by Vernor Vinge
Pham finger-walked up the cliff face, slowed by the need to stay hidden behind the bushes. Even here, the artistry of Ali Lin was evident. The cliff could have been simple raw diamond, but Ali had imported rocks from the mineral dumps on the surface of the L1 jumble. They were discolored as if etched by the seepage of a thousand years. The rock was watercolor art as great as any ever painted on paper or digital. Ali Lin had been a first-rank parkbuilder before the expedition to OnOff. Sammy Park had picked Ali for the crew for that reason. But in the years since his Focus, he had become something greater, what a human could become if all his mind was concentrated on a single love. What he and his fellows had done was subtle and deep…and as much as anything it proved the power that Focus gave to the culture that possessed it. Using it is right.
The tunnel entrance was still a few meters farther up. Pham sensed a half-dozen localizers floating there, imaging the outlines of the door.
A small fraction of his attention remained with the crowd back at the harbor. No eyes looked back in his direction. Some of the nimbler partyers had scrambled out onto the pier and formed a chain of life that reached six or seven meters into the air, an acrobatic tumble of humanity. The men and women of the chain were in a dozen different orientations, the classic zero-gee pose for such an operation. It broke the illusion of downness, and some of the Emergents looked away, groaning. Imagining the sea as flat and down was one thing. Suddenly seeing the sea as a watery cliff or a ceiling was enough to provoke nausea.
But then the tip of the chain extended a hand and grabbed Rita’s ankle. The chain contracted, bringing her back to the ground. Pham tapped his palm, and the audio from the scene below came louder in his ear. Jau Xin was beginning to get embarrassed. He apologized to his wife. “But Qiwi said it was okay. And face it, I am a space pilot.”
“A pilot manager, Jau. It’s not the same thing.”
“Close enough. I can do some things without a ziphead to make it right.” Jau sat back down by the mast. He tweaked the sail a little. The boat moved out around the pier. It stayed level in the water. Maybe suction was keeping it fitted to the surface. But its wake rose a half meter into the air, twisting and braiding the way surface tension makes free water do. The crowd applauded—even Rita, now—and Jau swung the craft around, trying to make it back to the moorage.
Pham pulled himself even with the tunnel entrance. His remotes had already been fiddling with the hatch. Everything in this park was localizer-compatible, thank the Lord. The door opened silently. And when he drifted through, he had no trouble closing it behind him.
He had maybe two hundred seconds.
He pushed quickly up the narrow tunnel. Here there was no illusion. These walls were raw crystal, the naked stuff of Diamond One. Pham pushed faster. The maps that unrolled before his eyes showed what he had seen before. Tomas Nau intended the Lake Park to be his central site; after this open house, outsider visits would be strictly limited. Nau had used the last of the thermal diggers to cut these narrow tunnels. They gave him direct physical access to the critical resources of Hammerfest.
Pham’s tiny spies showed him to be just thirty meters short of the new entrance to the Focus clinic. Nau and Reynolt were safely at the party. All the MRI techs were at the party or off-Watch. He would have his time in the clinic, enough time for some sabotage. Pham twisted head for feet, and extended his hands as brakes against the walls.
Sabotage? Be honest. It was murder. No, it’s an execution. Or a combat death upon an enemy. Pham had killed his share in combat, and not always at the end of a ship-to-ship trajectory. This is no different. So what if Reynolt was a Focused automaton now, a slave to Nau? There had been a time when her evil had been self-aware. Pham had learned enough about the Xevalle clique to know that its villainy was not just the invention of those who had destroyed it. There had been a time when Anne Reynolt had been like Ritser Brughel, though doubtless more effective. In appearance, the two could have been twins: pale-skinned, reddish haired, with cold, killing eyes. Pham tried to catch the image, amplify it in his mind. Someday he would overthrow the Nau/Brughel regime. Someday Pham would invade the Invisible Hand and end the horror that Brughel had made there. What I do to Anne Reynolt is no different.
And Pham realized he was floating in front of the clinic entrance, his fingers poised to command it open. How much time have I wasted? The time line he kept at the edge of his vision said only two seconds.
