20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (25 page)

He gave the cards a hungry look. "What else
you want?"

"A favour."

She set the CDVs down on the right side of
his desk and showed him the ciphertext message.

"Mr. Davies has informed me that you are
archiving the wireless messages on the keypunch machine for the
analytical engine."

"Yes," he replied. He lowered his voice so
that the others in the room could not hear. "Actually, I'm working
on a way to archive them on the keypunch as they come in, so we
don't have to do it manually, and I don't get stuck with it. Don't
tell the other blokes, though. If it don't work -- well, me pride
has taken enough of a beating lately, you see."

"Brilliant idea, Mr. Humboldt," she replied,
and if she were honest with herself, she would think that he was
very clever indeed. Perhaps he wasn't as thick as she had thought.
"But for now, I just need to retrieve a copy of this message, if
you can find it. Can you do that for me?"

He took the paper from her hand and studied
it. "It'll be hard to find."

"But not impossible?"

"Aw, no, Miss. I can try to match this string
of numbers here. Just takes longer, that's all." He squinted at
her. "Will this make us square, then? I'm pulling lots of extra
duty here, you see. I'm missing out on all the best card
games."

She produced her most beatific smile for him.
"I promise, Mr. Humboldt, that I will speak to Nigel on your
behalf, if you are able to find it."

"It might take some time, though, Miss L.
I've got a stack of Mr. Wallace's messages to work through." He
pointed to the stack of pages to his left.

"What in the world would a Cultural Officer
have to report? Did we not bring enough monogrammed handkerchiefs
or something?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised at how many messages
he sends. They are all encoded, o'course, everyone's is, but you
don't always need to know what they said. Plenty o'juicy stuff to
be found anyway, if you know where to look."

"Oh, really?"

As Mrs. Brightman would have said,
Information is where you find it
.

"Honestly!" Humboldt replied.

She deliberately widened her eyes and focused
all of her attention on him. It was one of her better
intelligence-gathering techniques, and it defeated torture
hands-down.

"It's all in the higher-level data," he
continued. He pointed at the partial header in her message.
"Metadata, as we call it here in Informatics. Who he sends messages
to, when he sends 'em, how often, how long they are, how the
message is laid out. I can tell you who's sending messages to his
wife
and
to his sweetheart and when, I can. I can tell you
who's reporting on a regular basis, or who is supposed to and is
constantly late."

He leaned closer and whispered, "Wallace
sends
loads
of messages. Mostly at night, ship's time. To
lots of different people. He thinks we're just typists, but we
Booleans are more than that. We recognize patterns, see? That's how
we write code. We see patterns in data and tell the A.E. what to do
with 'em. Don't underestimate your Booleans, Miss Llewellyn. Even
without the actual text o' the message, we know things. And
sometimes we can guess the rest." He tapped the side of his nose
and waggled his eyebrows at her. "Everyone's got a pattern, Miss L.
Everyone. If you know a body's pattern, you can read 'em like a
book. And when they break that pattern, you can tell even
more."

"What do you mean?"

She decided to let this little fountain of
knowledge babble for as long as he wished. His talk of patterns
interested her, and his description of the engine code tickled her
inner computer. Mrs. Brightman was quite fortunate that more
scientists could not access these machines, at least not yet; they
would remove the need for her Girls.

"Like if the cipher text pattern changes,"
Humboldt said. "Either the sender is talking to someone new, or his
code's been broken. But so far, Wallace's hasn't changed." He
pushed his chair back and spread his hands as he spoke. "Just
imagine, Miss L, what would happen if everyone had one of these
engines! It would change everything! Even more than the Invasion
changed us. Personally, I think that's why the TIA has a monopoly
on their use. You have to have a license to have one, you see, not
to mention a herd of Booleans to run it. They want to control how
fast the world changes, methinks."

Gemma did imagine, as he carried on. A host
of analytical engines would certainly put Mrs. Brightman out of
business, and quickly. But she couldn't tell the Boolean that. She
merely nodded with astonishment at his cleverness.

