“Sweeping, Master,” Beta responded. “Done. The room is free of unauthorized devices. Give command.”
“Change Code Rembrandt. Code Rembrandt invalid. New Code for function is Code Degas. Execute.”
“Done.”
When it was Core, there was no “Master,” and the response sounded more mechanical. That would do.
“Run sequence from point at which subject Ari Martinez first entered this room on arrival and accessed either Core or these units.”
He sat and watched as Ari’s image went over the programming of the girls and also as he interrogated them. He sat without much expression, but when it was done he said, “Code Degas. Beta and Alpha are to volunteer no knowledge whatsoever from data they have from experiences before becoming part of this system to anyone but me. This data is to be encrypted and coded so that it cannot be accessed by anyone other than myself, and then only with the Code Hypatia. This knowledge may be accessed and used to carry out orders, but cannot be revealed or accessed to others. Execute.”
“Done,” came the response.
“Okay, girls,” he said with a child’s cruel glee. “Now we’re gonna have some educational fun here.”
Tann Nakitt was delighted to be where he was even though he would have preferred to be anywhere else. The fact was, the moment the Mallegestor had burst through the door and fired at him, striking him and knocking him cold, his last frantic thought had been that this was the end of all things.
He had also had little problem cooperating with the probe that basically had excised a very tiny and totally unpleasant portion of his captivity from his memories. He understood that he’d never be allowed out alive unless he did, and there wasn’t much he could do anyway. So now he was in the position of knowing, or at least suspecting, that something was missing, but not troubled about it. He’d had this sort of thing done before, and when it was something that really mattered, he’d always had this gut emotional reaction, the feeling that something that was a part of him had been wiped out. Since he didn’t feel that way, and since he had good narrative memory up to being shot and then from getting out of the scrubber case, as he thought of it, he didn’t let it worry him anymore.
“You didn’t, by any chance, bring my pipe and herbs with me, did you?” he asked Ari, as casual as if they were still in the lounge of the City of Modar.
“Sorry, no. And the passenger module was pretty well blown to bits, so there’s little chance we’ll recover them. You’ll live.”
“The pipe’s pretty important to us,” Nakitt explained. “It is something partially made by your family and partly by yourself and is a symbol of adulthood. The hell with some incriminating memories; the loss of the pipe feels like I lost an arm!”
“Well, you’re whole, hale, and as irritating as ever. For the next day or two you have fairly free run of the place, since you’ll be examined when you leave anyway. Don’t try swallowing any precious gems, don’t attempt to access the computer system, and stay out of the way of the folks who should be here, and we’ll all get along fine.”
“Don’t worry! As far as I’m concerned, let me eat, sleep, and just melt around here until it’s time to leave. Nothing personal, you understand, but just what I’ve seen of this mausoleum gives me the creeps.”
Ari was beginning to think the same way himself. Jules was—what? Over a century old, certainly, and through one rejuve treatment. He looked okay, but it was middle-aged distinguished, not Mister Adonis. Still, the guy had started as a street punk in a jerkwater town on a backward world where pig farming was still a major activity, and he’d become, by guts, smarts, guile, and ruthlessness, one of the richest and most influential men in all the Realm. How many bodies that represented, nobody knew, probably not even Jules. The old boy was fond of commenting that keeping score was the first step to getting caught.
Such a man, over such a length of time, had to feel as if he were somehow possessed or guided by something supernatural. Not that he hadn’t made some mistakes and lost a few rounds, but very few, and nothing fatal either in the business or the climbing up through it. He’d been hurt a number of times, but never spent more than a few nights in custody anywhere.
He had no heirs and had never even considered marriage, most likely because, other than his mother and his sister— Ari’s mother—no women counted. Ari often thought that Jules really didn’t like women much; that his relations with them were less getting pleasure than getting even for something. Men who crossed him, he liked to take down, to reduce them to terror and make them bleed and bruise; women he enjoyed torturing or recreating as slaves in some twisted fantasy of his that he now had the power to realize.
Still, Jules may have been a gangster and a business genius all in one, but he was no scientist or engineer. He believed what machines told him, and he had a lot of faith in technology. He wasn’t infallible, and he was becoming convinced that he was, and that was dangerous. He, Ari, knew the potential lurking in this kind of setup. Isolated, so insulated that even Realm law enforcement needed permission to land, with a very small set of personnel—until the two girls, no permanent residents—and lots of experimental state of the art stuff that still wasn’t approved in the Realm. Wallinchky might think he had the computer under control, but who could say for sure?
Ari knew there wasn’t much he could do about it if anything did happen, though. Unlike Jules, he had neither the self-confidence nor the ability to put those things out of his mind that couldn’t be dealt with, and so he hadn’t been sleeping all that well.
It also didn’t help that, on the morning Tann Nakitt was to be awakened, Beta, the former Ming, had appeared and informed him, “The Master has assigned me to you for whatever you may require, sir.” He could tell it was what had been Ming without even trying to make out the facial features under all that makeup, or whatever it was. Angel had been and remained a head taller than Ming.
He didn’t like that at all. “I do not require you for anything. You do not have to be here.”
“My sole function is to execute the wishes of the Master,” she informed him. “The Master wishes me here.” And that, of course, was that. But she added, “Sir, the Master has designated me as your personal computer station. You may ask anything of me and I can retrieve it from Core. Also, I can relay commands to and from any other unit or Core. You are to use me for that purpose exclusively, sir.”
He had no illusions that his uncle was sending her as a favor. She was here to make certain he did everything just right. That irritated him as well, but he knew he again had little choice in the matter. Up until the Modar business, he and Jules had mostly operated in separate spheres, he working for a variety of Jules’s companies, mostly legitimate ones, and Jules, well, being the octopus. It was clear now that neither he nor his uncle were comfortable being in such close proximity to one another.
She had simply stood there, impassive, as he brought Nakitt out of suspended animation, consisting on his part of observing what the medlab computer did and bringing the Geldorian to mental alertness. And she’d observed as he himself had guided the interrogation in the mind box that allowed just a bit of inconvenient stuff to be excised. She followed him everywhere, got out of his way at all times, and responded briskly if he asked her to hand him something. She said nothing unless asked something that required a response, and she gave the response as tersely as possible. Still, she didn’t move like an automaton; she moved like a normal person, even a normal Terran-type female. She ate and drank some really godawful crap she got from the nearest computer station once a day, and if she crapped or took a leak, he never saw it.