"My ship leaves the day after tomorrow," he said as calmly as he could manage. "So next week is right out. Would Minister Baxter be available for a phone interview instead? If security is a concern, there's no need for face-to-face contact."
"I'll just check." The screen blanked for a moment, then: "I'm sorry, sir, but the Minister isn't available at all until next Thursday. Can I help you make any alternative arrangements? For example, by long-range channel?"
"I'll have to check my budget," Frank admitted. "I have a limited bandwidth spend. Can I get back to you on that? Would you mind just double-checking that I'm not on your list anywhere? If the Minister's unavailable, would it be possible to arrange a chat with Ambassador Morrow instead?"
"I'm sorry, but the Ambassador's busy, too. As I said, sir, this is about the worst possible week you could have asked for an interview. If you leave things with me, I'll see what I can do, but I'm making no promises."
Frank put his temporary phone away and stood up tiredly. At times like this he felt as if he was walking blindfolded along a corridor pre-greased and strewn with banana skins by a cosmic jester. Why now? Why did they have to lose the fucking thing now, of all times? A quote from Baxter, or even Morrow, admitting that their colleagues were being stalked—that would be explosive. Only they weren't playing ball. The whole thing smelled like a discreet security lockdown: scheduled interviews canceled, public appearances held to carefully controlled zones with vetted guest lists, the bland stench of denial hovering over the rotting corpse of business as usual.
Just like one of Mom's dinner parties when she'd been trying to break back into the charmed circle of political movers and fixers who'd dropped her the first time around, after her electoral defeat.
The air was still cool and slightly damp in the park, but the heated benches were dry enough to work on. Frank folded up his mobile office and stood up.
The poplars were flowering, and he walked slowly under a ceiling of catkins, bouncing and shedding in the morning breeze. The path merged with two others at one of the bronze war memorials that were heartbreakingly common hereabouts. Frank paused for a minute to scan it with his glasses, capturing the moment forever. Almost a hundred years earlier, at this very spot, an enemy battalion had put up a spirited resistance to the forces of the All-Conquering. Their souls, large and warlike, had gone to Valhalla: the victors had raised the stele not out of magnanimity but with the more subtle intention of magnifying their own prowess. Nobody likes to boast that they massacred a bunch of terrified, starving, ill-equipped conscripts, Frank reminded himself. It's easier to be a hero when your vanquished enemies are giants. Something he'd have to bring up if he ever got close enough to interview the honorable Elspeth Morrow. "So how does it feel sentencing to death 140 million children, 90 million crumblies, and another 600-million-odd ordinary folks who were content to mind their own business and don't even know who you are?"
Farther along the path Frank passed a patrolling gardener 'bot. Judging from the smell, it was collecting and fermenting either slugs or waste from the citizens who walked their dogs at dawn. The trees were farther apart on this walk, with park benches between them and fields stretching away beyond. Each bench bore a weathered pewter plaque, stained almost gray by age: In loving memory of Private Ivor Vincik, by his parents, or Gone forever but not forgotten, Artillery Sergeant Georg Legat. The park wore its history as proudly as a row of medals: from the memorials to the fallen to the white charnel house built from the skulls and femurs of the enemy battalion, used by the groundskeepers to store their lawnmowers.
The trees came to an end, and the path began to descend toward a concrete underpass that slid beneath the road that separated park from town center. If you could call it a town center, these days. First there'd been a small rural village. Then there'd been a battle. Then there'd been another village, which grew into a town before the next battle flattened it. Then the town had been rebuilt and turned into a city, which had been bombed heavily and rebuilt again. Then the Mall that Ate Vondrak had turned into the Arcology that Absorbed Vondrak, all concrete towers and gleaming glassy Penrose-tiled roof, a groundscraper sprawled across the landscape like a sleeping giant. The place was heavily contaminated by history, war memorials marking off the worst pollution hot spots.
It was a quiet day, but there was still some traffic and a few people about at ground level even that early in the morning—a couple out for an early-morning run together, three kids on walksters, an old woman with a huge backpack, worn boots, and the wiry look of a hiker poring over an archaic moving map display. A convoy of local delivery vans hummed past on the road deck, nestling behind their long-haul tractor like a queue of ducklings.