"Another obstacle is the data storage. Them
cards are a right pain in the arse, having to feed 'em in every
time a body wants to run a programme. If we could access our data
more quickly, I doubt if even the TIA could prevent universities
and banks and governments from building their own."

He adjusted his hunter green jacket and sat
up straighter in his chair. He picked up the CDVs and rested them
next to one of the Sophie cards.

"I'm on the job, Miss. I like the one of the
Badger and Tentacle especially. M'cousin Jules runs it, you know!
Them cards in particular are rare. Even I couldn't get one before
we left." He smiled at her. "But I have to let you know, it'll take
a while to do what you're asking. You run on and do some science or
something. I'll let you know when I find anything."

"Very well. Pax?"

"Pax."

After they shook hands on it, Gemma left the
chamber in a slight daze. Humboldt was not as dim as she had
reckoned.

Could he be? No, surely not
, she
thought. If he were her Watcher, why would he agree to help
her?

She could not help but feel anxious, though
she did feel better for having taken some sort of action. Had she
just tipped her hand to the Watcher that she was looking for him?
She got a firm grip on her thoughts and decided to believe that she
had just added a new ally to her growing list. The ghost of the Man
from Shanghai retreated into the shadows of her memory, as he
always did when she patched up an ill-conceived kick on her
part.

She looked up at the clock next to the lift.
It was getting late. Her belly reminded her that between decoding
her message and visiting Humboldt, she had missed both tea and
dinner. Even though she was tired, she knew that her unsettled mind
would not allow her to sleep. She could not bear the thought of
pacing in her cabin until Pugh called for her.

She touched the slip of CDV in her pocket.
The corridor was empty; only the night crew was on duty by now, and
most of them were on the command deck. She paused at the lift and
took out the card. Looking up at her was the upper half of a
portrait of Sophie the Steamfitter.

Did it belong to one of the gun crew? Or
perhaps to Cervantes himself? Or did someone else leave it behind?
Perhaps it slipped out of a pocket whilst the panel was open? It
was difficult to tell by the card. Sophie cards were ubiquitous on
the
Fury
. Except for the burn and tear across the bottom,
there was nothing unique about this one. She considered showing it
to Dr. Pugh, but she didn't feel ready to do that just yet.

She took the lift to the laboratory deck. She
would take advantage of ship's night and search once more for the
Orion file, as her mistress demanded. She walked by the open door
of the laboratory and saw Bidarhalli's back blocking one of his
panels, the one with the ridiculous equations that never
changed.

They reminded her of her brief time in a
Belgian laboratory. In her guise as "Claire Bisette", she had
deliberately miscalculated entries in a ballistics chart. She had
not lied when she had told Pugh that Brightman was not in the habit
of destroying technology; but even her mistress broke habits every
now and then. Not stealing the data had been a strange sensation
for her, and only her gratitude to Mrs. Brightman had assuaged her
smarting pride as she had typed the mistakes whilst the true
numbers danced behind her eyes. It had been a delicate business,
mucking the figures up just enough to skew the researcher's results
but not enough to be immediately obvious. She had been overjoyed to
leave that mysterious job behind her. Filching a formula was not a
problem, as it also sated her own inquisitiveness, but deliberate
errors went against her grain.

Bidarhalli studied a piece of paper, followed
the lines of the equation with his grease pencil with an
absentminded hum, and then wrote a character in the column to the
right of the equations. It was so quiet that she could hear the
pencil squeaking against the glass.

So, she was not the only one that had
discovered the trick to safer decoding. She held her breath, prayed
that the man would not hear her, and squinted at the distant panel.
It was no good; the plaintext was in Hindi. Gemma knew many
languages, but Hindi was not among them.

She took the lift to another deck and paced
the corridor. In the quiet of ship's night, she could hear the
voice of the
Fury
. A steady background drone hummed like a
busy washerwoman, punctuated by skittering and scrabbling from the
vents that was faint enough to hide behind the busy noises of
ship's day. She wondered if she were hearing some of Humboldt's
algorithmic bugs in the air ducts.