He tapped his fingers angrily. The door slid open, and he floated through into the silent room. The clinic was brightly lit, but the vision behind his eyes was suddenly dark and vacant. He moved cautiously, like a man suddenly struck blind. The localizers from the tunnel, and what he shook out from his clothing, spread out around him, slowly giving him back his vision. He moved quickly to the MRI control table, trying to ignore the absence of vision in the corners and dead spaces. The clinic was one place where the localizers could not survive long-term. When the big magnets were pulsed on, they fried the electronics in the localizers. Trud had taken to vacuuming them out after a magnet-accelerated dustmote had cut his ear.
But Pham Nuwen had no intention of pulsing the magnets, and his little spies would stay alive and well for the time it took him to set his trap. He moved across the room, quickly cataloguing the gear. As always, the clinic was an orderly maze of pale cabinets. Here wireless was not an option. Optical cables and short laser links connected automation to magnets. Superconducting power cables snaked back into areas he couldn’t see yet. Ah. His localizers drifted near the controller cabinet. It was set just the way Trud had left it the last time he had been here. Nowadays, Pham spent many Ksecs each Watch with Trud in the clinic. Pham Trinli had never seemed pointedly curious about the workings of the Focus gear, but Trud liked to brag and Pham was gradually learning more and more.
Focus could kill easily enough. Pham floated above the alignment coils. The inner region of the MRI was less than fifty centimeters across, not even big enough for whole-body imaging. But this gear was for the head only, and imaging was only part of the game. It was the bank of high-frequency modulators that made this different from any conventional imagers. Under program control—programs mostly maintained by Anne Reynolt, despite Trud’s claims—the modulators could tweak and stimulate the Focus virus in the victim’s head. Millimeter by cubic millimeter the mindrot could be orchestrated in their psychoactive secretion. Even done perfectly, the disease had to be retuned every few Msecs, or the ziphead would drift into catatonia or hyper-activity. Small errors could produce dysfunction—about a quarter of Trud’s work had to be redone. Moderate errors could easily destroy memory. Large errors could provoke a massive stroke, the victim dying even faster than Xopi Reung had.
Anne Reynolt was due for such a massive cerebral accident the next time she retuned herself.
He’d been gone from the Lake Park for almost one hundred seconds. Jau Xin was taking small groups for rides in the boat. Someone had finally fallen in the lake. Good. That will buy more time.
Pham pulled the hood off the controller box. There were interfaces to the superconductors. Things like that could fail, on rare occasions with no warning. Weaken the switch, tweak the management programs to recognize Reynolt when next she used the gear on herself…
Since he’d entered the clinic, the active localizers he’d brought with him had spread across the clinic. It was a little like light spreading farther and farther into absolute dark, revealing more and more of the room. He’d set the images at a low priority while he examined the SC switch with nearly microscopic vision.
A flicker of motion. He glimpsed a pants leg passing near one of the background views. Someone was hiding in the dead space behind the cabinets. Pham oriented on the localizers and dived for the open space above the cabinets.
A woman’s voice: “Grab a stop and freeze!”
It was Anne Reynolt. She emerged from between the cabinets, just beyond where he could reach. She was holding a pointing device as though it were som
e kind of weapon.
Reynolt steadied herself on the ceiling and waggled the pointer at him. “Hand over hand, walk yourself back to the wall.”
For an instant, Pham teetered on the edge of a frontal attack. The pointer could be a bluff, but even if it were guiding a cannon, what did it matter? The game was up. The only option left was swift and overwhelming violence, here and with the localizers all across Hammerfest. And maybe not…Pham retreated as instructed.
Reynolt came out from behind the cabinets. She hooked a foot under a restraint. The pointer in her hand did not waver. “So. Mr. Pham Trinli. It’s nice to finally know.” With her free hand, she brushed her hair back from her face. Her huds were clear, and he had a good view into her eyes. There was something strange about her. Her face was as pale and cold as always, but the usual impatience and indifference was overlaid with a kind of triumph, a conscious arrogance. And…there was a smile, faint yet unmistakable, on her lips.
