"Human sacrifice?"
"It doesn't take much energy to talk to a demon," I explain. "They're pretty much waiting to hear from us, at least the ones people mostly want to talk to. But they come from a long way away-from universes with a very weak affinity to our own. Information leakage doesn't imply an energy change in our own world; it's concealed in the random noise. But if we try to talk to a universe close to home there's a huge potential energy barrier to overcome-this sort of prevents causality violations. The whole thing is mediated by intelligence-observers are required to collapse the wave function-which is where the sacrifice comes in: we're eliminating an observer. Done correctly, this lets us talk to a universe that isn't so much next door as lying adjacent to our own, separated by a gap less than the Planck length."
"Oh." She points at the map. "So this thing… it's a very precise transformation through the Mandelbrot set. Which you guys have used as a map onto a Linde continuum, right? Why don't they just set up an n-dimensional homogeneous matrix transformation? It's so much more intuitively obvious."
"Uh-" She manages to surprise me at the damnedest times. "I don't know. Have to read up on it, I guess."
"Well." She pauses for an instant and looks very slightly disappointed, as if her star pupil has just failed a verbal test. "This is very like what I saw. Got any suggestions for what to do next, wise guy?"
"Yes. There's a photocopier upstairs. Let's call the curator and run off a copy or two. Then we can get someone back home to compare it to the photographs of the shipping container at that murder site in Rotterdam. If they're similar we have a connection."
OUR HOTEL HAS A BIJOU BAR AND A BREAKFAST room, but no restaurant; so it seems natural that after running off our copies we should go home, head for our respective rooms, freshen up, and head out on the town to find somewhere to eat. (And maybe share a drink or two. Those hours in the basement of horrors are going to give me bad dreams tonight, and I'd be surprised if Mo is any better.) I spend half an hour soaking in the bathtub with a copy of Surreal Calculus and the Navigation of Everett-Wheeler Continua-hoping to brush up on my dinner-table patter-then dry myself, pull on a clean pair of chinos and an open-necked shirt, and head upstairs.
Mo is waiting at the bar with a cup of coffee and a copy of the Herald Tribune. She's wearing the same evening-out-on-the-town outfit as last time. She folds the newspaper and nods at me. "Want to try that Indonesian place we passed?" I ask her.
"Why not." She finishes the coffee quickly. "Is it raining outside?"
"Wasn't last time I looked."
She stands up gracefully and pulls her coat on. "Let's go."
The nights are drawing in, and the evening air is cool and damp. I'm still self-conscious about navigating around the roads-not only do they run on the wrong side, but they've got separate bike lanes everywhere, and, to make matters worse, separate tram lanes that sometimes don't go in the same direction as the rest of the traffic. It makes crossing the road an exercise in head-twitching, and I nearly get mown down by a girl on a bicycle riding without lights in the dusk-but we make it to the tram stop more or less intact, and Mo doesn't laugh at me out loud. "Do you always jerk around like that?"
"Only when I'm trying to avoid the feral man-eating mopeds. Is this tram-ah." Two stops later we get off and head for that Indonesian place we passed earlier. They have a vacant table, and we have a meal.
I turn on my new palmtop's antisound and Mo talks to me over her satay: "Was that what you were hoping to find at the museum?"
I dribble peanut sauce over a skewer before replying. "It was what I was hoping not to find, really." She has her back to the plateglass window and I have a decent view of the main road behind her shoulder. Which is important, and I keep glancing that way because I am on edge-our friendly neighbourhood abductors seem to go to work at dusk, and when all's said and done this is a stakeout and Mo is the goat. I look back at her. She's very decorative, for a goat: most goats don't wear ethnic tops, large silver earrings, and friendly expressions. "On the other hand, at least we know we're dealing with something profoundly unpleasant. Which means that Carnate Gecko gets something solid to chew on and we've got a lead to follow up."
"Assuming it doesn't follow us up instead." Her expression clouds over in an instant: "Tell me the truth, Bob?"
My mouth turns dry: this is a moment I've been dreading even more than the discovery in the basement. "What?"
"Why are they after me?"
Oh, that truth. I manage to breathe again. "Your… research. And the stuff you were really working on in the States."
"You know about that." She looks tense and I suddenly wonder, How many secrets are we keeping from each other?
"Angleton told me about it. Black Chamber notified us when they deported you. Don't look so startled. About the restricted theoretical work on probability manipulation-lucky vectors, fate quantisation? It's all classified, but it's not-no, what I mean to say is, they don't like us running around on their turf, but information sharing goes on at different levels."
I point my skewer at her and dissemble creatively. "That stuff is fairly serious juju in our field. The Pentagon plays with it. We've got it. A couple of other countries have occult operations groups who make use of destiny entanglement fields. But the likes of Yusuf Qaradawi can't get his hands on it without a hell of a lot of reverse engineering, any more than the provisional IRA ever got their hands on cruise missile technology. The difference is, to build a cruise missile takes a ton of aerospace engineers, an advanced electronics industry, and factories. Whereas to build a scalar field that can locally boost probability coefficients attached to a Wigner's Friend observer-say, to allow a suicide bomber to walk right through a ring of bodyguards as if they aren't there-takes a couple of theoreticians and one or two field ops. Occult weapons are so much more portable that you can think in terms of stealing the infrastructure-if you've got people who can understand it. As most nongovernmental activist groups rely on cannon fodder so dumb they have 'mom' and 'dad' tattooed on their knuckles so the cops know who they belong to, that isn't usually much of a threat."
"But." She raises her last satay and swallows the skewered morsel. "This time there is." I see motion outside the window: see a familiar face, little more than a pale blur in the darkness, glance inside as it walks past.
"Evidently," I mumble, feeling guilty.
"So your bosses decided to trail me in public and see what they picked up while trying to identify the group by way of the museum basement," she adds briskly. "How many people are watching us, Bob?"
"At least one right now," I say, heart bouncing around my rib cage. "That I know of, I mean. This is supposed to be a full top-and-tail job, guards outside the hotel and round the clock watch on your movements. Same as most politicians at risk of assassination get. Not that we're expecting any suicide bombers," I add hastily.
She smiles at me warmly: "I'm so pleased to know that. It really makes me feel secure."
I wince. "Can you suggest any alternatives?" I ask.
"Not from your boss's-what's his name? Angleton? His point of view. No, I don't suppose there is." A waiter appears silently and removes our plates. She looks at me with an expression that I can't read. "Why are you here, Bob?"
"Uh…" I pause to get my thoughts in order. "Because it's my mess. I got roped in because I didn't follow procedures and hang you out to dry in California, and then I was there when things turned nasty, and this whole mess is classified up to stupid levels because there's a turf war going on between project management and operational executive-"