The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "Something new. Something explosive. It's a whole new industry, Julia. The company that markets it is gonna win big."

  How interesting, NN core one said. Not many days when we get offered two revolutionary partnerships.

  You think they're connected? she asked.

  There's one way to find out, Juliet. Start name dropping, see how our Clifford reacts.

  Right. "This partnership," Julia said laconically. "Let me guess: you provide the data constructs of a rudimentary technology, and Event Horizon develops it to a commercially viable level? Is that the way you see it working, Clifford?"

  He raised his hands, putting on a rueful grin. "God damn, on the ball or what? After all these years, Julia, I'm still not in your class, nobody is. OK, let me lay it straight on the line for you. Event Horizon is one of several possible partners I'm considering. And I'd like it to be you, Julia, I really would. This operation of yours, you leave the kombinates standing. If we can thrash out a deal, make the numbers work, then it's yours. I'll be a sleeping partner, maybe a gate to some military contracts, but essentially it'll be your field."

  "This sleeping partner arrangement, I hope that's not intended literally, Clifford."

  "People like us, Julia, I mean, working close on this deal, spending time together, maybe you'll see more to me than you do now."

  "But I still have to put in the best bid if I want this new technology you're offering?"

  "Yeah, you've got some stiff competition lining up for a slice of this pie. I'm not hiding that from you. But I'll show you what I'm offering on a confidential basis, and you can decide what sort of offer to make. I'm confident you'll come out tops. You'll understand what this means, you've got the kind of vision the kombinate boards lack. And this needs someone with vision behind it, Julia."

  Dear Lord, he makes you want to vomit, NN core two said. So dreary and predictable.

  This all sounds very familiar, Julia said. Do you think Clifford could be the one Mutizen stole the molecular structuring data from?

  If they did, then where did he get it from? NN core one asked. Globecast doesn't employ a single physicist.

  Oh yes they bloody well do, my girl, Philip Evans said. I told you there was something wrong about Globecast bidding to acquire the Mousanta labs.

  So you did, Grandpa. But they haven't acquired it yet. Which means Mousanta can't be the source. Did commercial intelligence come up with anything?

  Sod-all! Idle buggers. You hit this Clifford, Juliet, hit him hard. Make him know he's a cheap nobody.

  Behind Clifford Jepson a couple of umpires had walked out on to the cricket square. They began to set up the wickets.

  "What's the matter, Clifford?" she asked. "Hasn't Mousanta got the resources to hack the atomic structuring theory? Is that why you've come running to me and the kombinates to build the generator for you?"

  "Motherfuck!" Clifford Jepson gasped.

  It was all she could do not to laugh. His fall from oily confidence to bewildered fright was classic comedy. The lack of control surprised her, though, she hadn't been expecting that, not from a trained executive. Another demonstration that he didn't really have what it took. She could never understand why he carried on the arms trading. In his father's day it was different, the post-Warming world was unstable, astutely placed arms shipments could quite often shift the balance of power in small countries. But now life had calmed down again, the only people who wanted arms on the black market were the alienated, increasingly bitter and desperate radical political groups. It made Clifford Jepson little more than an extension of the terrorists he served.

  "How?" he demanded.

  "One has contacts."

  "Not for that. Atomic structuring is the biggest ultra-hush there's ever been."

  "Not so, apparently."

  Squeeze him, Juliet, go for the slam. You can dictate your own terms now. I never did like the little bugger, not a patch on his father.

  "Do you still want to offer me a partnership?" she asked.

  "I'll consider any bid you submit."

  "Good. Have your office contact Peter Cavendish. I'm sure we can come to some arrangement. I'll be generous, Clifford. The person who delivers the theory for a nuclear force generator to Event Horizon will be a very rich person indeed. I hope it's you, Clifford, I really do. For old times' sake."

  My girl, Philip Evans said smugly.

  Ask him about the source, NN core two said.

  "Clifford." He looked at her, not angry. Wary, though, she thought, a wounded animal, cornered but prepared to fight. "If you provide me with your source, where you obtained the data from, I'll offer you forty-five per cent royalties, and we'll close the deal this afternoon."

