I've been weaving destinies from behind a desk for too long, Georg. Scott's mistake is typical of what happens when you stay out of the field and lose touch with reality."
"Are you going to travel in person, then? What about your estates and committees—"
"They'll look after themselves. They'd better—they'll know I'll be back."
Another smile, this time almost coy; if he hadn't known better, he'd have sworn she was flirting with him. "But seriously. I can combine the trip with a tour of the new candidates, consolidate my control over Scott's puppets in the field, and get back in touch with what it's really about. The great program, Georg. Fancy that!" She tapped her tablet. "Get me a full briefing.
Then I'll arrange a session with Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein, and obtain permission before issuing the formal denunciation by way of the Committee of Inquiry. After which we'll discuss how you're going to mind the shop for me while I'm gone."
He caught her eye. "Me? The whole thing?"
She didn't blink. "Did you have any other plans for tonight? No? Good, then I assume I can safely invite you to dine with me. We have a lot of things to discuss, Georg. Including how to ensure that you don't disappoint me the way U. Scott has … "
The action went down hard and fast, once Hoechst had drawn certain facts to the elevated attention of Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein. Blumlein had stared at her with those icy blue eyes, set just too close together: "Do it," he'd said, and that was all. Leaving her enough rope to hang herself with if it turned out she was wrong and U. Vannevar Scott's Subdepartment of External Environmental Control was, in fact, clean.
Walking in through the smashed glass doors of the office building in Samara, Hoechst nodded and smiled at the troops holding the front desk.
Show the flag, as her creche-leader Fergus had exhorted her. One or two walking wounded waited stoically for the medevac truck to show up. A pile of pithed and drained bodies lay stacked like cordwood on the polished granite tiles at one side of the foyer, leaking blood from their ears and eyes, their minds already taken by the Propagators. Hoechst ignored them, concentrated on shaking hands and exchanging congratulations with her staff. First things first. Blood on the soles of her boots. She'd get to Scott in due course: Damn him for forcing me to this!
Of course, Scott's headquarters wasn't the only target of the action. Nodes had gone down all over the planetary net, branch offices off-lined and isolated during the mop-up. Out in the country, Peace Enforcement troops had punched in the doors of his harem, taken the puppets by the brain stem and turned them in for processing—those that weren't put down immediately as a poor cost/benefit risk for reclamation. It was all part and parcel of the messy business of taking down a ranking ubermensch who had been accused of malfeasance, and Hoechst hated him for it, hated him for forcing her to publicly expose a ReMastered who was less than adequate at his assigned role. But she had no real alternative. A failure to act right then might only encourage him, or worse, expose her own people to accusations of inadequacy; and in the long run it risked undermining the destiny of the people.
Troops in cream-and-beige office camouflage wedged fire and blast doors open for her as she walked through the administrative castle toward the executive service core. Her bodyguards kept pace with her, anonymous behind their masks. Staff officers followed in their wake, apprehensive and eager to serve her. There were few signs of damage, and little violence, for U. Scott's castle had been taken by stealth in the first instance. A scheduled movement of internal security troops had been replaced by Hoechst's own storm groups, welcomed with open arms by slack defenders who never suspected that their death warrant had been ordered by the planetary overdepartmentsecretary with a curt two-word phrase.
At the core of the building stood a secure zone, doors locked open by a treacherous override. Hoechst climbed the staircase, her mood bleak. At the top, a mezzanine floor looked out across Scott's control hub. He was one of those who seemed to thrive on oversight, she noted, as if he couldn't trust anything that happened outside the reach of his own senses.
The doorway onto the mezzanine was splattered with drying clots of blood, brown and sharp-smelling beneath the emergency lights. Her guards waited at either corner. In the middle of the floor a curious triumvirate waited for her. In the big chair, U. Vannevar Scott himself, pithed and locked down, his limbs limp and his face an accusatory mask. Behind it, to either side, stood S. Frazier Bayreuth and another person, a woman in the robe and veil of the Propagators' Order.