“You set me up, Anne, didn’t you?” Back at Nau’s lodge, he took another, longer look at what he thought had been Anne Reynolt. It was a patch of wallpaper, lying loosely on a bed. She had blinded the eyes that could get really close, and fooled him with a crude video.
She nodded. “I didn’t know tas you, but yes. It’s been clear for a long time that someone was manipulating my systems. At first, I thought it was Ritser or Kal Omo, playing political games. You were an outside bet, the fellow who was too often in the middle of things. First you were an old fool, then an old slavemaster in hiding as a fool. Now I see that you are something more, Mr. Trinli. Did you really think you could outsmart the Podmaster’s systems forever?”
“I—” Pham’s vision swept out of the room, roamed across Lake Park. The party was continuing. Tomas Nau himself and Qiwi had joined Jau Xin on the little sailboat. Pham zoomed in on Nau’s face: he was not wearing huds. He was not a man overseeing an ambush. He doesn’t know! “I was very afraid I couldn’t outsmart his systems forever—you, in particular.”
She nodded. “I guessed whoever-it-was would target me. I’m the critical component.” She glanced briefly away from him, at the uncovered controller box. “You knew I was retuning in the next Msec, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” And you need retuning more than I knew. Hope surged in him. She was behaving like a character in an idiot adventure. She hadn’t told her boss what she was up to. She probably had no backups. And now she was just floating there, talking! Keep her talking. “I figured I could weaken the SC switches. When you used the device, it would jam high and—”
“—And I’d have a capillary blowout? Very crude, very fatal, Mr. Trinli. But then, you’re not clever enough to try real reprogramming, are you?”
“No.” How far out of calibration is she? Hit at emotion. “Besides, I wanted you dead. You and Nau and Brughel are the only real monsters here. For now, you’re the only one I can reach.”
Her smile widened. “You’re crazy.”
“No, you are. Once upon a time you were a Podmaster just like them. Your problem is you lost. Or don’t you remember? The Xevalle clique?”
Her arrogant smile vanished and for a moment her gaze was the usual frowning indifference. Then she was smiling again. “I remember very well. You’re right, I was a loser—but tas a century before Xevalle, and I was fighting all the Podmasters.” She advanced slowly across the room. Her pointer never wavered from Pham’s chest. “The Emergents had invaded Frenk. I was an ancient-lit major at Arnham University…I learned to be other things. For fifteen years we fought them. They had technology, they had Focus. At first, we had numbers. We lost and lost, but we made them pay for every victory. Toward the end we were better-armed, but by then there were so few of us. And still we fought.”
The look in her eyes was…joyous. He was hearing the history of Frenk from the other side. “You—you’re the Frenkisch Orc!”
Reynolt’s smile broadened and she came even nearer, her slim body straightening out of zero-gee crouch. “Yes indeed. The Podmasters wisely decided to rewrite the histories. The ‘Frenkisch Orc’ makes a better villain than ‘Anne of Arnham.’ Rescuing Frenks from a mutant subspecies makes a better story than massacre and Focus.”
Lord. But some automatic part of him still remembered why he was here. He slid his feet back along the wall, positioning for a kick-lunge.
Reynolt stopped her approach. She lowered her aim, to his knees. “Don’t try it, Mr. Trinli. This pointer is guiding a program in the MRI controller. If you had had a moment more, you would have seen the nickel pellets I put in the magnet target area. It’s an ad hoc weapon, but good enough to blow your legs off—and you would still face interrogation.”
Pham sent his vision back into the MRI gear. Yes, there were the pellets. Given a proper magnetic pulse, they would be high-velocity buckshot. But the program, if it was in the controller…Tiny eyes swept along the superconductor interface. He had enough localizers to talk through the optical link and wipe her pointer program. She still doesn’t know what I can do with them! The hope was like a bright flame.
He tapped his fingers on the palms of his hands, maneuvering the devices into place. Hopefully, it would look like nervous gesturing to Reynolt. “Interrogation? You’re still loyal to Nau?”
“Of course. How could it be otherwise?”
“But you’re working behind his back.”
