‘Ah, a pleasant surprise!’ Nju said. ‘Se Barra is here, awaiting us.’
This ‘pleasant surprise’ brought Rico wide awake in a hurry. Sure enough, there was his mother, rising from an upholstered armchair and scowling their way. Since she was wearing midnight blue coveralls with digital readouts down the sleeves, he could assume that she’d come looking for them straight from work. Hi groaned under his breath as she came striding over, a tall woman with waist-length black hair, bound neatly in a long braid to leave the chip slots at the base of her skull unobstructed. Although she was beautiful in a strong sort of way, and no-one would have called Hi handsome, they shared a certain look, the same intense black eyes and sharp profile. Golden numbers flickered up her sleeves, changing endlessly. Apparently, she was still transmit-linked to that job. In their family, Barra was the hardware expert, though she could walk the Map with the best of them when she needed to.
‘Well, hello there, Sis,’ Hi said. ‘Come for the festival?’
She ignored him and looked Rico over. He could feel his face burning as she sighed and looked away again.
‘Let’s go up to your room,’ Barra said. ‘Nju, hail.’
‘Hail to you, Se Barra. Do you have luggage or some case that I might carry for you?’
‘None, thanks. I won’t be staying long.’
This promise got Rico through the silent ride up in the lift booth. No-one spoke as they all trooped down the long hall to the suite Hi had rented for this festival night. Once they were inside, Nju sat down with his back to the closed entry door. He would sleep there, too, curled up on his sleep mat. The rest of them went into the spacious main room, carpeted in pale pink, draped in tan silk, scattered with soft brocade furniture. Two big vidscreens hung on the longest wall; one ran the Centre Council report while the other showed tower graphs of the popularity rating garnered by each politician for the day’s votes. The graphs rose and fell in a kind of dance as each vote changed the constituents’ opinion of their representatives. Barra sat down in the middle of the sofa, while Hi headed straight for the small liquor cabinet.
‘Something to drink, Sis?’
‘No. I’ve got something important to tell you, by the way.’ Hi grinned and pulled the blackbox card out of his shirt pocket. The edges glowed red.
‘Where did you get that?’ Barra said.
‘Don’t ask.’ Hi put the card onto an end table, then opened the cabinet. ‘I’m just looking for bottled water, or soda, something like that. The water you get in Pleasure tastes like swamp to me. Rico? You want something?’
‘No thanks.’
Rico headed for a slender wooden desk on the far side of the room. It held the antique frame he’d discovered that afternoon, a flat black screen embossed with a couple of archaic access points of the sort he’d studied only in history classes. Hi set a carafe of pinkish soda down on the low table in front of the sofa, then pulled off his robes and dumped them onto a chair.
‘Damn things are so hot,’ he remarked, then returned to pouring his drink. ‘I’ve got something important to say, too, but you go first. Why didn’t you just send me a packet, anyway?’
‘I didn’t want this over the lines just yet, though I suppose the wretched grids will find out soon enough. Rico, what are you doing over there?’
‘Just fooling around, Mom. You should come take a look at this. It’s really old hardware.’
Barra did join him, leaning over the desk with one hand on the back of his chair. She smelled clean, of soap and the wipe chemicals she used on circuits, not like the women in The Close. He felt himself blushing.
‘Rico, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘Everyone does it.’
‘Well, I thought you -’
‘Look.’ Barra considered him for a moment. ‘It’s the people in Pleasure that bother me. Penned up like criminals, trapped here forever whether they like it or not. It’s not what they do. It’s the way we treat them.’
Rico felt all his good times run away like spilled water. He’d never really thought of that, never really let himself think about it. Barra leaned over and flipped up a narrow panel on the desktop.
Underneath lay a row of tiny disks like coins in a wrapper.
‘You can load those,’ she remarked. ‘Yeah, in those slots there. Someone’s modified this link to the usual Map sockets for Pleasure Sect, but you’re right. This is a very old frame. I’m surprised it still works.’
‘I’m surprised it ended up in a hotel,’ Rico said.
‘Oh, those loads are probably games or something. And it’s a nice-looking piece of furniture.’ Barra turned back to her brother. ‘Is that pink stuff drinkable?’
‘Better than the water. I’ll pour you some.’
