She curled her fingers reflexively. Not legal, but she would hellcrown every Selector for three minutes. Barge into Selector hideout six arbeiters three assistants grab Yol Origund himself, the Israeli expatriate who had taken the Selector mantle from founder Wolfe Ruller. Push the assistants outside watch the arbeiters tie the captives into hard chairs pull the clamp on their heads scan and reroute their own darkest inner boxes, watch the flick of concern as they see red lines…
Crime and punishment.
She switched back to the AXIS reports. Poor Ernest. He would never use a hellcrown for its intended purpose but the technological sparkles enchanted him. What artist would not want even the crudest direct access to the viewer’s imagination.
Had she been too harsh. No knowing. Duty and law.
Mary Choy caught herself hitching a sob. Spun out and not yet begun. She glanced at her seatmates C, E, F, G, three young men in longsuits and an older woman expensively dressed in thirties period all involved in seatback vid, deadsound dulling their entertainments to distant whispers. They heard nothing of her distress.
LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine): “AXIS’s number two mobile explorer has finally finished an investigation of the sample scraped from one of the towers found arranged in rings across B-2. While the mobile explorer’s nano based laboratories are very small, they are almost as thorough as any similar laboratories on Earth, the only difference being that on Earth, we’ve experienced an additional fifteen years of progress. Still, the results are expected to be enlightening.
“If you’ve noticed, as we have, that reports from all AXIS monitoring facilities have been less informative recently, there’s a simple explanation. We are in a difficult phase of AXIS’s exploration of B-2. The large-scale investigations have shown a world at once enigmatic and entrancing, a world covered with life but with no obvious animals or even large plants. Yet the existence of the circles of towers seems to point to some form of intelligent life, though we are cautioned against drawing such conclusions. What AXIS is doing now is delving deeper into the evidence it’s gathered thus far. The mobile explorers wander and float purposefully and conduct their analyses; the nickel sized children continue to broadcast information about the planet as a whole; the volumes of information AXIS is absorbing are tremendous.
“But AXIS is not able to quickly send all this information directly back to Earth. AXIS has been designed as a true remote thinking machine, able to conduct its own experiments and draw its own conclusions, condensing the information—freeze drying it, as it were—and sending the more compact results to us.
“Should AXIS find a mystery it cannot solve, then the unprocessed facts will indeed be returned to Earth, but not immediately; that process could take years, even decades. AXIS is capable of surviving for at least a century, repairing itself, happily going about its work; but there are many weak links, not the least of them being the transponders spread across deep space between Earth and Alpha Centauri. They cannot repair themselves as AXIS can. They exist in the deep cold of interstellar space and their entire energy budget is devoted to receiving and transmitting signals. Should one of these transponders be lost, transmission time of all information will quadruple. Should more than one be lost, transmission may stop completely or proceed at an impossibly slow rate.
“And if for any reason part of a message is lost, it will take virtually another decade to instruct AXIS to send it again. The thread of AXIS’s downlink to Earth is fragile indeed, which I suppose is only fitting, considering how audacious this enterprise is in the first place.”
36
There are no chariots there, no yokes, no roads. But the King projects out of himself chariots, yokes, roads. There are no joys there, no happiness, no pleasures. But he projects from himself joys, happiness, pleasures. There are no pools there, no lotus ponds and streams. But he projects from himself pools, lotus ponds and streams. For he is the creator.
The Institute for Psychological Research rose from a seventeen acre lawn like an inverted step pyramid, one edge knifing into a ten story bronze and green glass cylinder. The building had originally belonged to a Chinese and Russian research center; under Raphkind many Chinese and Russian holdings within the continental United States had been nationalized following a joint default on US Bank loans.
The building had gone unused for six months then had been handed over with virtually no strings attached to Martin Burke. Within a year the IPR had seemed a permanent fixture, employing three hundred people.
The lawn was self maintaining as were all the gardens on the IPR grounds; desertion did not carry an onus of neglect anymore. Throughout the building arbeiters would have kept everything shipshape. Except for human plundering the IPR should be just as he had left it…
The car parked openly before the glass doors and Martin stepped out, reaching back to take his slate from Lascal. “Home is the hunter,” Lascal said. “We’ve checked all federal and metro eyes and ears. None are in use now. The place is quiet.”
Martin ignored that and walked toward the glass doors. They did not refuse him. For a brief moment simply to enter the building as he had a thousand times before as if nothing had ever happened was worth all he had agreed to.
Lascal followed at a discreet distance. Martin lingered in the reception area for a moment clutching his slate with white knuckled fingers. He glanced at Lascal, who returned the ghost of a smile. Martin nodded and proceeded past the empty front desk then called back over his shoulder, “Who’s guarding the place?”
“Not for you to worry about,” Lascal said. “It’s secure.”
“We just drove up and walked in…” Martin said, his voice trailing off. Not to worry about. “Where’s Dr. Neuman?”
“Everybody’s on the first research level,” Lascal said, following Martin’s hollow footsteps.
“And where’s Goldsmith?”
“In one of the patient rooms.”
Martin stepped into his old office at the end of the hall two doors before the elevators to the underground research level. The disk cabinets opened to his touch but were empty; his desktop was clean. Biting his lower lip he tried the drawers on the desk; they were locked and would not accept his thumb-print. He was back but he was not home; home no longer recognized him.
“You didn’t need that stuff, did you?” Lascal asked quietly, standing in the door. “You didn’t tell us you needed it.”
Martin shook his head quickly and pushed past him.
The elevator door opened at his approach and he got in, Lascal following two steps behind. Martin felt his anger rise and worked to control it. Two words kept echoing through his head: No right. Perhaps that meant that they had had no right to ransack his workplace; it might also mean there was no right to be found in anybody’s actions regarding IPR.
Twenty seven feet down. The doors opened. No time at all since he last walked this hall turned to the left and authoritatively opened the large door to the central research theater. Martin stood hands on hips, darting glances at the lowered stage. Above the stage, behind thick glass, three rows of swivel seats occupied a gallery. Banks of lights glowed gently, recessed into the hemispherical dome directly over the theater. Most of the equipment was still in place as he had left it, tended by two research arbeiters: the white and silver triplex cylinder, nano monitors, flat ranks of five computers and one thinker arrayed to the left of the three gray couches, minus the buffer computer, within which investigators and investigated might have the security of knowing they were swimming in a time delayed simulation…