A seagull, surprisingly far inland, circled overhead, raucously claiming its territory.
"When's the next train to Potrobar?" he asked aloud.
"You have twenty-nine minutes. Options: Make a reservation. Display route to station. Rescan—"
"Reservation and route, please." The ubiquitous geocomputing network there was crude compared to the varied services on Earth, but it did the job, and did it without inserting animated advertorials, which was a blessing. A light path flickered into view in front of him, strobing toward one of the arcology entrances. Frank followed it across the ornamental cobblestones, past a gaggle of flocking unicyclists and a fountain containing a diuretic-afflicted Eros.
The train station was on level six, a glazed atrium with sliding doors along one side to give access to the passenger compartments. Frank was slouched in a seat, pecking at his keyboard in a desultory manner (trying to capture the atmosphere of a chrome-and-concrete station was like trying to turn a burned lump of charcoal back into a tree, he thought dispiritedly) when his phone bleeped for attention. "Yeah?" he asked, keeping to voice-only—too easy for someone to snatch his window/camera in this crowded place.
"Frank? It's me. I'm here. Where are you?"
"You're—" His eyes crossed with the unexpected mental effort of trying to figure it out, then he hit on the caller's geocache location. "Eh. What do you want, Wednesday?"
"I've, uh, I've only just got off the ship, but I was wondering, are you busy this evening?" It came out in a rush. "See, there's this wine-and-cheese reception thingy, and I've been invited to it, says I can bring a guest, and I haven't done one of these things before, but I have been strongly advised to go—"
Frank tried not to sigh. "I've just had an interview fall through. If I can't refill the slot, I guess I might be free, but probably not. Just what kind of do is it?"
"It's some kind of fifth-anniversary dead light get-together, a reunion for any Moscow citizens who're on Dresden. At the embassy, you know? My, uh, friends said you might be interested."
Frank sat bolt upright, barely noticing the other commuters on the platform, as they began to move toward the doors. "Wait, that's excellent!" he said excitedly. "I was wanting to get some local color. Maybe get some interview slots with ordinary people. When is it, you said—" The doors were opening as passengers disembarked: others moved to take their place.
"The Muscovite high consulate in Sarajevo. Tonight at—"
Frank started. The platform was emptying fast, and the train was waiting.
"Whoa! Mail me? Got to catch a train. Bye." He hung up fast and trotted over to the doors, stepping aboard just as the warning beeper went off.
"Potrobar?" he muttered to himself, glancing around for an empty seat.
"Potrobar? What the fuck am I going there for?" He sighed, and forced himself to sit down as the PA system gave a musical chime and the train lifted from the track bed and began to slide toward the tube entrance.
"When's the next train from Potrobar to Sarajevo?" he asked plaintively.
SET US UP THE BOMB
Ring ring. "Hey! what took you so long? I've been waiting for hours! I'm going to be late—"
"You are not late. There will be another capsule in less than half an hour, Wednesday. Did you receive my message about the reception?"
"Yes." Wednesday sighed theatrically. "I'm on my way there. Will you tell me what this is all about?"
There was a momentary pause. "In due course."
Wednesday shook her head. "In other words, no." She bent down and buckled up her boots. They looked really fine with the white lacy shalwar trousers she'd bought for dinner and never worn. "So what's the point of me going there?"
"There is going to be trouble," said Herman, his voice a distant monotone.
The conspirators who are currently assassinating Muscovite diplomats—"
"What?"
"—Please do not interrupt. Did you think you were the only target?"
"But, but—"
"The chancelleries of a hundred worlds will be shaken by the exposure of this conspiracy, Wednesday. If the primary annealing state vector collapses to—excuse me. If the outcome I am betting against myself on comes to pass. I apologize, human languages are poor vehicles for describing temporal paradoxes."
"You're going to have to try harder if you want to impress. I'm just an airhead party animal, me."
