by John Barnes
“A Beowulf,” I said. “Jesus. You’re really not kidding, are you?”
He shook his head solemnly. “That’s what I mean, bud. A massively parallel processor like they use for animation. Or flight test simulations. Or designing atom bombs. Or cryptography. Or molecular design of drugs. The poor man’s do-it-yourself supercomputer. Yeah, one of those. Well, I closed that door real careful and tiptoed back to her office, and then took a deep breath and booted up GAUDEAMUS CONTROL. A data entry screen came up, and it was a list of twenty-two blanks starting with x, y, z, t, and e, and continuing into Greek and I think some Hebrew. Below it was the note ‘Place test object on plate before beginning.’
“Now from here on out, we’re at the weird part, and it just gets weirder.”
So I looked around and there was a metal box, topped with a flat steel plate, lying on the desk, and a USB cable led to it from a hole in the wall. Another peek around the corner, and, sure enough, it was plugged to a USB jack on the back of the Beowulf-refrigerator. Another USB lead went discreetly down by the floor, hidden under duct tape; it connected to a ten-port USB dock way back under the desk. So the desktop computer was the terminal for the super, and the Gaudeamus program was the driver. And the supercomputer controlled Gaudeamus, which apparently was that little box with the circular metal plate, like a crude model of a hot plate, via the USB cable.
Well, maybe Mama Bismarck did raise one idiot. I figured, I’ve come this far, I gotta try it.
I took a quarter out of my pocket and set it on the plate. Then I entered twenty-two numbers, just alternating ones and zeroes, onto the screen. In some fields it wouldn’t take a zero, in others it wouldn’t take a one, but if it wouldn’t take one, it would always take zero, and vice versa. When I was all done a little red box with the blinking white word “GO?” appeared at the bottom of the screen, ringed with a blue line—which made me suspect that if I hit RETURN, it would go. Whatever that might mean.
My finger was poised over the the return key when something went off about two feet behind my head, with a bang as loud as a thirty ought six and a flash like a flashbulb going off. I jumped, and my finger came down on RETURN.
With a soft little pop, like the way a bubble in a sheet of bubble wrap pops when you squeeze it, the quarter vanished from the plate.
I stared at that for a second, and then my disoriented mind realized that something much bigger had happened behind me just before the quarter vanished.
I turned around and the quarter was lying on the carpet, a wisp of smoke curling up from around it. It was burning the carpet. I darted into the bathroom, got a handful of water, and splashed it on the quarter; it sizzled and boiled, and the stale stench of boiled student carpet came up.
After waiting a few seconds, I put my hand over it, not touching it, and it felt hot. I timed off a full minute, and gingerly touched it; it was warm but not enough to burn my skin anymore. I picked it up and pocketed it. There was a quarter-sized seared circle on the carpet.
I decided that whatever GAUDEAMUS CONTROL was, I didn’t need to fuck with it any more that night. The Gaudeamus experimental results files she had, and her lists of stuff to get for her Gaudeamus laboratory, were all referenced to case numbers in the industrial espionage notes, which were cross-referenced, several different ways, to the prostitution and drug records. Oh, and in a small U-Haul moving box beside the terminal, the size they used to make for albums, she had two small butane torch cylinders, a package of those blank cartridges they use for those gunpowder-driven hammers that you use for setting a bolt, and a paper bag containing about a quarter pound of loose black powder. So maybe the real secret to it all is that she’s Brown Pierre’s girlfriend and she needs all the money to go bombing with him.
Three interwoven businesses, her own weird whatever-it-was gadget attached to that Beowulf, a bomb-making kit right next to where she worked, and every goddam thing in the goddam universe seemed to be named goddam Gaudeamus.
“Spelled like Gaudeamus igitur?” I asked.
“Yep. Or like that web cartoon.”
“I was just looking at it when you rang my door.”
