Blonde Bombshell (13 page)

19

Paris

The two men who weren’t werewolves sat outside a pavement café on the edge of Montmartre. One of them was reading the international edition of the
Herald Tribune.
The other was using a small pumice stone to sharpen his teeth.

“It says here,” said the reader, “that archaeologists in Africa—”

“Mmm?”

“The big hot one that looks like a pear. Archaeologists in Africa have found the oldest human remains so far discovered.”

“Is that right?”

The reader nodded. “Fragment of a jawbone.” The B-word made him wince. “Found in the fossilised faeces of a hyena. Scientists have pinpointed the age of the remains using carbon dating.”

“Carbon what?”

“Dating.”

The amateur dentist frowned. “I heard a bit about that on the broadcast network,” he said. “Apparently, it’s where a lot of beta males in search of mating partners sit at tables and interview females for no more than three minutes.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure how that’d work.”

The reader shrugged. “Well, they’ve got to talk about something, presumably. If you got a bunch of male archaeologists and another bunch of female archaeologists, and they all discussed how old the bones were for three minutes, I guess you’d probably make some sort of progress. And when you think how long seminars drag on for back home—”

“Yes, but three minutes. That’s not very long.”

“Short attention span,” the reader explained. “Definitely a defining characteristic of the species.”

“Maybe.” The amateur dentist twiddled his pumice thoughtfully. “Seems an odd way to choose a life partner, though.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can see how mating with a female who can tell if a bone’s stale just by looking at it would be really useful.” He read the paragraph again. “Two hundred thousand years,” he said thoughtfully. “Does that change anything, do you reckon?”

His colleague shook his head. “Don’t see why,” he said. “Basically, it just means they’re even dumber than we thought. Two hundred thousand years, and they’re still powering their transport with controlled explosions.”

“I guess. But maybe we should report it.”

“No.” The amateur dentist shook his head. “One, I don’t see how it makes any difference. Two, how do we know that figure’s accurate? If their idea of scientific method is high-intensity group flirtation, I doubt the Institute back home’s going to set much store by their findings.” He tested the points of his back teeth with the pad of his forefinger and nodded his satisfaction. “Forget about it, and let’s get on with the job, right? Sooner we finish, sooner we’re out of here.”

He’d chosen the right line of argument. The reader folded the newspaper and laid it on the table. “Agreed,” he said. “Right, where is he now?”

“With the Pavlov female,” his colleague said, glancing at a hand-sized portable screen. “If this thing’s working properly, they’re about due to jump to their first conclusion round about …” He counted under his breath, three, two, one. “Now,” he said.

The reader drained the last of his coffee, shivered and stood up. “We’d better make a move,” he said. “Signal the ship.”

Two seconds later, they dissolved into the faintest and quickest of blurs. Because of a freak electric storm over New Guinea and a slight malfunction on a broadcast satellite, viewers in Holland watching an afternoon soap caught a fleeting glimpse of what appeared to be two Alsatian dogs drifting in space, and a dozen Swiss motorists relying on their GPS guidance systems found themselves diverted down service roads and cart tracks. A nuclear submarine ran aground in the Cayman Islands, and a weather station in Mexico confidently forecast a light shower of frogs.

Fortuitously, at the precise moment when two shimmering whirlpools of light spun into two men in business suits in the middle of Novosibirsk’s busiest shopping mall, nobody was looking that way; they were all too busy watching a pyramid of one thousand cans of prime Italian plum tomatoes slowly collapsing in the window of a prestigious delicatessen. Sometimes, you just get lucky.

The non-werewolf who’d been reading the newspaper checked his miniscreen. “Two degrees out,” he said irritably. “Soon as we’ve got a moment, we’re going to have to recalibrate the whole system.” He looked round. “What is this place?”

“Some sort of covered market,” his colleague said.

“What, the whole thing? Just —
shops?”

“I suppose they must like shops.”

“Obviously.” The reader put his miniscreen away and scanned for an exit. “According to the beacon, Stetchkin and Pavlov are 2.71 clicks that way,” he said. “Try and act—” His colleague had vanished. The reader found him a few minutes later, staring into a shop window as though it was a sneak preview of a particularly nasty version of the afterlife.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We came here to help these people, but…”

The shop called itself Pawz Jawz ‘in’ Clawz, and the centrepiece of its display was a life-size Airedale terrier modelling the latest in doggy jupons, boiled-prawn pink with a white faux-fur collar. The reader swallowed hard. “So what?” he said. “We do the same thing back home. We have little coats and hoods for humans, and dear little shoes with brass buckles, and—”

“That’s
different,”
his colleague growled. “You know it is. This is—

“They’re a primitive species. They don’t know any better.”

“They’ve had two hundred thousand years to learn. I think they’re like this because they want to be. In which case,” he added grimly, “I say, let ‘em fry.”

“It’s not about them, and you know it.”

His colleague nodded slowly. “You’re right, I guess,” he said. “Still, I wish I hadn’t seen that. It makes it hard to do the job, you know?”

The reader shook his head. “Let’s get it done and get the hell out of here,” he said.

