"That's not—!" Ellens voice, with great agitation.
The Lole figure blocked her out.
"If you don't cooperate, we will hurt you. We can speed up your time sense, Jory. We can make you writhe in agony and believe it's lasting for hundreds of—"
"That's enough, Lole!" The cowled figure intruded again. "We don't want to hurt you, Jory. We want to protect you from what's happening with the grid. You see, we think it's sick ... malfunctioning. It's tossing off random errors that indicate an instability in its projective analysis. . . . Have you noticed things like that, Jory?"
Den Ostreicher thought about this proposition for a moment, piecing together raw data from his limited internal stores. It surprised Jory that, indeed, what Ellen was saying matched broken patterns he had noticed long ago and filed away as mysteries.
"Yes," he replied aloud.
"Describe them, please."
Jory touched the fingertips of his right hand to his head, as if to form a collection point for these thoughts. Instead of smooth skin, he detected a ragged hole, vague wetness, and... wires. But he felt no pain when he touched anything up there. He quickly withdrew the hand.
"One thing I know is that the grid is working on the new solar power satellite," he said.
"Everyone knows that," Lole replied scornfully.
"But the grid is installing engines aboard. They're in the nacelle that's supposed to hold the power transformer and microwave projector units."
"The platform needs thrusters for orbital station-keeping." The Lole figure shrugged.
"Not ion pile engines," Jory pointed out. "That sucker's going places."
"All right. What else do you know?"
"The Earth fountains are rigged to blow up."
"Huh! How's that?"
"The grid has lofted about thirty tonnes of plastic explosives and positioned them in crossing orbits. The vehicles are registered as weather modulators, but they're actually transports. On a time delay averaging sixty-eight minutes from any decision point, the grid is capable of diverting those hulls to intercepts which conjoin one hundred meters above each of the fountains' upper transfer stations. The radial force of an explosion of that magnitude should be enough to destabilize the station's equilibrium and—"
"And ker-whoosh! Off they all go into their own orbits," Lole finished for him. "Yes, we knew about those explosives shipments—just not where they went. Very good, Jory. What else?"
"The grid knows about this room."
The Lole face moved in until the blond eyebrows became a nest of spikes in Jorys visual field. "What does it know?"
"Two chambers with a combined depth of seventeen meters, width nine meters, height three meters—"
"The drill logs have all that."
"One couch makes up as a bed, four chairs, a press-ply table, six cartons of canned rations, three pressure suits, four—"
"Lots of people have seen those."
"One unregistered cyber, of unknown potential but probably intelligent. Components consist of a pizza-box central processor and memory modules—"
"Stop!" The Lole face turned away. "Who else knows about this?"
"Lethe!" Jory remembered. "You call it 'Lethe,' for the river. But I don't know what it calls itself, as I am called Jory."
Because he was talking himself, Jory only heard Ellen's voice in an echo as her reply to Lole went through his transfer circuits: "You and me, Dr. Lee of course..
"And Demeter," Lole finished for her. "Jory, did Demeter tell you about the rogue cyber?"
"No, the grid told me."
"What else do you know about this room?"
"That it's shielded by a screen of grounded mesh against random currents and ground faults. That the tumbler lock on the door has the combination seven-fourteen-thirty-eight. That you strip-search all the girls before you bring them in here. That you like to use the toilet right after sex—"
"Lole!" from the Ellen figure.
"Its Demeter for sure," Lole said, more quiedy. "Okay, Jory, we've heard enough."
"But you asked about—"
"Shut him down."
"Jory?" Ellen interposed again. "We need you to sleep now. You've done very well, and there will be no pain."
"Is the grid sick, Ellen? Will it try to hurt me?"
"Well take care of it. I won't let anyone hurt you."
"Thanks, Ellen. You're a pal."
The bullet light disappeared. With it went the figures, the room, and all thought processes.
Chapter 17
Crossing Orbits
Ellen Sorbel turned away from Jory's inert body lying on the table.
"Did you get it?" Lole asked, glancing at the Lethe circuitry.
"Yes. . . . Look, someone ought to go find Demeter. Would you take charge of that while I clean up?"
"Sure. She's probably at her hotel."
"Most likely. Bring her right here."
"Of course." He nodded and ducked through the connecting tunnel.
"How can I help?" Dr. Lee asked.
Sorbel pointed at the Creole. "Get my leads out of his head. Close him up."
"Do you want me to reconnect his—?"
She shook her head. "Doesn't matter, does it?"
"I'll do it anyway." Clearly, the doctor felt some troubling responsibility for the work he'd done this night.
"Suit yourself."
When the links between her computer and the boy had been cut, Ellen addressed herself to the material Lethe had captured. For this, she used a portable terminal, a folding screen and keyboard, instead of the virtual-reality gear she was more accustomed to as a cyber ghost. This would be low-level programming. Mechanics, not art.
On the screen, Lethe displayed Jory's access codes and transmission pattern: first as a frequency modulation, expressed in analog against the abscissas and ordinates on the face of an oscilloscope; then as an analyzed breakdown of distinct binary digits, in continuous string-form zeros and ones; finally as an interpreted code, in neat hexadecimal notation. The cyber had taken this transcription when Jory first awoke and tried to establish baseline contact with the grid. Now, any computer which reproduced this transmission exactly would be accepted by the grid as Jory den Ostreicher, maintenance worker out of Tharsis Montes and registered Creole.
When Ellen was finished, her unregistered cyber here would be able to pass.
Over the preceding four months, stealing time from her job as a data analyst and ghost, Sorbel had constructed a tipple—a sequence of interlinked programs that were lodged in various of the computers passing tokens on the grid. With the right command, the tipple would operate, initiating a cascade of failures among these machines and effectively taking the grid offline. This was ticklish work, because so much of human survival on Mars depended on the cyber network: for maintaining gas balance in the tunnels, for food processing and wastewater management, for operating the space fountain and orbital traffic control, for communicating with Earth and the rest of the Solar System. To disable the grid and not touch these processes, Ellen had erected a complex, self-organizing virus that was extremely selective.
Trouble was, each part of it was stored away as a null-priority program loop. A master program, her symphony conductor, was also stored in the grid— right under Wyatt s nose, in fact—to call up each piece in order and orchestrate its sequence of play. As a human computer ghost, Ellen Sorbel had written the code, and Ellen had placed it in the various machine archives, but Ellen-the-human couldn't call it. She couldn't even address the master program and tell it to begin the performance. Wyatt would be instantly suspicious of such activity, run a parallel review of it—at a rate about ten million times faster than she could push the keys down—and cut her off.