Rico heard the sofa creak as she sat down again. He powered on the frame and found the icons that had so puzzled him earlier in the day. Most were standard - little circles each marked with an access glyph for different agents and utilities, room service, commcalls, banking access, and so on. One area of the holoscreen showed a set of five icons, though, that he’d never seen before, and one that should have been there was missing, a general route out to the Map at large. Every sect Map contained a pipe to whatever artificial intelligence coordinated the sect, which would then supply the out-route. But this frame showed nothing to mark the pipe, unless Pleasure used a glyph he couldn’t recognize? On a frame this old the glyphs might well mark subordinated access areas, too. Since the frame had no jacks, he was limited to finger-tapping icons like any tourist - irritating enough to make him stubborn about it.
He began expanding the icons, one at a time, into new clusters, each linked by colour, but he found nothing recognizable as a pipe. Activating the sub-icons brought him air conditioning controls, a commcall directory, some rather startling holos of various sapients having sex in unusual ways, and other end-user objects. Loading in the coin-like objects brought him games and more pornography. The frame’s structure and sockets stayed stubbornly closed until he realized that he had a repair utility in hidden files, just sitting waiting to be unpacked. It took him a bare few minutes to break the passwords and bring the utilities up. Now! He could add a pipe out, easy as easy - well, easy for someone like him.
As he worked, he could hear Hi and Barra chatting, teasing each other. All at once something caught his attention.
‘Been asked to take a team up to Orbital,’ his mother was saying. ‘I’ll be leaving pretty soon.’
Rico sloughed round in his chair to listen. Hi was sitting at one end of the sofa, a glass in his hand, and Barra was at the other end.
‘Orbital?’ Hi said.
‘Orbital?
Isn’t that dangerous as hell?’
‘Not any more. They’ve finally got the radiation levels down. It’s only taken what... fourteen years to clean the place up? Well, it’s not spotless, no, but I’m not going to be having any more children. My genes and I will be safe enough.’
‘Ah.’ Hi paused for a sip of his soda. ‘Well, well, well. We’re finally going to get hands-on access to the Nimue AI.’
‘It’s about time, huh? Think I’ll have any better luck than you did?’
‘I never got to go up to Orbital. The Lep had just exploded their pulse bomb, remember, when their flagship suicided. The place was hot enough to cook your dinner. What examination I did had to be through the Map, and the Map out there was a mess. It’ll be great to start getting things untangled.’
‘If we can. After fourteen years of floating out there with nothing but radiation soakers and clean-up bots, who knows what’s left?’
‘Well, you can always count on my help through the Map.’
Barra grimaced. ‘I may have limited clearance. The Council’s putting one of Karlo’s officers in command, some Captain Niko, some name like that.’
‘What? The guild won’t stand for that!’
‘That’s what I told him. We need to lodge a formal protest. If you hadn’t been gone today
-’
‘Yeah, I know, I know. First thing in the morning I’ll take care of this. I don’t understand why the military’s even involved.’
‘Well, Nimue
is
a defence installation. And it was disabled as an act of war. But mostly, it’s the new way of doing things.’ Barra grimaced again. ‘The Peronida way.’
Hi nodded and looked balefully into his glass.
‘This soda’s terrible,’ he remarked, then set the glass on the table. ‘Think you’ll find any new evidence of the L’Var treason?’
‘Why would I? I thought you’d found plenty.’
‘I delivered it to the courts under formal protest, if you’ll remember.’ Hi hesitated, frowning, glancing Rico’s way. ‘It was a standard record holotape, fuzzy as hell from the disruption but readable, tagged with full routing code coming from the L’Var family compound out in the swamps. There were other bits and pieces of code that looked like a shut-off order and an override, or there could have been one before the pulse bomb went off, I mean. There were images, in various conditions, but some were pretty clear. And there were voice fragments left
- Kella L’Var’s voice, all right, logging in. The judges ate the tape up. It wasn’t the only evidence, thank God. But it executed Kella L’Var and her two brothers.’
‘What was wrong with it?’ Rico said. ‘Something must have been.’
‘Smart boy.’ Hi flashed a grin. ‘Nothing was wrong with it. But it wasn’t right, either. For one thing, it was so damn convenient that it would survive. The pulse bomb scrambled packets, blew codes, fused sockets - you name it. But this nice convenient record of the traitor’s act just somehow survived, all chewed up, maybe, but it did.’
‘Well, something as important as a shut-down order gets routed right into the safe box,’
Barra objected. ‘It wasn’t just some list of icon counts.’