“Well, there, that’s another ‘gaudeamus’ into the mix, hunh?” He slurped down more of that fierce coffee; I think by then I was equally puzzled as to how he could still be staying awake, now that the morning light was showing me the grayness of his skin and the bags under his eyes, and how he would ever be able to go to sleep, given that he’d had so much of my writing coffee. He sipped again and sighed. “If you’re wondering how I’m staying awake, bud, it’s half caffeine, half fear. But what I’m afraid of can’t hurt you. I’m getting to why not. Meanwhile, I just got to stay awake. So, anyway, hell, yeah, all the ‘gaudeamuses’ I was running into were spelled like that ‘gaudeamus.’ That is the ‘gaudeamus’ we are gaudeamusing here. Latin for ‘let us rejoice,’ ‘let’s all get happy,’ or more loosely, ‘whoopty ding dong.’”
“I kind of like ‘whoopty ding dong,’” I admitted, “but the most conventional translation would be ‘let us rejoice.’”
He nodded seriously, as if accepting my expertise, and I felt stupid for interfering with his telling the story when he was already very tired and confused.
“Anyway, anyway,” he went on, “probably the way ‘gaudeamus’ keeps popping up as the name for things is not really a mystery or even a connection. It’s just that everything really trendy and really cutting edge has been getting named after the trendiest thing on the Internet, which happens to be that web cartoon.”
“If you can call anything that’s that complex a cartoon.”
“You said it, John.” Trav rolled over and took a sip of his coffee, making a face. “Need to get a warm-up.” He headed out to my already overworked coffeemaker, his thin bony shoulders hunched in his denim jacket so that from the back he looked like a tall eighth-grader with a bad case of eighth-grade attitude. But when he came back with his steaming cup of coffee, and shoved Corner (who had leapt onto the couch and curled up the instant that Travis got up) over to the side, above the rising steam from the Pure Black Evil, his eyes looked a million and ten years old.
“Anyways,” he said, “I had one stray thought that I couldn’t dismiss till later—I was wondering if Lena Logan might be the real author of Gaudeamus. That would explain why she had a Beowulf—everyone knows you need a super of some kind to put Gaudeamus together—and her other occupations might help explain why whoever wrote Gaudeamus could be in on so much stuff that nobody else was in no position to know, or not know, or whatever. Damn, I’m tired. But then it got a whole lot weirder.” He sat back and sighed. “Nice to be here. And I know from my visit to Pittsburgh that this old futon couch is about the most comfortable thing ever developed for a human being. A night sleeping on it took ten years off my pathetic old-man back. But I gotta hang in and stay awake. And you’re still listening, so on with the story.”
I had never seen Travis Bismarck look this tired.
So, anyway, John, since I didn’t understand a thing I was looking at, I went back and looked at all the shit I did understand. Lena Logan had forty-three regulars, most of them scientists and engineers at high-tech companies, but six of them just ordinary working joes—and she was giving all kinds of price breaks to the ordinary working joes so they could come see her more. She had these elaborate files on all the scientists and engineers, but on the pool cleaners and contractors and so on, just some notes about what they were into in bed. New clients went into the group of thirty-seven scientists or the group of six studs, or—almost all of them—into the “tell him I’m busy” list. Like she needed big stupid horny guys that knew what they were doing, and she needed all these tech geniuses, and that was all she needed—if you weren’t one or the other, she didn’t want your business.
Well, I recorded everything I could record, shut down everything I had started up, and got out of there well before she got back, leaving everything as I’d found it, except for a damp spot on her car
pet with a darkened, scorched circle in its center. It was still forty minutes till she’d be back from her night seminar, but there was nothing that would make me push my luck to stay longer and learn more. The plain fact of the whole business was that I knew much less than when I had started.
Maybe they were all bringing secret documents, or covertly emailing them to her—but almost forty men, all with ultra-high security clearances? Sure, the system screws up now and then and lets some bozoid have a clearance, but that many, mostly cleared to SCI, at the same few companies and labs? You can believe a professional spy recruiting one or two or maybe even five sources—but thirty-seven? Without getting caught? Somehow she had to be getting it from them without their knowing about it.
At least that much was completely consistent with Calvin Durango’s reaction to the stolen material.
Well, I’d tried going in the back. Time to try the front.
