“You can hardly expect me to be sympathetic to your problems. Under the circumstances.”
“I, ah, may have been a trifle out of line during the meeting. It must have seemed I’d stepped out of bounds. I know you hadn’t done anything to warrant a probe.”
“No, I hadn’t.”
“Anyway, I knew you’d slip out of it. It was too simple a trap to catch a fox like you.”
“Yes, I wondered about that too.”
Korda called the ball to his hand and turned it over and over, as if searching for the principle of its operation. “I wanted Philippe to think we weren’t getting along. There’s something odd about Philippe, you know. I don’t know what to make of his behavior of late.”
“Everyone says Philippe is doing a wonderful job.”
“So everyone says. And yet, since I gave him your desk, I’ve had more trouble than you can imagine. It’s not just the Stone House, you know. The Cultural Radiation Council is screaming for your nose and ears.”
“I’ve never even heard of them.”
“No, of course you haven’t. I protect you from them and their like. The point being that there was no way Cultural Radiation should have known about this operation. I think Philippe’s been leaking.”
“Why would he do that?”
Korda rolled the ball from hand to hand. In an evasive tone of voice he said, “Philippe is a good man. A bit of a backbiter, you know, but still. He has an excellent record. He used to be in charge of human cloning oversight before the advisory board spun it off as a separate department.”
“Philippe told me he didn’t know much about human cloning.”
“That was before he came here.” Korda raised his eyes. They were heavily lined, tired, cynical. “Look it up, if you don’t believe me.”
“I will.” So Philippe had lied to him. But how had Korda known that? Sitting beside this heavy, unhealthy spider king, the bureaucrat felt in great danger. He hoped the traitor was Philippe. Everyone talked about how good Philippe was, how slick, how subtle, but the thought of Korda as an enemy frightened him. He might sometimes seem the buffoon, but under that puffy exterior, those comic gestures, was the glimmer of cold steel.
“Boss?” His briefcase diffidently extended the phone.
He absorbed:
The hall of mirrors shunted the bureaucrat to the elevator bank, where he caught a train to the starward edge of the Puzzle Palace. It let him off at the portal of a skywalk, slabs of white marble laid end to end like so many shining dominoes out into the night.
To either side of the skywalk blazed a glory of stars, the holistic feed from observatories scattered through the Prosperan system. He walked out onto the narrow ribbon of marble, with the fortress of human knowledge burning behind him, the citadel ring of research ahead. A few scattered travelers were visible in the distance. It was a long trip to the Outer Circle, several hours experienced time. He could catch up with one if he wanted, to exchange gossip and shop talk. He did not want to.
“Hello! Care for some company?”
A pleasant-looking woman bustled up, wearing an odd hat, high and bulbous with a small brim. For the life of him he could not imagine what combination of interactivity it might represent. “My pleasure.”
They matched strides. Far ahead were any number of data docks, long perpendicular branchings ending in warships, transports, freighters, and battle stations, their absolute motions frozen in conventional space, all feeding off the data linkages the skywalk carried. “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” the woman said.
She gestured back at the Puzzle Palace, burning white as molten steeclass="underline" an intricate structure of a million towers that had swallowed the sun whole. Its component parts were in constant flux, the orbits of the physical stations changing relative positions, wings and levels hinging away from one another, separating and fusing, and shifting as well with the constant yeasting restructuring of knowledge and regulation. Cordelia and chill Katharina were at the far side of the structure, encased in crystal spires of data. “I guess,” he said.
“You know what’s humbling? What’s humbling is that all this can be done with a transmitted signal. If you stop to think about it, it seems it ought to be impossible. I mean, do you have the faintest idea how it’s done?”
“No, I don’t,” the bureaucrat admitted. The technology was far beyond anything he was cleared to understand. While he would not say so to a chance acquaintance, of all the Puzzle Palace’s mysteries, this was the one that most intrigued him.
There was an office rumor that the Transmittal Authority’s equipment could actually tunnel through time, sending their signals instantly through the millions of miles and then dumping them in a holding tank for the number of hours actual lightspeed transmission would take. A related but darker rumor held that the Outer Circle existed only as a convenient fiction, that there was no far asteroid belt, that the dangerous research sites were scattered tnrough the Inner Circle and planetary space. The Thu-lean stargrazers, by this theory, were nothing but a reassuring distraction.
“Well, I do. I’ve got it figured out, and I’ll tell you. You lose your identity when your signal is transmitted — if you stop and think about it, of course you do. At lightspeed, time stops. There’s no way you could experience the transit time. But when your signal is received, a programmed memory of the trip is retrofitted into your memory structure. That way you believe you’ve been conscious all those hours.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“It protects us from existential horror.” She adjusted her hat. “The fact is that all agents are artificial personalities. We’re such perfect copies of the base personality that we never really think about this. But we’re created, live for a few minutes or hours, and then are destroyed. If we experienced long blank spaces in our memories, we’d be brought face to face with our imminent deaths. We’d be forced to admit to ourselves that we do not reunite with our primaries but rather die. We’d refuse to report to our primaries. The Puzzle Palace would fill up with ghosts. See what I mean?”
“I… suppose I do.”
They came to a data dock, and the woman said, “Well, it’s been nice. But I’ve got to talk to at least five more people this shift if I want to meet my quota.”
“Wait a minute,” the bureaucrat said. “Just what is your occupation, anyway?”
The woman grinned hoydenishly. “I spread rumors.”
With a wave of her hand she was gone.
An edited skip. The bureaucrat emerged from the security gates into the data analogue of the Thulean stargrazers and shivered. “Whew,” he said. “Those things never fail to give me the willies.”
The security guard was wired to so many artificial augments he seemed some chimeric fusion of man and machine. Under half-silvered implants, his eyes studied the bureaucrat with near-sexual intentness. “They’re supposed to be frightening,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. If they ever get their claws in you, they’re much worse than you’d expect. So if you’ve got anything clever in mind, just you better forget it.”
The encounter space was enormously out of scale, a duplicate of those sheds where airships were built, structures so large that water vapor periodically formed clouds near the top and filled the interior with rain. It was taken up by a single naked giant.
Earth.
She crouched on all fours, more animal than human, huge, brutish, and filled with power. Her flesh was heavy and loose. Her limbs were shackled and chained, crude visualizations of the more subtle restraints and safeguards that kept her forever on the fringes of the system. The stench of her, an acrid blend of musk and urine and fermenting sweat, was overwhelming. She smelled solid and real and dangerous.