On the same day as I received this piece of negative equity I picked up the mollusc shell and listened for the sound of the sea — I hadn’t identified the shell yet. There was no sound and feeling hard put upon I shook it in irritation as one would shake any other piece of malfunctioning hardware. A cuboid crystal with silver circuitry etched in three faces like strange glyphs, fell out and cracked the top of my coffee table. Okay, it wasn’t that valuable, but I was attached to it, which was probably why I was pissed off enough to download a copy of what turned out to be Paul’s LTM to sell to Grable before passing the original on to Henara. As was to be my luck at that time I discovered I could not find Grable anywhere. I ended up studying the memory myself, determined to make a decent profit somehow that week.
It took me a couple of days to run through the last mission. Much of my time was spent fast forwarding by hand or by computer instruction ie stop when something interesting occurs. It seemed to me that these Golem spent most of their time standing about waiting to be given orders. The tale I eventually managed to piece together was one of incompetence and failure.
The PSC had tried to establish a base on a planet called Scylla before something called the world-tide occurred. This was to be done by a mixed crew of hired labourers and androids.
The whole thing was severely disorganised. The androids weren’t complex enough and the workers not clever enough to sort out the discrepancy. There were disputes about pay and an attempt, considering the time limit on the project, at what can only be described as extortion. I saw the base half-finished and a belated attempt at evacuation. Some of the humans got away, others boxed the androids and attempted to seal the base against the world-tide. Paul was not boxed because he was almost as useful as the humans. He was a very new design. The rest was like some Atlantean disaster; explosions, water, sparks, floating bodies. When Paul’s memory greyed into auto shutdown — after a long period of time recording the marine life feeding — I realised what Grable had been after. The androids. They were Golem twos, the first workable androids to be sold by Cybercorp — there had only been one Golem one — and if still there they were worth disgustingly huge amounts of money. I wondered then where he got his information from and why Paul’s LTM had ended up in that shell. But even as I wondered I packed the equipment I would need and sought the required permissions for its transportation. By the next solstan day I had booked myself for transmission to Scylla’s runcible, for while running through Paul’s memory I had seen a map and a map reference. I knew where the base was.
The crate is hidden. The world-tide is coming. And there are only two things that stand between me and death. My Tenkian autogun keeps the lice away, but there is no sensible way it can keep me from drowning. There is another way though. Even as I record this I pull up my sleeve and look at the bracelet clasped around my wrist. The jewels seemed to have taken on a sinister glitter.
Jane was not happy about my sudden business trip, but I managed to bring her round, as I normally do. After spending one pleasant night with her I got up early and made my way to the transmission station. The runcible transmission, the longest and most unbelievable part of any interstellar journey, took no time at all. I don’t even try to pretend to know anything about the technology that can shove me through an underspace non-distance and drag me out a hundred or more light years away, and in that I am more honest than most. Skaidon technology; brought about by the linking of a human mind and AI. It’s impossible to understand unless you are both a genius, like Skaidon himself, and plugged in. In my life I have been neither and am unlikely to be.
One moment I was there standing in the containment sphere as before the altar to Minotaur; silver bull’s horns on a dais of black glass, horns holding the shimmering disk of the cusp, then one step after I am one hundred and twenty-three light years away on the other side of another cusp in an identical sphere: standardization across the galaxy — as awesome as it is depressing.
Beyond the standard one G gravity in the containment sphere the gravity was rather less, but being a fairly well-seasoned traveller I soon adjusted. A wide concourse led from the row of containment spheres to a huge embarkation lounge, this being because I had arrived on the moonlet Carla; the closest companion to Scylla, which was too unstable for siting a runcible. At the opposite end of the lounge I could see a delta-wing shuttle waiting to heave itself into a violet sky and was surprised to see how few people there were waiting for the flight. I made my way to an information console and called up one of the runcible subminds.
“Name?”
“Jason Chel.”
“What information do you require, Jason Chel?”
“There are certain packages under my code and I wish to pick them — “
“The packages have arrived at cargo runcible four. There are AG drays available at all cargo runcibles.”
I regarded the console with a degree of suspicion. It had been very quick for a submind.
Perhaps it was Carla AI taking an interest itself. The contents of one of my packages were somewhat unusual.
“Er, could you also tell me when the next shuttle is leaving for Scylla?”
“There will not be another shuttle to Scylla for two hundred solstan days.”
“What?”
“There will not be another shuttle — “
“I heard what you said. Why will there not be another shuttle to Scylla for two hundred days?”
“Because it is summer.”
“I beg you pardon?”
There came a sound very like a sigh from the console as if it was tired of repeating this information to people who hadn’t checked.
“Scylla is closed to all traffic for a period of two hundred and seventy three solstan days during its summer season. All ground bases are sealed. This is due to the accelerated activity of dangerous life forms at this time of the year.”
I walked away from the console feeling like a complete idiot. Some of the equipment I had in my luggage was brought along to deal with the life forms I had seen in Paul’s memory, a precaution which had cost me a fair lump of credit for transportation under seal. Now I’d discovered that in my eagerness I’d made a complete bollix. I’d have to go back to Ganymede and wait three quarters of a year before I could come back. In a daze I headed for one of the bars at the edge of the lounge with the vague idea of getting plastered.
I was into my third scotch when a vaguely familiar figure slipped into the seat on the other side of my table. It took me a moment to recognise him, even then I wasn’t quite sure. He looked too clean, too suave, not the man I’d known.
“What a surprise to meet you here,” said Chaplin Grable, and he grinned as amiably as a shark. I sat upright and looked at him in surprise. His smile made a small transition into a sneer as he took out a chainglass blade and began cleaning his nails. They didn’t need cleaning.
“My contact tells me there was a small foul up. I didn’t get time to put the LTM back so he concealed it in the hammer-whelk shell.”
He glanced up from cleaning his nails and I wondered why I had always considered him to be a faintly ridiculous, irritating, but harmless fool.
“Seems the shell went into the next lot, which was then purchased by a Mr Chel. That would be you wouldn’t it?”
He slid around the table into the seat next to me, his arm along the back of my chair and the chainglass knife held between his fingertips with its point pressing against his leg. I considered hitting down on the knife and driving it into his leg, but decided that was a fool’s move. I needed to know how much he knew, how much he had planned. I put on my best buying and selling face.