I unpacked one of my fake IDs, as Evan Gardenaire, tech sales rep and amiable moron for a high-tech firm whose products he didn’t understand. I called one of her “Wendy” numbers using Evan’s cell phone, said I’d be in town on Wednesday and I’d seen her ad in the Santa Fe arts paper, would she like to get together for a good time?
It seemed like the one way to find out what she actually did. And besides, after all that time looking at Lena, I wasn’t exactly thinking it was gonna be unpleasant. My biggest worry was that Hale might get pissy about putting it on the expense account. But when the worst that can happen is not getting any information, getting stuck for a lousy $250, and getting laid by a nice hardworking ho with big old high hard ones and a round little butt, well, what the hell.
She got home half an hour after I left the message, returned my call, and set me up to be her first date of tomorrow night—not that she told me that I was her first date of the evening, but by then I had a calendar taped up over my desk in that shabby little motel room, with probably a more accurate layout of her schedule than she had.
And knowing I had something to look forward to, hopefully a break in the case, but at least something I’d enjoy, I went to bed early and slept better than I had in a while, even slept in the next morning. Which was a good thing, because I haven’t slept since; like I said, I’m running on about thirty-five hours of caffeine and fear.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wednesday night, just as the sun was setting, everything all golden and in sharp relief the way it gets in the fall in the desert, I was standing up on that board-floor gallery, knocking on Lena Logan’s door. For purposes of the evening I was Evan Gardenaire, from my repertoire of identities. Oh, yeah, John, I usually carry five or six ready-to-go identities with me, especially when I’m out on a long-term case that’s at all complicated. For each identity, I have a prepacked appropriate wallet, plus cell phone, keys, hotel guide, whatever else goes with it.
Evan Gardenaire traveled in transfer-of-tech deals for a little bitty obscure instrument company out of Coeur d’Alene. I’d developed him a few years before for an industrial espionage case; Gardenaire looked like a guy who might have information worth stealing but almost for sure didn’t understand a lick of it. I always played him as eager to please and just a little dumb, which, if someone was looking to buy trade or tech secrets, made him look like pure solid gold left lying out on the counter.
She did the whole old-fashioned thing of calling me “Mr. Gardenaire” a couple times till I said “Evan” was okay. Then she made a little twisty smile of a face—something to let me know she didn’t like what she was doing but what could she do, these were the rules, and all that—and pulled up her t-shirt and bra, whipped out a titty, and asked me to touch her. Lots of hos think that if they do that before money or specific acts get discussed, the guy can’t be a pig. It’s sort of true, but only because the average vice cop doesn’t want to sit in the witness box with a defense attorney asking him to describe every detail of getting a feel. So when they decide to really entrap a girl, they just do it and then lie about it.
You’d think that anyone in an illegal business would realize that cops do lie, and often.
So I gave her nice big firm boob a good grope, and she slid her hand down me and tugged on Mr. Joyboy, just one long easy stroke, and said, “I really like touching your cock, it feels so good in my hand,” I guess so it would be recorded if I was wearing a wire.
Once we had established that I wasn’t a pig, we got down to real business. We sat down on the couch and talked for a few minutes, and she found out what Evan Gardenaire did, and as soon as she knew, she started a cutesy lead-in of explaining that she was a grad student in science and she wanted to work for a high-tech company someday, and soon we were off the clock and just the bestest buddies, besides being about to have unbelievably hot sex, because she wanted Evan Gardenaire to know that—drop gaze, flutter eyelashes, smile a shy little “please don’t hurt me like other men do” smile—she really liked him!
Which of course meant that poor dumb Evan blurted out more about his business. I gotta say, John, I never did see a working girl quite that excited before, especially not from just talking to her. And most especially not from just talking to her about using colored laser light to carve nanoscale steps and ramps onto a silicon surface and then using an atom laser process to dope individual nanoplanes with single-atom-wide lines of semiconductors. I think if I’d mentioned that the resulting chips were biocompatible, she might have come right then.
Anyway, now that she was good and excited, she decided to get me good and excited about a more traditional subject, so she started talking about what we were going to do. And that naturally segued into the main pitch. “Let me tell you about something. I think you might like it.” She reached into a drawer in the end table, and came up with three aquamarine capsules. Each was marked with a big whirly G quite a bit like the old General Mills logo on cereal boxes. “These are called Gaudeamus, but most people call them god pills or just goddies.”
