"Here," said Professor Mayer, holding out the photograph. "Recognize it?"
There was a "Politie BBE" stamp on the back of the photograph over a date, the initials of a crime-scene photographer and a coffee ring where a paper cup had been put down carelessly.
They told Professor Mayer little more than she already knew. In April 1989 a squat used by heroin addicts had burnt out in Vizelstraat, Amsterdam. The fire-twisted body of a victim had been found and the body had been so badly charred it proved impossible to put an age on it. Although it was doubtful if anyone tried very hard.
The Bijzondere Bijstands Eenheid became involved because the first police officer on the scene decided that the body had been shot through the head with a high-powered rifle. As most of the skull was missing this was a reasonable mistake to make, even if it was boiling brains and not a bullet that ripped apart the vagrant's head.
After this had been established, responsibility for the crime reverted to the Amsterdam police and it was their note which was attached to the photograph. The victim was thought to be one Marzaq al-Turq, sometimes known as Moz Ritter, and there was no evidence to suggest foul play.
"There was no reason to exclude it either," Petra Mayer said, but the Professor was talking to herself.
Police HQ in Amsterdam were currently trying to locate the evidence locker into which a bone sample from the body had been decanted, so they could carry out the forensics tests no one had bothered to do before.
"I followed your work, you know." She spoke as slowly and as clearly as she could. Many people thought Professor Mayer's lugubrious growl was affectation or the result of too many drugs. This was wrong.
The drug damage and the facial scar from her famous car crash might both be self-inflicted and closely related, but the voice came from God. Although the Professor was honest enough to admit that her sixty-a-day cigarette habit did not help matters.
"A BBS here," said Professor Mayer. "An early news group there. Little hints and rough workings. I kept a list of the names you used and I wasn't the only one, did you know that?"
How could he not? Prisoner Zero had waited for replies and confirmations. For other people's take on his solutions. It was a very quick and dirty form of peer review, a term he'd first stumbled over at Amsterdam University. Although it didn't always work, of course. He'd posted a line of code onto a Polish bulletin board, just that, nothing more. This was at the height of Solidarity. A time when messages were mostly coded and all BBS were watched no matter how primitive, and what passed for academic BBS in Poland at that time was very primitive indeed.
And his equation had just sat there, unanswered and perhaps unread. One of a dozen fragments he took from the notebook and posted in his attempt, fleeting and destined for failure, to find the numinous within numeracy.
"I'm offering you a new life," Petra Mayer said. "A new start." Grinding out her Lucky Strike, the elderly academic reached for the packet and realized it was empty. "No?" Professor Mayer's smile was sour. "I told Gene not to make me waste my time asking you." She paused, thought about it. "Not much point asking you anything really, is there?"
CHAPTER 40
Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]
In the beginning there was lightning and then agony, sharp where it shouldn't have been. Where no one should be touching her.
"CV-1," a voice said, sounding matter-of-fact. "Also essential for countering heart attacks, near-drowning, frigidity, bed-wetting, incontinence and related ailments."
Fingers moved from between her legs to her chest, rolling up the latex top of her jump suit and the voice said, "Do I need the quill?"
It was speaking mostly to itself.
The fingers found a point on Tris's sternum, settled one finger on top of another and pressed in the bony hollow of her chest, at a point exactly equidistant between her nipples.
"CV-17," said the voice. "Good for confusion, hysteria, high blood pressure, breathing ailments, difficulty swallowing and assorted similar maladies..."
The pressure increased and then lifted as the darkness unwrapped itself, leaving Tris facing the top half of an anxious-looking young man, whose skin was as white as his tied-back ponytail. Above the waist he was as real as Tris, below this he seemed a mere shadow. At least that's what Tris thought, until the boy flicked back the other half of his cloak and suddenly she could see all of him.
"Unlucky," he said, helping Tris to her feet. "Getting lightning struck like that." The boy was taller than anybody she'd ever seen, his face soft and somehow bloodless, pale like snow or high clouds in a summer sky.
"Aren't there two of you?" Tris said.
Luca Pacioli shrugged. "There are dozens of us," he said. "Unfortunately, these days they're all me." Thrusting out his hand, the young man offered it to Tris.
His shake was tentative.
His skin cold.
"I'm Luca Pacioli," he said. "Ambassador Luca Pacioli. You're welcome to use my house if you need to sleep. I'm a baron," he added, rather diffidently. "A very poor one, sadly."
Luca let his eyes trail across her ripped jump suit, hesitating at the tear above one breast and stopping altogether when his gaze reached her bare abdomen where the trousers barely clung to her hips.
"You must have walked far," he said.
Tris nodded.
"A pity about your ship."
"My...?"
"That little racing yacht of yours. I saw it skim overhead a few days ago. Very pretty. You must have been upset when they shot it down."
"I crashed it," Tris said. "No one shot it down."
Luca's glance was kind. "That's not what I heard. The imperial guard took it out. I listen to the private feeds," he added. "I'm not meant to but there's not much else to do."
Somehow while he'd been talking, Luca had managed to steer Tris in a wide circle across rough grass and a broken path, so that now Tris found herself heading back the way she'd come.
"It's okay," he said. "You can trust me."
"Yeah," said Tris. "That's what they all say."
There was a feed bar on the fifteenth level of Rip, right at the bottom of the Razor's Edge where she'd wasted one summer. Actually there were several bars but they had merged into one in her memory and the jump area was called the Razor's Edge, because that's what it was.
A ragged scar down the inside of the world. Someone had sealed the Rip with spun glass, the silvery kind which was meant to catch radiation. Although Tris didn't believe it worked because too many jumpers she knew got sick and died from the coughs. You could always tell who was going to go next because their skin went bad and their eyes developed that haunted look, like they knew what was going to happen but didn't want anyone mentioning it.
Tris's health remained good but that was Tris, she'd never been ill in her life and the one thing she'd learnt from her time on the fifteenth was it really didn't matter if the guy was dying or not, you really, really couldn't trust anyone who said, "You can trust me."
You just couldn't.
And if they said, "I'm not going to hurt you" they always did.
"This way," Luca said, leading Tris towards a turning off the road between a broken wall on one side and a mound of rubble, so brush-covered that it was nearly impossible to work out what had been there originally, on the other.