  "No way, Julia. You want the generator, you deal through me."

  "As you wish." She rose to her feet, brushing down her skirt.

  "Hey, wait."

  "Call Cavendish, you have the number. I'll review what the two of you come up with; if I think it's good enough, I'll thumbprint on the dotted line, if not, your opposition get their big day."

  "Who are they? Who else is offering this?"

  She gave him a sweet smile. "No way, Clifford," said with her old Arizona twang. Philip Evans's gusty laughter echoed through her brain, her cybernetic mind twins projected quiet satisfaction. She left an acutely flummoxed Clifford Jepson on the bench, and headed back to the marquee. Her bodyguards closed in to escort her.

  An end-of-term-prankster had fastened a crude bra made out of pillowcases to the top of the flag-pole above the school's art and design block. It was flapping slowly in the breeze. The bishop and the governors had been facing it all through the speeches. Julia started to laugh.

  Chapter Twelve

  The interest was trickling back into Greg's brain, like a hit that charged his neurone cells with a dose of raw energy, leaving the mind clean, thoughts flowing with cold perfection. He hovered on the razor's edge between satisfaction and dismay. Tracing the girl, and through her Royan, was supposed to be a duty, not one of love's labours. But it felt good, the way he'd made it all come together in Monaco. Most of what they had learnt was negative information; it was a challenge making sense out of that. Dropped straight into a premier deal after fifteen years out in the cold, and still managed to hit the floor running. Not bad at all.

  He knew Eleanor had feared this the most, that he'd enjoy himself, remember the good old days, how it used to be, the excitement and the danger. When they met she'd been more than a little impressed by the romance of being a private detective. Even now, time tended to obscure the years before that, when he was out on Peterborough's streets; the brain's natural defence mechanism fading out the pain and anguish associated with the Trinities. But if he really thought about it, those moments were there, hiding in the shadows beyond the firelight.

  Eleanor didn't have anything to worry about, he decided, not really. Chasing after Charlotte Fielder wasn't about to trigger the male menopause. In any case, there was something slightly unreal about this investigation; carried from location to location in millionaire style, every fact uncovered pounced on by Victor's division and Julia's NN cores, producing a flood of profile data. All very swift and painless.

  In fact the interest would be purely abstract if it hadn't been for his eagerness to talk to Baronski, it was almost impatience. The Pegasus had to fly subsonically over land. He resented that, knowing how fast the plane could go.

  There was something else fuelling his mood, though, something darker, his intuition imparting a sense of time closing in. He hadn't confessed that to Suzi yet.

  The flatscreen on the forward bulkhead showed the Austrian alps slipping by underneath the plane. They reminded Greg of Greenland's coastline after the ice had melted, a range of lifeless rock, scarred and stained. He could see massive landslides, where the pine forests had died leaving the soil exposed to torrential rains. Thick white-water rivers snaked down every valley, tearing out more soil and flooding the pastures. Reforestation was pro
gressing slowly, the ecological regeneration teams had to build protective shields around their plantations. From the air they showed as green rectangles sheltering in the lee of the mountains, fragile and precarious. But there were new hydropower dam projects everywhere, ribbons of deep blue water accumulating in the deeper gorges. Most of the electricity was sold to the kombinate cyber-factory precincts in Germany. Austria had little heavy industry of its own, although low taxes and loose genetic-engineering laws had attracted investment from the biotechnology companies after the Warming. Event Horizon had several research centres in the country, he knew, as well as its main clinic at Liezen. He'd spent some time there himself, recuperating after tracking down the people who squirted the virus into Philip Evans' NN core. It was where he had proposed to Eleanor.