“Hey, no, no, Wendy, I’m not into that kind of stuff at all.” I put on my best real moron trying to act supersexy boyish grin, which looks a little like a steer that needs a finishing whack from the sledgehammer, and added, “I just want your sweet pussy, babe. And besides I gotta take a urine test on a real regular schedule and it’s only two days till my next one.”
She smiled; it was all cute and flirty like a seventeen-year-old talking to a college guy and impressed with herself. “Gaudeamus is much too new for there to be a urine test for it. It’s not an upper or a downer, and you can eat a fistful of it and it won’t change the way you drive, or get you into fights, or put imaginary bugs in your shorts. What it will do is enhance sex and give you awesome sex dreams.”
“Well, uh, I don’t think anything in the world could make me like it any better than I already do.” I needed to keep her talking about it, and get everything she would say about it.
“I have never once had any side effects, and I’ve taken it hundreds of times. And I went into this, um, line of work, because I like sex too—what a surprise, eh, baby?—and you know, it’s even better with goddies. But no matter how many times you take the god pill, sex without it doesn’t get one bit worse or less interesting. Very not like cocaine, for example.”
“Well, I don’t know—”
She let her hand slide up my thigh and gave my dick a nice squeeze. “That’s right, sweetie, you don’t know, but I can tell you, and you can try it. Like the old expression goes, the first time is free. Then you’ll know. And then you can decide whether you want it again. Now … let’s try one.”
I planned to acquire about ten, so I could take a few to a lady I know that does some lab work for me out the back of a biochem lab in Bozeman. And I figured I’d strung this out long enough to make it believable, and I’d heard about all she was likely to volunteer. It was time we got down to what I came for.
Oh, stop giggling, John, you fat old pervert.
So I said all right, I’d give it a try, and she said now you’re sure you
want to—like setting the hook you know—and she even said I didn’t have to if I was afraid (just like in all those after-school don’t take drugs movies). So naturally I got all huffy and demanded to take a god pill. And by then it all looked right, good and natural, nothing to make it suspicious.
I paid her, and we each took a goddy, and she said it would take maybe ten minutes to hit, let’s get undressed and make out while we waited for that. That was weird, most of the time they won’t kiss, and the few that do charge extra for it.
Okay, now this is going to sound weird, it’s relevant, you’ll see why a little later in the story: damn that girl could kiss. And for that matter she could sure everything-else too.
Then the goddies hit. God and jesus and that whole crowd, John, you wouldn’t believe how those fuckers hit when they fucking hit.
“Good?” I asked, feeling like an old creep, but I wanted him to keep talking about it.
“Like my whole skin was the underside of my dick. It was like I was going to come through my pores, man. And that was just the start, like the first little tingly-tingle. She did totally exactly completely the right thing every goddam second, and I could feel that she was every bit as sensitized as I was and I was doing the right thing for her, even before I would feel what the right thing would be.”
“They’re good at fooling you that way, aren’t they?” I said, glad that Kara wasn’t awake and out here to hear me say that.
“How do you mean?”
“You sound like you were actually feeling her enjoy it,” I said. “Like you could know. You can’t know that even when it’s not a whore. And since she was a whore, and working, besides, you can’t—”
“Well, now, see, that’s going to be kind of the point of the story, John.” He got up from the couch and wandered over to the big front window, opening the curtains to the west, to let the bright mountain morning daylight bounce in off the row of big white houses across the street. “What I mean is, it felt like—oh, I don’t know—like having porn-style sex while you’re in a Vulcan mind-meld. Like having a whole human heart, body, and soul, all perfectly responsive, that you could use like a soft rag to beat off with, a whole human being just as responsive as your own hand. Like what you hoped sex was going to be just before you lost your virginity—if you lost it to someone you were crazy-mad in love with—only getting the whole experience from both sides at once. And one more weird detail, John, before we get to the weird part. She called me ‘Norman’ the whole time she was doing it.”