‘Yeah, yeah, but still.’ Hi leaned back, considering. ‘I kept having the feeling that Nimue was trying to tell me something, the whole time I was jacked in. Call it cyber’s intuition. The AI was practically junked - shut down first, then hit by that pulse wave - but she was trying to reach me. I could just feel it. And she tried the hardest to reach me when I was finding the evidence that killed the L’Vars.’
Barra frankly stared. Hi grinned at her.
‘It Sounds crazy, I know,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Rico? Think your patron’s losing a few databanks with age?’
‘No,’ Rico said. ‘I know that kind of feeling.’ Hi raised an eyebrow.
‘Yeah? We’ll have to talk about this some more.’ Hi turned to Barra. ‘Huh. I wonder if Karlo’s putting one of his men in charge to make sure that you do find some new evidence. A lot of people grumbled about what happened to the L’Vars. Some of them are still grumbling. Karlo would love to produce more proof, just to lock down the crematorium door one more time.’
‘But Uncle Hi?’ Rico said. ‘If it wasn’t the L’Vars, then who was it?’
‘Good question, kid, a very good question. I don’t know. There wasn’t one shred of evidence on the Map that pointed to anyone but the L’Vars. That’s why I finally turned the tape over to the courts. And by then the Makeesa had a lot of hard evidence that the L’Vars had been bargaining with the Leps. Witnesses, that kind of thing.’
‘Witnesses can be bought,’ Barra said. ‘I wouldn’t trust Vanna Makeesa with a six-bit coin, much less someone’s life.’
‘It’s a hard world,’ Hi said, grinning. ‘And Vanna’s one of those sapients who makes it just a little bit harder for us all. She saw her chance to get her claws into the L’Var property, if you ask me, and took it.’
‘She’d kill someone for money?’ Rico broke in. ‘That’s really loath.’
‘Not just money,’ Barra said. ‘Hatred first. Then money.’
Rico considered, leaning over the back of his chair. This conversation was giving him different data than the history downloads he’d been assigned on the School Map. Hi was watching him, he realized, as if waiting for some reaction.
‘Well,’ Rico said. ‘What if Karlo wanted Nimue down so he could save the day with his Fleet?
It sure made him a hero, and that made him First Citizen.’
Hi laughed and pointed at the blackbox on the table.
‘Never say that without one of these around, Rico, but you know something? A lot of people have wondered the same thing.’
‘Too simple,’ Barra said. ‘Karlo had already seen one planet destroyed by the Lep invaders. He’s not a monster. I don’t see him risking it happening again. All of his ships were Kephalon ships. Every man and woman onboard had just lost their families, their homes - everything. I think they wanted to kill Leps first and worry about politics later.’
‘Yeah.’ Hi nodded. ‘And we’re all damn lucky that Karlo was bringing his bunch of orphans our way.’
Rico felt a cold stripe run down his back. The history downloads had made that part clear enough, that without the Kephalon navy, Palace would have been destroyed once the defence grid went down. Palace had always trusted in its AIs, had never built a navy of fighting ships. With Nimue off-line, the planet floated in space as helpless and fragile as a bubbleflare. No wonder, he supposed, that public opinion had cheered Vanna Makeesa when she rooted out the traitors - or at least, the family that most people considered traitors.
‘You don’t think that tape was real?’ Rico said.
‘I
think
it was real,’ Hi answered.
‘I feel
that it was a plant, a fake, a send-up, whatever you want to call
it.
The courts aren’t interested in feelings.’
‘Huh. Could I get onto that part of the Map?’
‘What?’ Barra broke in. ‘Hell, no! Don’t you go trying to breach the firewalls, either. Rico, we’re talking about military secrets and legal matters here. Planetary security matters. Do you understand me?’
‘I was just curious.’
‘I know what your "just curious" means.’ Barra was glaring at him. ‘Don’t you remember what I said the last time you got into an unauthorized area? I will not bail you out of trouble again, young man. I mean that. You may be my own blood and genotype, but the guild comes first.’
‘Ah, Mum! Don’t worry! Come on! I don’t have any of the metas. It’s way above my level, I bet.’
‘Don’t bet,’ Barra snapped. ‘You’ll only take that for a challenge.’
Rico tried smiling at her, but she merely glowered in return. When he realized that Hi was watching, he did his best to look contrite.