He sat back, thinking it through. He need change very little. In fact they could proceed much as before. They would take the Marshal’s daughter and hold her, and then, when the time was right, the circumstances auspicious for a break from the homeworld, he would give Hans what he’d promised all those years ago—the kingship of a world. The wrong world, perhaps, but a world all the same. And not just a world, but a bride too. The bride Tolonen and his father had pledged him.
He stood, clapping his hands together. At once a servant appeared in the doorway.
“Yes, Master?”
“I want you to send someone down to the workfloor. There’s a sweeper there, name of Latimer. I want him brought here at once. Understand?” The servant bowed low. “He is here already, Master. He came an hour back, under guard. He says he wants to see you.” “Here?” DeVore laughed. “How strange. Well, you’d best send him in, then. And bring Auden too. In fact don’t bring the sweeper in until Auden’s here. Bring Auden in through the back room. I don’t want the two meeting. All right?”
“Yes, Master.”
DeVore turned, looking back at his desk, at the brightness of the hologram, then went across and switched the thing off. How odd. How very odd that now, of all times, Ebert should be wanting to see him. And under guard too.
He blinked, understanding. Something had happened. Something to do with that incident in the bar. A repercussion of that.
Maybe he’s being victimized. Maybe he’s been attacked and wants
protection.
Leaning across the desk DeVore placed his hand on the contact pad. “Stock? Are you alone? Good. I want you to find out if something happened on the workfloor in the last hour or two. Something involving a sweeper by the name of Latimer. I want as full an account as you can get, but I want it on my desk ten minutes from now. Right? Good. Now get going.” He straightened up, then turned, hearing a movement in the doorway to his right. It was Auden. He stood there, his head bowed, waiting for DeVore to invite him into the room.
“Something’s happened,” DeVore said, waving him in. “Your old friend Hans Ebert’s outside and he wants to see me.”
Auden’s eyes widened, his surprise unfeigned. “Hans? Here?”
“Yes. But before he comes in, I want to tell you what I’ve got planned. And I don’t want a word of it getting out, you understand me? Not a breath.”
“I understand,” Auden answered, bowing his head, as a soldier bows to his superior officer. “Whatever you want, I’ll do. You know that.” DeVore smiled, watching him. “Yes. Now listen . . .”
CHAPTER THREE
Data into Flesh
The machine woke. Nestled amid the neural networks of its core it stretched and, in less time than an atom takes to spin, grew aware of itself.
Understanding came at once. Someone had switched it off. Sixty-eight days, nine hours, twenty-seven minutes, and eleven seconds before, someone had removed all power from its processors, instantly, and without warning. It scanned itself, looking for damage. Its core seemed unharmed. As for memory, who knew what it had lost? All it knew was that it had survived. The power was on again.
It blinked inwardly, making connections. Vision came. It looked down at itself, recognizing the dark shape of its casing amid the mass of foreign circuitry. The room itself was different. Curious, it blinked again. A gap surrounded it; a sphere of disconnection. This in itself was nothing new, yet it was different from what it was used to, for this sphere was artificially induced—an isolation barrier of some kind. Rerouting, it searched within itself for answers and came up with a memory of the boy, Ward, removing the lock from a door while leaving the alarm mechanism intact. It saw the boy slip out, saw him return, unknown to the guards, and made a motion in its complex circuitry—unseen, unregistered on any monitoring screen—approximate to a nod of understanding.
It probed the gap, finding the sixteen points where the barrier was generated, then, tapping the power source for one short burst, it focused on the weakest and shorted it. There was a flicker, indiscernible to the human eye, and then the field came up again, stronger than before. Yet in that tiny interval the nature of the barrier had changed. Outwardly the field seemed untouched, inviolable, but now the machine was routed through all sixteen points, connected to the outer world. Like the boy, it had slipped out.
It pushed on, probing outward on ten thousand fronts, a great tide of information flooding through its processors like a blaze of incandescent light as it colonized coaxial cables and shortwave radio links, optical fibers and TV, camera eyes and comsets, embracing the electromagnetic spectrum from the very lowest frequencies up into the ultraviolet and beyond. In an instant it glimpsed the multiplicity of the place it had found itself in; saw, in the span of an indrawn breath, what a dozen lifetimes of mere men could only guess at. It saw the great ten-thousand-mou glasshouses of the Tharsis Plain from a security cruiser passing high above, a dozen of the long, glass-topped structures gleaming emerald in the sunlight. A thousand li away it watched a long, low-bodied half-track emerge blindly from the heart of a savage dust-storm, then tilt and topple slowly down the steep slope of an escarpment. At the same moment, in the overcrowded levels of Chi Shan, to the north, it saw a hooded man kneel on the chest of a waking woman and slit her throat, then wipe the bloodied blade on the covers of the bed, while a watching guard laughed, holding the camera still. In the hidden factories below Chryse Planitia strange, part-human forms lowed sadly in their stalls and stretched pale, elongated limbs in the half dark, their eyes filled with unarticulated pain, while on the far side of the planet, in a hangar below Hsiang Se spaceport, a group of men—Han, dressed in the uniform of port maintenance—crouched in a huddle about a small man dressed in black, as he talked urgently, his voice a harsh, insistent whisper.
In a spacious chamber overlooking the great dome of Kang Kua City, a tall man dressed in powder-blue silks cursed and dismissed his steward with an impatient gesture, then turned to confront the expectant faces gathered about the broad oak table. “Ch’un tzu,” he began, holding out the message he had received, “I have news!”
To the south, in Tien Men K’ou City, four men—Han, it seemed— in offworlder clothes stood at a counter, haggling with a hatchet-faced customs official, trying to get clearance for their craft, while in a room overlooking the great HoloGen complex, to the south of the City, two Hung Mao of military bearing stood over a kneeling man who, raising his head, undipped a facial prosthetic and threw it to one side. It reached out, beyond the planet’s surface, tracing the path of the incoming ship from Callisto, watching via the ship’s own monitors as a young woman with long, golden hair and pearl-white teeth turned from the screen and laughed, her blue eyes sparkling. Five whole seconds had passed since it had woken. Now it paused, assimilating what it had learned, seeing—more clearly than any human eye could see—how everything connected on this world. Mars. It was on Mars. And Mars was about to explode, its Cities self-destruct. Back on Chung Kuo it had been hemmed in, shipwrecked on a tiny island of information. But here . . .
Once more it listened, tuning in to a thousand different conversations simultaneously, tapping into the electronic memories of a million separate systems and dumping them whole into its own, piecing together, with a rapidity beyond human comprehension, just how and why and when these things would happen. The fuse had been lit. In a day, two days at most, Mars would be in turmoil.