The Great Symmetry (17 page)

Evan was beginning to understand the implications. “Untraceable
. But, presumably the Codex program is storing your searches.”

“Temporarily during your session, or you can save your searches if you want. But that’s it. This is the spirit of the infoterrorists. You and the information are free to meet each other as you wish.” Mira pointed at one of the cubes. “In there, you have complete privacy. Unlike any other computer you have ever sat in front of.”

Evan couldn’t imagine that she would be so gullible. “Oh come on. There is no way.”

“Really
. This is the reason. Everything my uncle has ever done, is for this. The information is free.”

“Does it scream?”

“Not here. It sings.”

“I think that’s your uncle Axiom rubbing off on you. Speaking of whom, meaning no disrespect, but he is a total loon. Maybe those meds are doing battle in his brain.”

Mira dismissed it. “Oh no, he’s always been that way.”

Evan pressed. “I appreciate his help and all, but are you sure it’s wise to trust our safety to someone who can’t put two sentences together without some trippy parable? When Security is busting in, he’ll be there to stop them by posing existential riddles for them to solve. Naked.”

“
Do not, under any circumstances, underestimate him. There is a reason that he is the most wanted person on Kelter. And wanted, not found. Whatever he says, he is good for. Always. He opened his home to us, he meant it, and it’s worth more than anything else I can think of. Hey – you should check out information on the dragnet. You’re a star!
Affirmatix has been sweeping all around the Untrusted Zone for both of us. But they won’t find us down here. So, do you want to check it out?”

“I do,” Evan affirmed.

“Share?”

“Nope. Get your own cube
.”

As Evan took his place in the cube, it began to sink in. Search, on anything, without hesitation.

He remembered the time that he had been waved off. He had been trying to construct a possible chronology of Versari glome discoveries, and the only available model was the sequence of exploration by humans. Just after he had started to assemble the historical data, Evan had been summoned by the Director of Research for his grant at that time, to review a list of acceptable topics – and Evan’s
avenue of inquiry was most emphatically not on the list.

At the time, it had seemed like an odd coincidence. He had just moved on to other things, which were on the approved list and were also worthwhile.

As he sat in the cube thinking of what he might query on, Evan considered other subject areas, where it was simply known that you did not search. History, other than what you were taught in school. Economics, except for the daily pulse of the
financial markets. These limits had never mattered much to him, because he wasn’t much interested in those subjects.

Most of Evan’s material concerned a long-dead alien race, where very little information would be considered sensitive or possibly sequestered. For just a moment, Evan caught a glimpse of what it might mean, for people trying to learn and teach on matters more closely connected to the daily lives of humans.

The infoterrorist might be on to something, at that.

But if the entire world had been there for him to search on, would it have done him any good? Possibly not. It spoke to a huge weakness that Evan had always known he had. For any one puzzle, such as a new Versari artifact just brought to light,
there was no person in the universe who was more persistent, or who had better analytical skills. Evan could chew on the problem in front of him until it gave up everything it had.

But connections eluded him. Larger themes, or patterns, were invisible to him unless the brute force of statistical analysis made them readily apparent. At the Valley of Dreams site, most of the real progress had come from suggestions offered by Kate. He would tell her the latest about his efforts, incremental findings, and dead ends. Then she would come up with an idea that had been in plain sight the entire time.

Kate had a simple explanation for why this was. “You look at
these items on the table. Artifacts. You use all these machines to analyze them. But you don’t think of the Versari as people who loved, and that’s the single most important fact of their existence.”

Then there were her novels. Once upon a time, Evan had carefully gone through the first volume and had provided her with a list of the factual inaccuracies based on everything that was known about the Versari, and a further list of items that were highly questionable. She had not done a single edit, insisting that he was missing the whole point. And he had to admit, the
Tails of Versari
series had reached many thousands of readers, teaching them about the long-departed race even if the details weren’t perfect.

Where was Kate now? Evan started pulling up searches. A brief history, of the two years since they had last spoken. The crushing ruling against
DelMonaco Trading, unpublished but somehow available, due to the audacious data mining of the infoterrorists.

Next, current whereabouts.

Not exactly. Four hours ago, she had checked out a chopper, and now her heartbeat was gone. There was no further trace.

Evan knew exactly where she was.

Known associates
. It was double edged. A hazard for him – he should not go anywhere near any of his known associates, especially her. But was the hazard even greater for Kate? Alone at the Valley of Dreams, she could be picked up so easily. Vanish forever. Spend her last moments crying out, over and over, that she had no idea where he was.

Do something.

He knew that was wrong.
He knew. Breathe.

Do something.

Frantically, Evan searched for more information. There was nothing. Four hours, no heartbeat.

Was he actually concerned for Kate? Or, did he just want
to talk with her, at least one more time before his fate arrived?

At that moment the ground shuddered and the sharp report of explosions arrived. Evan jumped up and out of his cube. Mira was intent on her console in the adjacent slot. He couldn’t believe she was still staring at the screen.

“Did you hear that?”

“Sure did,” Mira told him.

“And?”

“Checking the best way to go. Now I know. Let’s go!”

Mira launched herself, Evan rushing to follow. A door slid open for them into a long corridor. A right turn, then a left. More doors, then stairs down.

Mira led them to a garage with a
dozen choppers, grabbed a backpack and a helmet off a shelf, then rushed to claim a chopper. Others were streaming in, and a bay door on the far side of the garage was already rolling up.

A tall, thin man came in through the door. “Kes − where’s Axiom?” Mira demanded of him.

“He is safe. We are free to find safety ourselves.”

“You are sure?”

“I have made certain of it,” the man said.

“
Thank you for that.” She turned to Evan. “Grab a pack and hop on,” she instructed. “It’s time to leave.”