  He smiled at the memory, then turned back to his cybofax which was showing Baronski's data profile. Dmitri Baronski was sixty-seven, a Russian émigré, leaving his motherland when he was twenty-three as an exchange student and never going back. He'd spent ten years as a PR officer for the Tuolburz kombinate, only to be dismissed for creaming off too high a percentage on the girls and boys he was supposed to supply for visiting executives. After that there were some arrests for pimping, one for fencing stolen artwork. Then fifteen years ago he'd hit on the idea of providing escorts for the wealthy, going for quality rather than quantity. He gave his girls an education in deportment equal to a Swiss finishing school, and discreetly presented them to European society.

  He ran about a dozen at any one time, and the snippets of information they provided from pillow talk earned him about three-quarters of a million Eurofrancs a year from the stock exchange. It could have been more, but he was surprisingly honest with the girls, giving them a percentage.

  "Christ, will you look at this!" Suzi exclaimed.

  Greg left Baronski's exploits to look over her shoulder. She was busy reviewing Charlotte Fielder's profile on her cybofax.

  "What's up?" he asked.

  "This girl has run up a medical bill that a hypochondriac millionaire would envy."

  "She's ill?"

  "Neurotic, more like. There ain't much of the original Charlotte Fielder left, the biochemistry she's carrying around! Her piss'd rake in a fortune on the street." She ran her index finger down the wafer's screen. "Get this, vaginal enlargement! What's she been bonking, King Kong? Follicle tint hormones. Submaxillary gland cachou emission adaptation. What the flick is that?"

  "It's a biochemical treatment to alter her saliva composition," Rachel said. "Makes her breath smell sweet the whole time, even the morning after. Especially the morning after."

  "Jesus wept. Bigger tits, yes, I can understand that; but this lot. . ."

  Greg enjoyed her growing choler; Suzi didn't show her real feelings often enough, keeping them bottled up in the mistaken belief that remaining unperturbed was more professional. "What? You mean it's not natural?"

  Rachel laughed.

  Suzi started to snap at him, then grinned weakly. "All right. But I don't know why we're bothering looking for off-planet aliens. This girl isn't anywhere near human any more."

  "It's just a tool of the trade, dear. You and Julia have bioware nodes, I have a gland, Fielder has beauty."

  Suzi turned the display off, and tucked the wafer into her shellsuit's top pocket. "Yeah, maybe. But it's acid weird, wouldn't catch me doing it."

  "I'd hope not," he muttered.

  The Pegasus was over a large town, shedding speed.

  "Is that Salzburg?" Greg called forward to Pearse Solomons.

  "Yes, sir. And we've got landing clearance for the Prezda."

  "Fine." They were losing height rapidly, the Pegasus pitching its nose up at a respectable angle. Outside the town, the ecological-regeneration teams had triumphed. Rivers had been given gene-tailored coral banks to halt erosion. They were lined by surge reservoirs, like small craters, to cope with the sudden floods inflicted by Europe's monsoon season. Valley floors were a lush green again, speckled with wild flowers; llamas and goats grazing peacefully. Dark green tracts of evergreen pines were rising up the side of the slopes once more. They were a gene-tailored variety, nitrogen-fixing to cope with the meagre soil, their roots splaying out like a cobweb, clinging to exposed rock with an ivy-derived grip.

  He wondered how much it would cost to repair the whole of the country in this way, a Japanese water garden treatment.

  The Prezda arcology had been built into a natural amphitheatre at the head of a valley, facing south. It was as if the rock had been ground down into a smooth curved surface and polished to a mirror finish. A cliff face of a hundred thousand silvered windows looked out down the valley, he could see the mountains and lush parkland reflected in them. The image wavered as the Pegasus drew closer, as though the windows were rippling.

  Between the two silver arms of the residential section was a low dome housing the inevitable shopping mall and the business community, along with the leisure facilities. The cyber-factories were buried in the rock behind the apartments. Power for the city-in-a-building came from a combination of nearby hydroelectric dams and hot rock exchange generators, bore holes drilled ten kilometres down to tap the heat of the Earth's mantle.

  "Ant city," Suzi said as the Pegasus headed in for a pad above the western arm.

  "You live in a condominium," Greg retorted.

  "Yeah, but I get out to work and play."

  The Pegasus landed on the roof, and taxied on to a lift platform at the edge. They began to slide down the side of the silver wall to the hangar level.