“Only to serve him better. If this had turned out to be Ritser Brughel’s work, I wanted a complete case before going to my Podmas—”
Pham lunged outward from the wall. He heard Reynolt’s pointer click uselessly, and then he slammed into her. The two of them tumbled back into the MRI cabinets. Reynolt fought almost silently, slamming her knee into him, trying to bite at his throat. But he had her arms pinned, and as they sailed past the magnet box, he twisted and slammed her head against the cover plate.
Reynolt went limp. Pham caught himself on a stop, ready to smash her again.
Think. The party at North Paw was still going on, an idyll. Pham’s timer showed that 250 seconds had passed since he had left the harbor. I can still make this work! There were necessary changes. The blow to Reynolt’s head would show up on an autopsy…But—miracles!—her clothes showed no sign of the struggle. There would have to be some changes. He reached into the MRI target area and swept the nickel pellets into a safety bin…Something like his original plan could still work. Suppose she had been trying to recalibrate the controllers and had an accident?
Pham moved her body carefully into position. He held her tightly, watching for any sign of consciousness.
The monster. The Frenkisch Orc. Of course, Anne Reynolt was neither. She was a tall, slender woman—as much a human as Pham Nuwen or any of the far descendants of Earth.
Now the carven legends on the Hammerfest walls had a clear translation. For years and years, Anne Reynolt had fought against Focus, her people driven back step by step, to that last redoubt in the mountains. Anne of Arnham. Now all that remained was the myth of a twisted monster…and the real monsters like Ritser Brughel, the descendants of the surviving Frenks, the conquered and the Focused.
But Anne of Arnham had not died. Instead, her genius had been Focused. And now it was deadly danger to Pham and all he worked for. And so she must die…
…Three hundred seconds. Wake up. Pham tapped out instructions. Botched. He typed them again. Once he weakened the SC connectors, this little program would be enough. It was a simple thing, a coded beat of high-frequency pulses that would turn the bugs in Anne’s head into little factories, flooding her brain with vasoconstrictors, creating millions of tiny aneurisms. It would be quick. It would be lethal. And Trud had claimed so many times that none of their operations were physically painful.
Unconscious, Anne’s face had relaxed; she might have been asleep. There were no marks, no bruises. Even the slender silver chain around her throat, even that had survived their struggle, though it had been pulled free of her blouse. There was a ’membrance gem at the end of the
chain. Pham couldn’t help himself. He reached over her shoulder and squeezed the greenish stone. The pressure was enough to power a moment of imagery. The stone cleared, and Pham was looking down on a mountain hillside. His viewpoint seemed to be on the cupola of an armored flyer. Ranged around the hillside were a half-dozen other such vehicles, dragons come down from the sky to point their energy cannons at what was already ruins, and the entrance to a cave. In front of the guns stood a single figure, a red-haired young woman. Trud said that ’membrance gems were moments of great happiness or ultimate triumph. And maybe the Emergent taking the picture thought this was such a moment. The girl in the picture—and it was clearly Anne Reynolt—had lost. Whatever she guarded in the cave behind her would be taken from her. And yet, she stood straight, her eyes looking up into the viewpoint. In a moment she would be brushed aside, or blown away…but she had not surrendered.
Pham let the gem go, and for a long moment he stared without seeing. Then slowly, carefully, he tapped a long control sequence. This would be much trickier. He altered the drug menu, hesitated…seconds…before entering an intensity. Reynolt would lose some recent memory, hopefully thirty or forty Msec. And then you will begin closing in on me again.
He tapped “execute.” The SC cables behind the cabinet creaked and spread apart from each other, delivering enormous and precise currents to the MRI magnets. A second passed. His inner vision sputtered into blindness. Reynolt spasmed in his arms. He held her close, keeping her head away from the sides of the cabinet.
Her twitching subsided after a few seconds; her breath came relaxed and slow. Pham eased himself away from her. Move her out from the magnets. Okay. He touched her hair, brushing it away from her face. Nothing like that red hair had existed on Canberra…but Anne Reynolt reminded him of someone from a certain Canberra morning.