"Vannevar, my dear. A shame we had to run into each other again under such distressing circumstances." Hoechst smiled at the man in the chair.
His eyes tracked her slowly, barely able to move. "And yourself, Bayreuth.
And to whom else do I have the pleasure?"
The strange woman inclined her head: "U. Doranna Mengele, your excellency. Here by order of the overdepartmentsecretary to pay witness to the proceedings and ensure that all is conducted in accordance with the best practices and customs of the enlightenment."
The body in the chair seemed to be agitated. Hoechst leaned close: "You should relax, Van. Struggling won't help. Those nerves won't grow back, you know." It was necessary for her image; inside, something was screaming, You stupid unplanned bastard! What in the dead god's name did you think you were doing? "We were given a warrant and we have executed it."
She glanced at Bayreuth. "Do you have an activation key?"
He turned and beckoned a guard over. "Switch this one back on for the supervisor," he said tersely. The Propagator cocked her head to one side and watched, silently. Hoechst tried not to pay any attention to her. There was no avoiding it. With a Propagator to witness everything, spooling the uploaded sensory take straight into the distributed network of her order, any attempt at dissembling—or mercy—would be exposed instantly.
The guard touched his wand to the back of U. Scott's neck, and some expression returned to the man's face. A finger twitched. He slurred something, fighting for control: "Portia. How could you?"
"Certain facts were drawn to my attention," she said drily, half-noticing the way Bayreuth had turned pale behind the chair. Facts I could not ignore once they were on the record, she added to herself, expanding the eulogy.
"Sloppy procedures. Failure to abide by best practice and custom. Potential treason."
He closed his eyes. "I would never commit treason."
"Not through commission," she said, then damned herself for her weakness in conceding even that much in front of the Propagator's eyecams.
"Nevertheless. A risk of exposure was noted—and more importantly, swept under the rug." She leaned over him, rested a fine-boned hand on one immobile shoulder. "We couldn't ignore that," she said quietly.
"I was in the process of cleaning up." He sounded infinitely tired already; the upload bush would have digested his cerebellum, already be eating away at his thalamus, preserving him for posterity and the glory of the unborn god. Without the activator he'd soon be dead, not simply immobilized. Although he'd die soon enough, when the Propagator took his mind. "Didn't you know, Portia? I thought, you … you … "
"Booster." She snapped her fingers, fuming angrily. Don't ghost out on me now! His shoulder felt like a joint of uncooked meat, solid and immobile.
There was a nasty stench in the air—if he'd lost bowel control already, that meant he was farther along than she'd wanted. "Witness for the Propagation, I request access to this one's lineage. While the instance vector has proven unreliable, I believe with suitable guidance the phenotype may prove stable and effective."
Bayreuth was blinking at her in surprise. The Propagator nodded. "Your request has been received," she said distantly. "A reproductive license is under consideration. Or were you thinking of a clone?"
"No, recombination only." Hoechst leaned closer, staring into U. Vannevar Scott's eyes, remembering earlier days, more innocent, both of them interns on the staff of an ubermensch—stolen nights, sleepless days, the guilt-free pleasure before responsibility became a curse. Politics. What, thirty years? Thirty-seven years? She could barely remember his body; some lovers were like that. Well, others you remembered for life. Scott …
Scott was history, in more than one way. "It will be something to recall him by."
"Your request will be considered by the Race Genome Improvement Committee," said the Propagator, placidly straightening her wimple. "Is there anything else?"
"Termination witness." She kept her hand on his shoulder while the guard administered the coup, switching the tree into uncontrolled dendritic mapping. His sightless eyes closed; presently a pale fluid began to leak from the back of his skull. The touch of dead meat; once she'd hated that … now it just left her feeling glad it wasn't her turn. She smoothed his hair down, straightened up, and caught Georg Bayreuth's eye. "Have this taken away for recycling." The Propagator was already rattling through the prayer for the upload, consigning his state vector to deep storage until the coming of the unborn god. "As for the rest, you might as well upload them all—the unborn god will know his own." She sighed. "Now. Have we found where he kept his master list of puppets?"