"Just so." Pause. "Attend. Three ambassadors have been murdered. Their deaths coincide with the arrival of this ship in orbit around whichever planet they were on at the time. On this planet, there is an ambassador, and another senior government official. The reasons I brought you here are threefold. Firstly, I am interested in knowing who is killing these diplomats, and why, because I believe it will answer a very important question—who destroyed Moscow." There was another brief pause. "Backward chaining from the resolution of that situation, I must have sent a message to my earlier state vector—acting in my capacity as an ex-officio oracle and deity within the light cone—to pick you up at an early age. Your involvement was implicit in the development of this situation, although I don't yet fully understand why, and I believe the reason the faction of the assassins tried to kill you is connected. The information you stumbled across on Old Newfie was more important than I realized at the time. Unfortunately, unless I can arrange transport there for you, it may not be easy to retrieve it."
"You want to take me back home?" It came out as a squeak. Wednesday stood up hastily: "You didn't say anything about that! Isn't it dangerous?
How will we get there—"
"That was the second reason," Herman continued implacably. "My third reason is this: I am a distributed intelligence service, linked by causal channels. I am highly dependent on state coherency that can only be maintained within the light cone—whenever the ship that is the focus of my attention makes an FTL transit, I lose contact. You are my reset switch.
You are also my blind spot coverage. If I am inaccessible when critical events occur, you are sufficiently intelligent and resourceful that, if adequately informed, you can act as my proxy aboard ship. Now. Are you ready?"
"Ready for—" Wednesday took a deep breath. "What am I meant to be ready for?" she asked, her voice puzzled and slightly worried. "Is it going to be dangerous?" She pulled on her jacket (which she had dilated to an ankle-skimming coat, showy but thin and useless against the elements).
"Yes."
"Oh, how nice." Wednesday pulled a face. "Is there anything else?"
"Yes. You should be aware of several things. Firstly, there is another human agent of mine involved in this situation. His name is Martin Springfield. You can trust him implicitly if you meet him. He is acting as my unofficial liaison with another diplomatic element that is investigating the situation—more or less on the same side. Secondly, I owe you an apology."
"An—" Wednesday stopped dead. "What's that supposed to mean?" she asked suspiciously.
"I failed to prevent the destruction of your home world. I am worried, Wednesday. Preventing incidents like that is the purpose of my—this component's—existence. A failure to do so suggests a failure of my warning mechanisms. A failure of intelligence on my part suggests that the entities responsible for the destruction of Moscow are far more powerful than previously realized. Or are agencies of such an entity."
Wednesday leaned against the wall. "What? But you're the Eschaton!"
"Not quite. It is true that I am a component of the ensemble intelligence referred to as the Eschaton." Herman's voice had gone very flat, as if to emphasize the fact that any color in its tone was simply a modulation trick.
"The Eschaton preserves global causality within a realm approximately a thousand parsecs in radius. It does so by recursively transmitting information back in time to itself, which is used to allow it to edit out temporal anomalies. Such temporal paradoxes are an inevitable side effect of permitting faster-than-light travel, or of operating an ensemble intelligence employing timelike logic mechanisms. I receive orders from deep time and execute them knowing that in doing so I ensure that the descendant state vector is going to exist long enough to issue those orders.
If I do not receive such orders, then it may be that the events are not observable by me. Or my future state vector. This situation may occur if the Eschaton is disrupted or edited out of the future of this time-line. I am advising you, Wednesday, that I should have prevented the destruction of Moscow. That I failed to do so raises questions over my future survival."
"Oh fuck! You're telling me—"
"There appears to be a complex play in progress against me, executed by a party or parties unknown. I revise my previous estimate that the threat was emergent from the ReMastered. Their desire to destroy me is well understood, as are their capabilities, and countermeasures have been in place for some time. This threat emerges from a higher realm. The possibility of a hostile Eschaton-equivalent intelligence existing in the future of this light cone must now be considered. It is possible that a ReMastered faction is being manipulated by such an external entity. My ability to project ahead has therefore been called into question. Fallback logic modules employing neo-Bayesian reasoning suggest that when you return to the ship they will send a team of agents after you, but this is a purely speculative assumption. You must be on your guard at all times. Your job is to draw out the hostile proxies and expose them to me, starting at the embassy memorial ceremony. If you fail, the consequences could be far worse than the destruction of a single planet."