She paced for what seemed like hours, and
still her mind refused to settle. Could Bidarhalli have sent that
mysterious message on the first day? Or did he use encoded messages
as a matter of course, like most of the Cohort? If so, why decode
it when everyone else was off duty, if the plaintext was not
readable to anyone but him? Could he be her Watcher?

Her heart raced like a wild horse with no
rider to restrain it. She wanted nothing more than to run, but
there was nowhere to go. She stood still and pulled the reins on
her breathing to get it back under control. The ship seemed so
cramped and close. If only she could take a turn outside ... it had
been so long since she had seen the sun ... other than the one in
the orrery ... Nigel's little garden ...

She remembered the Gardens as suddenly as she
had remembered Humboldt earlier. Why not? She did not know if they
were locked down at night, but she had plenty of time on her hands
to find out. A little time in the green might settle her mind,
though she could not imagine ever sleeping again.

Soon she found herself in front of one of the
Garden doors; there were four, according to the schematics, on
various sides of the chamber. There was a slight hiss as the door
released, and she could feel moisture stealing out of the
opening.

A bill next to the door sported a flirty
Sophie the Steamfitter outfitted with a speech bubble and little
else, admonishing the reader to "KEEP DOOR CLOSED TO KEEP MOISTURE
AND PESTS WHERE THEY BELONG". So, this must be the place from which
Humboldt's bug had escaped, only to be crushed in the gears of the
A.E.

Despite her fretfulness, she did manage to
smirk at the "Hats Required" sign next to the bill as she passed
through the door. There were a few caps and hats on pegs, along
with a gaudy straw hat for the ladies, covered in horrid faux
cabbage roses and a wide mauve ribbon. A matching parasol hung next
to it. Gemma left them untouched. Surely, the very proper Cultural
Officer was abed at this hour, and such niceties could be set
aside. Unless, as Humboldt had indicated, he was busy composing
wireless messages. Instead, she released her hair from its braid.
She shook it loose and let it hang free.

She stepped through the lock and inhaled the
humid air, refreshingly wet after the arid corridor. After she
secured the door, she was left in darkness, with only a series of
what appeared to be streetlamps illuminating a brick path ahead.
Apparently, the Gardens followed the ship's clock and let the trees
sleep. The sudden nightfall startled her a little, after her
near-continuous time under harsh lights.

She meandered along the path, breathing in
the smell of earthly things, things that she didn't know she
missed. Here was the perfume of roses, and there the scent of
turned soil. She smelt water, running water, here in the depths of
space! She thought she heard the gurgling of a current over stones
in the distance. It felt luxuriant, almost sinful, to just walk and
take it all in. No secret signals to watch for, no messages to pry
out of hidden places, no bullets to dodge. There was no Man from
Shanghai to haunt her footsteps here, as he did far too often these
days. Just one foot in front of another. How long had it been since
she could do that? Just walk?

She ran her hands through her loose hair,
enjoying the privacy of the late-night path. The crew's night shift
was much smaller than the day shift, and most of them were on the
bridge or the Oberth deck. She was certain she would have as much
time alone here as she wanted. She just hoped that the Watcher,
whoever that happened to be, hadn't followed her.

The sound of water faded a little as she
passed through an iron gate between two tall maple trees. The light
of the nearby lamp glinted off the feathers of a brass eagle
perched on one of the posts.

The path turned and moved farther away from
the rippling of water. In its place was a new sound: raucous
laughter. Someone was having a grand old time here. She sniffed in
irritation, disappointed by the interruption. She turned to work
her way back to the corridor when she thought she detected a
familiar tone in his merriment. Curiosity got the better of her,
and she continued in her original direction. Soon she caught sight
of a gazebo on a small hill, and she made her way towards it. The
lights grew brighter and more numerous as she closed in on it. The
juniper trees that lined the path dripped with tiny flecks of
illumination, like nests of fairies.