Well, Portia. That brings me to the next question. How is your pet project going?"
Hoechst leaned back in the overstuffed velvet-lined recliner, and stared at the gold leaf intaglio on the ceiling. She took her time answering: it was all a little overpowering. Truth be told, she was unused to having the confidence of the Overdepartmentsecretariat, and U. Blumlein's avuncular tone put her on a defensive edge. It reminded her of one of her teachers, from the hazy years back in the creche, a fellow whose temperament alternated between confiding warmth and screaming tantrums—contrived, she later discovered while reading the creche's policy mandate, to teach the youngsters the benefits of close-lipped circumspection. She'd been a good pupil, perhaps too good, and it was unnerving to find that the kindly professor's object lesson in pain had such direct applicability to the upper reaches of the clade. It just went to show that that which does not kill us makes us stronger was more than just an empty platitude.
"I asked a question," her superior reminded her.
"I believe I have the basic issues under control," she said confidently, raising her glass and taking a cautious sip of almond liqueur to cover her moment of hesitation.
"The basic issues," Blumlein echoed, and smiled. He held out his glass and a moppet hastened to refill it. Hoechst shuffled slightly in her chair and ran a finger under the shoulder of her gown. She smiled back at him, although she was anything but relaxed.
An invitation into her superior's parlor for an evening's entertainment was normally public recognition, a sign of favored status within the clade. But a private invitation, to dinner for two, was something else again. The only people who'd see her were their bodyguards, private secretaries, and the service moppets, all of whom—apart from the secretaries—were disposables who counted as nothing in the sparse social networks of the ReMastered. What could he have in mind? Special orders? It certainly wasn't a seduction attempt—his tastes lay notoriously in other directions—and she couldn't see herself being important enough to cultivate for other reasons. One thing every ReMastered acquired early was a sensitive nose for relative status, and this discreet assignation simply didn't make sense from any angle she could think of. Unless he had, for some inexplicable reason, decided to assess her for the role of his public partner, a remarkable if knife-edged honor.
"I'd like you to recap the basic issues, Portia. In your own words and in your own time, if you please."
"Oh. Well." Portia shook herself. Idiot! She cursed. What else could it be about? "Scott failed miserably on Moscow. Or rather, he succeeded inappropriately. The result was, well, not what we anticipated. Sixteen ubermenschen dead, not to mention the loss of an entire client world that was less than eighteen months from open phase-two restabilization—that was a major setback in its own right. Worse, the weapons tests—the causality-violation devices his puppets were testing—have probably attracted the attention of the Enemy. Bluntly, he failed on two levels; his treason against his own kind failed, and worse, the weapons tests also failed catastrophically, leading to the loss of the system. It was, all told, a disaster, and Scott knew he would attract unwelcome attention if he could not provide a compensatory positive outcome."
"Hmmph." Blumlein grunted, something approximating a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. On the stage behind her, three or four moppets were performing some sort of erotic dance: Portia angled her chair so that she could watch sidelong, while keeping her attention on the planetary overdepartmentsecretary. "Juggling on the tightrope over the abyss is a long and honorable tradition, I suppose." He smiled, not unkindly. "What long-term plans did U. Scott intend to pursue?"
"I think he was going to take over New Dresden, but he didn't leave any written records." Portia sniffed. "Not surprising." His attitude encouraged her to return the smile as a peer—a gamble, but one that might bring serious advancement if it paid off.
"Absolutely." Blumlein's expression turned chilly. "How could he possibly have been so stupid?"
She shrugged, dismissively. "Scott has—well—never lacked for self-confident ambition." You can say that again. A brief flashback: lying in bed listening to him rant, plans to create his own clade, bring about the unborn god, steal whole worlds from the flock. "I worked closely with him for several years, when we were younger. It's probably a good thing time ran out on him; he wasn't keeping his eye on the fine detail, and if he'd gotten his plan past the second stage, the consequences could have been even worse than the slow-motion disaster he's left us with."
Blumlein put his glass down, leaned closer, his pupils dilating slightly.