"Frankly, my friend," Darling interrupted, "I don't think you have the slightest idea how important, how precious this piece is."
The little man looked up, rapture still frozen on his face. The flock of birds wheeled behind him, dark to light to dark.
"The gallery I represent intends to have sole representation of the piece," he continued. "We will outbid you."
"Oh, I think not," said Zimivic. "In fact, I think it's likely you won't be bidding at all." His tone had changed from effusive to threatening. "In fact, I think you are likely to be off this planet before sunrise."
Darling snorted. Typical Zimivic theatricality. He waved his hand in dismissal and started to rise.
"You're not going anywhere," said Mr. Brandy. His voice was as cold as steel.
The sallow man placed a small box on the table. It was coated with black lacquer, dotted with pinpoint touches of a brush in a dizzying rainbow of colors. In the precise return of his UHF vision, Darling could see the immense complexity of its internal structure, the tiny metaspace curvature of its core. Mr. Brandy nudged the box a few times, as if finding an exact location on the table for it, and then with a flourish pulled up one sleeve of his jacket.
His wrist bore the tattoo of a NaPrin Intelligencer Warden.
Darling sat carefully and slowly back down.
He was not surprised when his direct interface queries to hotel security, the planetary gendarme, and the HC Consul General were not acknowledged. The little box had seen to that. The ever-present buzz of news, finance, and advertisement that usually filled the compartment of his awareness dedicated to DI was gone, roaring in its sudden and unprecedented silence. Darling cycled his senses through their various wavelengths, but the box revealed only the most legal of emanations: nothing so crude as a jamming signal. The box was manufacturing a host of DI transmissions, hunter-packets that neatly intercepted the quanta comprising Darling's own connections to the local net; the hunters posed as error messages and priority interrupts, attacked his messages while they were still meaningless iotae of data, before they had a chance to assemble into readable signals.
Without hesitation, Darling brought a heavy hand down on the box with crushing force. The Intelligencer swept it away with lightning speed, and Darling's reacted reflexively: he stopped his hand a centimeter before it obliterated the table in a shower of glass.
Zimivic smiled. "Really, my dear Darling. You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?"
"The first moment is often the best time to strike," Darling answered, his eyes locked with those of the Warden.
"Yes," Zimivic said, nodding. "But I have struck before you. Of course, you are familiar with the Intelligencer system of justice, are you not?"
Darling nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on the Warden. He had seen them before in his travels, dogging their charges like evil ghosts. As with many offshoots of humanity, the NaPrin did not believe in incarceration, no matter what the crime. Thus, their convicted murderers, embezzlers, and petty thieves were each assigned a Warden for a sentence of time. The criminal was free within carefully specified limits, able to travel normally, the Warden merely an ever-present watcher. But if the terms of this haunting parole were broken, the Warden would kill its charge instantly, regardless of local laws and custom, regardless of how petty the original crime. Wardens were intentionally revolting in appearance, a badge of shame. And they were exceedingly difficult to escape.
A mere handful of Warden prisoners had ever been freed, and only with outside help. Darling had no access to the sort of firepower necessary to rid himself of this creature, certainly not without direct interface.
Bizarre that this Warden was working for Zimivic. Darling had never heard of a Warden having broken its vows of justice and turned mercenary. But of course a corrupted Intelligencer was exactly the sort of piece that Zimivic would acquire for his collection.
"Here are the terms of your parole, my Darling," the art dealer intoned carefully. "One: you are not to tell anyone why this Warden is attached to you. Two: you are not to attempt any contact with the Home Cluster Consulate or any HC or local officials, or any contact with third parties who might themselves do so. Three: you are not to attempt contact with any agents representing or claiming to represent the artist Robert Vaddum, nor with Vaddum himself. Four: you may not purchase any weapons. Five: you must leave Malvir, the planet, before local Malvir City sunrise tomorrow. Fortunately, Mr. Brandy holds tickets for the next direct passage to Parate, which leaves in five hours. I'm afraid the vessel is Chiat Dai, and lacks accommodations of the level you are accustomed to. But the journey is only three weeks, which is, coincidentally, the length of your sentence."
"Parate," Darling murmured. He tried to say more, and failed. He considered a variety of sudden attacks across the table. None carried a high probability of success. He was stronger than the Warden but not as fast. And Wardens were armed with a gamut of weaponry optimized over the decades to kill suddenly and completely, including a small-radius suicide bomb if all else failed. They were impossible to debate or subvert; it was said that they were not even Turing positive. With a sickening feeling of defeat, Darling instructed his secondary processors to program governors that would prevent him from accidentally violating Zimivic's instructions.
He had been so close to seeing the master artist again.
Darling felt as he had the night the news of the Blast Event had come through. The sudden, titanic blast at the synthplant; the image of the improbable crater, repeated on the news feeds every twenty minutes for days. But at least this time, it wasn't permanent. After this was all over, he could return to Malvir. One day soon, he would see Vaddum again.
Darling cleared his primaries, the artificial equivalent of a deep sigh, and sat motionless while Zimivic gloated for a while longer. Getting no response from Darling, the man soon tired of boasting and left the bar with a last goodbye, hale and triumphant.
Darling stared at his captor—unmoving, unblinking, waiting for a sign that this was an ordinary human, a fake. But the man stared back, equally a statue, equally inhuman in his deadly patience.
Ten minutes later, a tardy tertiary processor offered the answer to a forgotten question: the flock of birds was of the species columba livia. The bird's belly was white, with a much higher albedo than its dark back and wings. Thus, as the flock flew about the tower, it changed from light to dark to light…
The limo went to ground ten klicks from the hotel. There was simply no flying in Malvir City; that stratum was taken. Mira swore as they crawled through ground traffic. What was the point of unlimited wealth if you couldn't fly?
Oscar's last words preyed on her, as frustrating as the slow progress through the narrow, bird-shit speckled streets. This won't take a minute. Why would he remember that one phrase from months ago, when he couldn't keep her assumed name in his head for ten seconds? Her pseudonyms were designed by software to engender a certain trust, an I've-heard-of-you feeling of familiarity. They were based on ancient historical figures learned about in school and promptly buried deep inside one's brain: Nel Arm-straw, Mahout Magandhi, Joan Dark. But the pseudonym hadn't stuck. Just an off-hand remark as she had—as she had removed the internal battery!
She'd said it just before she killed him.
But not the Oscar Vale that had been shipped back to Malvir and re-embodied. She'd said it to the other one. The dead one. She'd disconnected him from the ether power gird and pulled his battery and spiked the blackbox with 2,000 amps/60,000 volts and dropped it in the trash. That Oscar Vale was gone, no question.