  "Does Event Horizon have a contact in Prezda security?" Greg asked the two security hardliners.

  "Not on the payroll," Pearse Solomons said. "But there is a commercial interests liaison officer, he deals with cases like data fencing, or bolt-hole suspects. He'll allow us to tap a suspect's communications, mount a surveillance operation, that kind of thing. You want me to call him?"

  "No. We'll keep him in reserve."

  There was a swift rocking motion as the Pegasus rolled forwards into the hangar. Greg stood up and made his way to the front of the plane.

  "You think Baronski is going to co-operate?" Suzi asked as she followed him.

  "According to his profile he goes out of his way not to annoy the big boys. Besides, he's old, he's not going to blow his chances of a golden retirement over something like a client's identity, not when we start bludgeoning him with Julia's name."

  The belly hatch opened, letting in a whine of machinery and the shouts of service crews.

  "Malcolm, you come with us this time," Greg said.

  The hangar took up the entire upper floor of the Prezda, nearly two hundred metres wide, curving away into the distance. Bright sunlight poured through its glass wall, turning the planes parked along the front into black silhouettes. It was noisy and hot. Gusts of dry wind flapped Greg's jacket as they made their way across the apron. Executive hypersonics and fifty-seater passenger jets were taxiing along the central strip, rolling on and off the lift platforms. Drone cargo trucks trundled around them, yellow lights flashing.

  The back half of the hangar had been carved into living rock, the rear wall lined with offices, maintenance shops, and lounges. Biolum strips were used to beef up the fading sunlight.

  Greg walked through the nearest lounge and called a lift. He held his cybofax up to the interface key in the wall beside it, requesting a data package of the Prezda's layout. "Baronski lives seven floors down from here, and off towards the central well," he said, reading from the wafer's screen.

  Suzi pressed for the floor and the lift door shut.

  Greg tried to get an impression from his intuition. But all he got was that same pressure of time slipping away.

  The lift doors opened on to a broad well-lit corridor with two moving walkways going in opposite directions. It was deserted, the only noise a low-pitched rumble from the walkways. They stepped on to the walkway going towards the centre of the arcology. There were deep side cor
ridors every fifty metres on the right-hand side, ending in a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out across the valley.

  The eighth walkway section brought them to the central well. A shaft at the apex of the amphitheatre, seventy metres wide, zigzagged with escalators. It was twenty storeys deep, Greg guessed the roof must be the hangar above. Each floor had a circular balcony, two-thirds of which was lined with small shops and bistros, the front third a gently curved window. The rails of glass-cage lifts formed an inner ribcage.

  It was a busy time, the tables in front of the windows were nearly all full, smartly uniformed waitresses bustling about. People were thronging the concourse and the balconies, filling the escalators. Teenagers hung out. Strands of music drifted up from various levels, played by licensed buskers. Greg could see a team of clowns working through the window tables two storeys below, children laughing in delight.

  "Baronski is back this way," Greg said, and pointed back down the corridor. "Couple of doors." That was when the ordered his gland secretion, seeing a flash of black muscle-tissue jerking. His espersense unfurled, freeing his thoughts from the prison of the skull. Minds impinged on the boundary as it swept outwards, deluging him with snaps of emotion, of tedium and excitement, the tenderness of lovers, and frustration of office workers. One fragment of thought had a hard, single-minded purpose that was unique in the whirl of everyday life about him. He stopped and searched round, seeking it again, knowing from irksome memory what it spelt.

  "Wait," he said.

  Suzi almost bumped into him as he halted. "Now what?"

  There was a flare of interest in the mind. And again, another one on the edge of perception, a couple of floors higher up.

  "There's a surveillance operation here," Greg said. "I've got two people in range. Probably more outside."

  Suzi shifted her bag. "Targeting Baronski, do you think?"

  "Dunno. They're interested in us, though, the direction we're heading."

  "What now?"

  "Malcolm, there's one on the other side of the well, opposite this corridor, not moving. Male. See if you can spot him."