Demeter rubbed the black, wide-weave mesh that draped these rock walls and ceiling. It seemed to be some kind of slippery plastic, maybe an acrylic fiber. She picked the warp and weft apart with her fingernails. Deep in the fabric, she found what looked like a metallic thread. She traced it down, plucking the black strands apart at spaced intervals, until the wire came out at the hem. There, under a blob of solder, it joined another wire running parallel to the floor. Demeter followed the latter to one of the pitons anchoring the cloth. The base wire was wrapped and soldered around the steel rod. And the rod, by the look of it, was grounded at least nine or ten centimeters into the native stone.
What could all this metal be for?
There was an old device—the Faraday shield—that anyone could make by simply connecting a set of parallel wires across one end, then grounding the common point. It was used to block electrostatic charges and to keep a voltage potential from building up between whatever lay on one side of the shield and the other. That would be useful, certainly, in protecting this room's contents from electrolytic corrosion, say, from seeping groundwater. Or it might screen out static noise that would interfere with delicate circuitry or degrade radio reception inside the room.
But would such a screen also serve to block out electromagnetic transmissions? Would it, perhaps, shield circuitry cached in this hideaway from detection by distant sensors? Would it protect the occupants from surveillance by telemetry?
Demeter had taken only the basic science-survey courses recommended for junior diplomats. But she remembered that, back in the twentieth century, when telecommunications signals and power transmission often went by underground copper cable, anti-corrosion devices attached to the outside of the sheathing didn't inhibit the signal-carrying capability. Nor did they stop eavesdroppers and power thieves who leeched off the surface of the cable with electromagnetic toroids.
Clearly, the wire mesh surrounding this room was intended to do something. It might be keeping something out, random voltages or sapping currents. But it would have nothing to do with keeping secrets inside. Quod erat demonstrandum....
In following the hem of fabric across the end of the secret room, Demeter had to pull out part of the store of canned goods and survival gear she had discovered last night. A draft, down near the floor, stirred the fine hairs on the back of her hand. There was an opening behind the boxes—had to be.
She set about moving the big items farther into the room. When she had opened a squeeze space, Demeter pushed the cloth aside and wiggled under the low lintel into a short tunnel. It was about three meters long, negotiable on her hands and knees, with a dull, caged light at the end. Clearly, the same purloined circuit that illuminated the first room brightened the space beyond.
The second room was hung with the same dark cloth but had none of the comfortable old furnishings or other amenities. Just a table of recycled, pressed plastic and a collection of... components.
Without touching anything, Demeter examined them. As she traced the shielded wires and mesh-sheathed ribbon cables between them, she began to get a sense of their function.
This box, certainly, was a power supply. It was fairly big, slab-sided, with a heatsink on the back and a red switch on the front. The switch had a "zero" and a "one" position, with a light-emitting diode aligned with the one's place. The black cable coming out of it connected to...
That cabinet was flat, like a pizza box. It spider-webbed with parallel cabling into a nest of modules that might-could be peripherals or possibly identical memory units. The cabinets flatness convinced her it contained a breadboard: that is, a hand-built circuit with the chips laid flat on an embedded gold-copper trace and soldered into position. That was how cybernetics inventors made one-offs and prototypes. The best commercial, mass-produced circuits from Earth, on the other hand, were spherically cast in layers under a microgravity environment. Like Sugar, they were a single unit, resembling pearls.
And this nest of modules—probably memories, now that she thought about it—all had a damaged look about them. Each of the ceramic cases had been cracked open, something done to their innards, and then resealed with liquid epoxy. . . . Very hand-built. And by a certifiable paranoid.
What Demeter couldn't identify was the input-output module; the system had no keyboard, trackball, or display device, no helmet or gloves. That, and there didn't seem to be any connection to network resources. She looked for cables leaving the tabletop in any direction, or something that might double as an antenna, and found nothing. Except, of course, that the grid could hear a cyber of this power and complexity just from the electromagnetic emanations of its cabling, sheathed or not. Simply turning it on would send out a radio-frequency signature.
"Why, you bastard!" Coghlan said aloud, meaning Mitsuno.
Despite all his assurances, and in the face of his apparent compassion and tenderness, Lole had lied to her. From the evidence spread out on this table, his secure little hideaway—"someplace you'll like," he had said, where he "usually required a strip-search" before allowing the uninitiated to enter—had housed its own cyber device all along.
Counting up the memory modules and dividing by four, she guesstimated that it operated well within the range of artificially intelligent. Probably with a Stanford-Sunnyvale quotient of sixteen hundred or more. And anything it sensed and processed, the grid would know a nanosecond later through electromagnetic interferometry.
"You unparalleled bastard!"
Lole Mitsuno and Ellen Sorbel entered their favorite watering hole, still wrangling about the botched datafields on the Hellas survey.
"You know there's no way a bed of olivine crystals can have extruded sideways into those sedimentary layers," Mitsuno told her. "I know there's no way it could have happened. Olivine is igneous rock. When it enters a formation, all the orderly structure just evaporates. Literally. So tell that to your cyber."
"I tried, but he's stubborn."
"Well then, we'll talk him over with Wyatt. Maybe the boss program can pound some sense into his diodes—"
"There you are!"
Lole glanced up and saw Demeter Coghlan bearing down on their table. From the flare in her eyes, she wasn't the happy woman he'd left ten hours ago.
"Demeter! Good to see—"
"Do you want to tell me what that tunnel's really for?" she demanded.
"What tunnel?" he asked, face dropping into a mask.
"Lole, what have you—?" Ellen sounded worried.
"The secret room where we . . ." Demeter glanced at Sorbel and her jaw tightened. "Where we fucked last night."
"Lole!" Ellen gasped. "Did you—?"
But Mitsuno cut her off, talking fast. "As I explained, Dem, its a place where some of us go to unwind, to discuss things in private, maybe hold a litde party. Its no big secret. Really."
Demeter chewed this over for just ten seconds.
"Then will you also explain to me," she said in a lower tone, "why the minute I go there, everyone is worried about it?"
"Who's worried?"
"Sun, the Korean playboy, and Orthis, the North Zealand negotiator. Both of them came asking after me this morning. Both said they missed me last night. They went looking right away and couldn't find me."
"Well, I think I mentioned that those tunnels aren't exactly open to the public," he replied slowly, trying to signal her with his eyebrows. Hadn't she figured out yet that the grid listened everywhere? There are no real services in that part of the complex. There are no terminals or glasslines, let alone electronic, uh, observation points. So people looking for you might not be able to, uh, contact you."