Even when the Cleveland Public Library logo came up, there were a few minutes of waiting. The screen scrolled messages about fighting illiteracy, and how he should spend his summer reading a book. Nohar knew that a few thousand users on a clunky time-sharing system at the same time tended to slow things down, but it still seemed the delay was directed at him.
He shifted on the couch, trying to become more comfortable. Waiting always made him aware of his tail.
Two minutes passed. Then, with a little electronic fanfare, the menu came up—though you couldn't quite call the animated figure a "menu." The library system called their animated characters "guides." The software was trying too hard to be friendly. It verged on the cute.
The "guide" facing him on the screen wore a sword
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S. ANDREW SWAPtN
strapped to his side, and was in the process of contemplating a human skull when he seemed to notice No-har's intrusion. The effect was spoiled by a glitch in the animation. A rolling blue line scrolled up and down the screen, shifting everything above it a pixel to the left. Nohar sighed. He had no desire to spend his time with a manic-depressive Dane. Especially after that call from Maria.
He spoke before the prince had time to object. "Text menu."
The only library "guide" he liked was the little blonde human girl, Alice.
The text menu came up and the first thing he did, despite Smith's admonition to start with Johnson, was to conduct a global search for information on Midwest Lapidary Imports. He wanted some sort of handle on his client's employer, which was also the home of the alleged suspects.
There was only a fifteen second pause.
The computer came back with the report, "Three items found."
Nohar shook his head. Only three? With a global search? That meant there were only three items in the entire library data base that even mentioned MLI.
Nohar played the first item and got a newsfax about diamond imports, legal and illegal. The focus on the article was how hard it was to keep track of the gems. It had a graph that dramatized the divergence between the gems known to have come into the country, and those known to be in circulation. In the last fifteen years, a hell of a lot more gems had been in circulation than could be accounted for. It was, in fact, causing a depression in the diamond market.
The article blamed the Fed and new smuggling techniques. The least likely smuggling method Nohar read about was casting the diamonds in the heat-tiles on the exterior of a ballistic shuttle. Midwest Lapidary was only mentioned peripherally in a list of domestic diamond-related companies at the end of the article.
FORESTS OF THE NtGHT
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The second article was actually about MLI, but it was only barely informative. It was from some subscriber service and was just a sparse paragraph of electronic text. MLI, a new company, incorporated in 2038. Wholesale diamond sales. Headquartered in Cleveland. Privately owned. Address. That was it.
Smith was right about these guys keeping a low profile. Nohar pictured most new corporate enterprises announcing themselves with trumpets and splashy media campaigns. It looked like MLI was trying to hide the fact it even existed.
The third item was a vid broadcast from December 2, 2043. The broadcast was dated. The guy with the news was still following journalistic fashion from the riots. Grimy safari jacket, urban camo pants, three-day-old stubble, sunglasses. The outfit had nothing to do with the story. The guy was standing in a snowdrift outside a pair of low office buildings faced in blue tile.
Nohar recognized a stretch of Mayfield Road behind the buildings. The guy was only a few miles to the east of Moreytown.
Hmm, Nohar thought there was a prison there.
The guy was trying very hard to have the voice of authority. "I am standing outside the offices and the laboratory of NuFood Incorporated. Today, came the surprising announcement that NuFood had been bought by a local diamond wholesaler, Midwest Lapidary. There had been speculation that NuFood had been on the verge of bankruptcy when it sold its assets and patents to Midwest Lapidary for an undisclosed amount. Shortly after the sale, NuFood's two hundred employees were laid off in what Midwest Lapidary called in a press release, 'a streamlining measure.' "NuFood, you may recall from a Special Health Report earlier this year, is the company with patents on the dietary supplement, MirrorProtein. While NuFood has had success creating synthetic food-products resembling natural items, which the human body cannot process, it has had continuing problems with the PDA 50
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in getting its products approved. Sources say this created the financial difficulty that led directly to the sale of the company. No one from Midwest Lapidary could be reached for comment."
That was a big help.
50 Smith was right. He needed to start with Johnson and work back. Johnson was Binder's campaign manager, so Nohar did a global search using both his name and Binder's.
The pause was closer to a full minute this time. His tail fell asleep. Nohar stood up to massage the base of his tail. Cat took the opportunity to jump up on the couch and snuggle into the warm dent in the cushions.
The screen flashed the results of the search. Over six thousand items, more like it. No way he could peruse all of it on-line, so he slipped in a ramcard and downloaded the whole mess of data. He leeched nearly fifteen megs in half that many minutes.
He now had his own little database on Binder and his campaign.
By five, his examination of the public information on Binder gave him no reason to alter his first impression of the guy as a right-wing reactionary bastard. It seemed Binder had something bad to say about every group or organization that didn't count him as a member; women, foreigners, liberals, intellectuals, blacks and hispanics, Catholics, the poor, the homeless, por-nographers, the news media—the list was endless. Despite the vitriol that coated every word the man uttered, three groups in particular gained his very special attention. In order of the invective he threw upon them, they were: moreaus, franks, and all their genetically-engineered ilk, whose rights he was actively involved in trying to repeal; homosexuals, whose sexual preference Binder seemed to rank primary in his personal list of mortal sins; and the U.S. federal government— the only place Binder and Nohar seemed to touch common ground—whose propensity for spending money FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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was only equaled by Binder's impulse to slash any spending program he could lay his hands on.
Nohar found it hard to believe he was investigating the murder of this guy's campaign manager.
The data on Daryl Johnson was more scattered. Nohar couldn't get a fix on his beliefs. All he got was the fact that Johnson was loyal to Binder and had been with the congressman since the state legislature. He had been recruited out of Bowling Green in the autumn of 2040. The same time as most of Binder's inner circle. Johnson's three classmates were: Edwin Har-rison, the campaign's legal counsel; Philip Young, the campaign finance chairman; and Desmond Thomson, the campaign press secretary. Johnson graduated at the age of twenty-three, late. Apparently because of a shift in his major, from chemistry to political science. A bit of a jump. That would make him the ripe old age of thirty-nine when he died.
Not so ripe, Nohar corrected himself. This guy was human, so thirty-nine was barely on the threshold of middle age. Thirty-nine was better than the life expectancy of some moreys.
He was a little more familiar with the situation he was dealing with. That was all. His client wanted to find out if MLI was behind the Johnson killing. So far, he didn't have any connection between the two, other than Smith's assertion that the missing three mega-bucks came from MLI.