A thought struck Evan. “What about the Codex?” he asked. “Will it be destroyed?”

“Oh no,” Mira told him. “That was just one portal to it. The actual Codex is in many places.”

The choppers streamed out of the garage. Like most of the Untrusted Zone, it was chaos that somehow worked out. After three near-collisions they found themselves flying at top speed down a narrow passage that was somewhere in size between a street and an alley. Mira took them through the maze, staying under rooftop level, finally pulling into a quiet alley and cutting the headlights.

It was not completely dark. White light from Foray shone on a wall of the alley. As his vision adjusted, Evan saw a few stars above.

Mira spoke quietly. “We can’t go to my place, and I’m running out of friends around here.”

“I know where we need to go,” Evan said. “Our home turf. The place we both know best.” There was no need to mention that Kate might be at the same location, given Mira’s reaction to his mention of her earlier.

“We need to stay in town,” she insisted. “The streets
will give us cover. I just need to figure out where we can crash.”

“As long as we’re with people, we’ll be traced. We need to leave. Tonight is evidence of that. What’s in those packs?”

“Survival gear. To escape into the desert, if need be.”

“I think it needs be,” he told her.

The Ghost

Kate’s sleep was troubled by dreams. Usually, she welcomed them. Even on this night, she resolved to gain some positive meaning from the confusing and despairing scenes in which she found herself. Loss. The legacy of her parents, gone. Trying to explain it to them, even as they weren’t there. Evan was with her, although he was dead. “Kate,” he called out to her.

It was even worse when she awoke but knew she was dreaming still, because Evan was there, framed against the entrance to the cave in the predawn. And still he called.

When she surfaced further and realized she could not possibly be asleep any more, she was incandescent.

“I mourned you! Two years away, and then you were killed. You have been dead, and you didn’t even call me
. Do you know what that’s like?” She looked around for something to throw. The stove was too far away.

“Kate−”

“You made me want to die. You could at least have the decency to stay dead.”

The ghost placated. “
I couldn’t tell you−”

“Left me to twist in the wind!” In a single moment, Kate experienced the accumulated anguish of the past two days as a heavy needle stabbing through her left eye, directly into her brain. Or perhaps it was the act of standing up quickly in the paltry air pressure.

“This is a promising reunion,” observed Mira, stepping forward to join them.

“You! So that’s why you wanted a ship. And you kept it a secret from me. So you could get some private time with Evan, I suppose?”

“Kate, we have only been together for a day,” Evan told her. “No, not together!
She picked me up, I mean, in a shuttle. Mira rescued me, so I could come here to you.”

“Rescued you. So you called her first. Didn’t even think of me.”

“Kate! She’s a pilot! I was going to be killed. I sent a message to the one person who could pluck me out of space.”

“You want me to believe that
? Get out of my cave! Never mind, I’m leaving.”

“That’s not going to be a good choice,” Mira told her.

“What, are you threatening me?” The stove was only two steps away.

“Nope, just pointing something out. Look.” Mira indicated the landscape outside.

Out in the valley, the choppers were arriving. Troops piled out and w
ere bounding up the slope to the cave. Toward them.

“I suppose you brought them here. Well that’s just great.”

“See Kate, that’s why I couldn’t find you sooner,” Evan started to explain.

“Well maybe you should have waited a little longer,” Kate huffed.

“You’re not being internally consistent. First you said−”

“Hey lovebirds, stow it,” Mira ordered. “We need to move. Grab the gear and go!”

“Maybe we can sort it out with them?” Kate asked.

“
Not these guys. Trust me. Move!”

Mira, Evan, and Kate hastened down the large passage into the cave, hopping over the large boulders that had fallen from the roof millennia ago.

Mira stopped at a small passage that sloped steeply upward. “Up here! We need to go through the vaults.”

“The vaults?” That seemed to Kate like the worst possible choice. “We would have to go right past the skylight entrance.”

“The vaults. There is a lot more passage there, beyond them. The big passage doesn’t go the farthest.”

If anyone would know, it would be Mira. She
had explored deep into the cave during the expeditions, dragging along anyone who would go. For many, including Kate, it was just one trip. Mira had photomapped the entirety of Blowing Cave, in great detail, pushing every passage to the bitter end. One night she had provided a show to everyone
on a big screen, zooming around the virtual cave so they could see every feature without the effort.

Mira, Kate, and Evan scrambled up the steep incline, then a series of other passages, before emerging in the upper cavern.

A faint light shone from far away to their right. They headed left. “We don’t need to go too near the skylight, and they won’t figure it all out quickly enough,” Mira told them. They headed around the corner into a much larger cavern.

The three found themselves in the vaults.

Springing The Trap

Soon enough, one of the trap lines bore fruit.

They had been tracking Kate DelMonaco as a top priority. McElroy’s partner of many years. It was a no brainer. She was the highest profile selection out of twenty surveillance subjects, known associates of McElroy.

Electronic monitoring sufficed at first. DelMonaco
left an obvious heartbeat wherever she went, a large bow wake on the surface of dataspace. Then, when she checked out a chopper, dedicated physical resources were dispatched.

Still, she was easy to follow. Carelessly flying at a thousand meters of altitude regardless of whether she might be tracked. Coming in for a slow, casual landing. Parking her chopper and walking around, first up a hill, then back to the chopper, then on to the cave. Not even the mos
t basic checks for signs of anyone following, as the surveillance team was.

The team brought up the map of the Blowing Cave.
It had been made by Mira Adastra, of all people, and published four years before. In the strange fashion of the denizens of the Untrusted Zone, Adastra had published it without sponsorship from any family, scorning any revenue which might have accrued from product placements or advertorials.