waste of air cars here, you see."
"Right, I see," Lacey said sourly. He nodded toward the sky. Air cars streamed among the buildings like foam on a rocky strand.
"Well, of course that's private sector," the guide said with a sniff as he led Lacey toward the long queue for the buses.
"Sure," agreed Lacey. "Well, if they won't give their people tools to do their jobs right, they needn't be surprised when the jobs get done half-assed. But it's not my City."
The sprawling crowds were an emotional shock to Lacey, though intellectually he had known what to expect and had tried to prepare for it. His suit of red-orange covered him throat to digits in high style. He liked the color, though it was too blatant for him to have worn it while working. Lacey had stopped working the moment he boarded the airliner in Greater Greensboro, answering a summons relayed through his superiors.
But more than the color, Lacey liked the fact that the suit left only his face bare to a woman's touch. For fifteen years, physical contact with a woman was all that it took to crumple Lacey as effectively as a kidney punch could; and in the crowded City, he knew he could not avoid such contact.