20

New York

Mark Twain sat in his suite on the forty-second floor of the Waldorf Astoria. On his knees lay a partially dismantled laptop, into which he was plumbing a dead octopus. Remarkable, he thought, that the Dirters could be so unobservant. Their oceans had produced perhaps the most sophisticated and versatile organic computer processor in the galaxy, capable of performing as many calculations per second as the latest generation of Ostar super-processors, and what did they do with it? They ate it. You could buy one of the things for a few coins in the open-air fish market ten minutes walk from where he was sitting; back home, only the government and the really big corporations could afford access to this level of hardware. The only downside he could see was that in forty-eight hours or so it’d start to smell fairly bad, and soon after that it’d have to be replaced. Big deal. Very carefully he looped a tiny noose of beryllium wire round the tip of a cold tentacle and hit the laptop’s ESC key. The screen lit up and immediately swarmed with Ostar numerals.

That made him feel a lot better. There was a whole load of difference between communicating with the bomb vehicle in orbit by direct neural interface and being able to see things actually displayed on a screen. In theory, of course, there shouldn’t be; but there was. It was a side-effect of being in an organic body for so long. When he got home, he’d prepare a report for the— But he wasn’t going home. He frowned, as a minor power surge made the octopus wriggle. Any day now, as soon as he’d figured out what he needed to know, he was going to blow himself up, and the planet with him. The octopods, with their incredible organic circuitry, would be extinct, along with thirty million species of mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, plants, lesser eukaryotics and micro-organisms. Arguably a high price to pay for getting rid of irritating tunes in the head.

Not that he had that problem any more. A few skilful tweaks to his cognitive subroutines had produced a filter that recognised repetitive beats and musical intervals and edited them out before they reached the relevant centres of his brain; now he could stand in the hotel lobby, where they played piped background music all the time, and never hear a thing.

Easy, of course, for a machine like him. It would probably be much harder to build and install such filters for flesh-and-blood Ostar back home; much simpler and cheaper to blow up the planet, much more cost-effective. Or maybe not. He thought about that. If he could take a breeding pair of octopuses back to Ostar and sell them to one of the big hardware corporations, would a 2 per cent royalty pay for hot-wiring filters into the brains of every Ostar on the planet? It took him three whole seconds to do the maths. Yes, it would, with enough left over for a cup of
r’uuytf and
a
spnf
cake.

A dead tentacle, galvanised by a spike in the current, stood up and waggled feebly before flopping back into the nest of coiled wires. There was, of course, an absolute and inviolable rule: weapons don’t make policy decisions. Quite apart from the obvious dangers, such as bombs changing sides or getting better offers in mid-trajectory, there was an important ethical issue — important, that is, for the weapons themselves. A choice, a say in how it was used, would mean responsibility, blame, guilt, not to mention the vast and murky multiverse of legal liability. You’d get shells refusing to burst and landmines declining to explode because they were afraid of getting sued. It’d be a nightmare.

Yes, whispered a rogue path in his matrix, but you’ve got to consider the larger picture. When they launched you, there was no way they could’ve known about the octopus. If you just blithely went ahead and vaporised the planet, depriving the Ostar of technology that could revolutionise the entire IT industry, wouldn’t that be the most appalling failure in your duty of care towards those who designed and built you and gave you the priceless gift of alternating current? A smart bomb may be nothing more than a tool, but the very fact of its intelligence imposes a larger duty. Sure, a bomb can’t make a
decision.
Perish the thought. But it can, and should, report back any relevant data, to allow its masters an informed choice.

Mark Twain looked down at his left hand. It held a pretzel; to be precise, half a pretzel. The other half was in his mouth, being slowly ground into soggy meal. He couldn’t remember making the decision to ingest bionutrients. His power-consumption monitors told him that there was no need for him to take on further fuel supplies at this time. He must, therefore, have picked up the snack and started nibbling it because he felt like it, because he wanted to.

High above the clouds, where the bomb sailed in silent orbit, red lights started flashing on a console. Down below, Mark Twain dropped half a pretzel and spat out the other half. He knew precisely what was happening to him. It was a recognised error syndrome: body memory, they called it, the organic fallacy. When a detached organic probe’s been walking around on its own for too long, it can get to believing it’s a he or a she, not an it, let alone a small, incidental accessory to an it that should damn well do as it’s told instead of filling its head with nonsense. Standard operating procedure at this point would be to return the module designated Mark Twain to the bomb vehicle for immediate disassembly and reintegration, followed by the construction of a replacement probe with an uninfected pseudo-consciousness. It should happen automatically, as soon as the presence of the syndrome had been detected. It should, in fact, have happened by now.

Mark Twain waited. Nope, still here.

And that was really worrying; because it implied that the syndrome was so deeply rooted in the system that it could override the built-in safety protocols and simply refuse to go.
Shan ‘t. Can’t make me. You and whose army?

Oh well, he thought, and closed his eyes. Critical systems failure, he input into himself, initiate immediate self-destruct.

He counted to ten and opened them again. Still here.

A wave of joy broke over him, sweeping him past guilt and recrimination. He should’ve blown up, but he hadn’t; oh
wow.
And this room; it was amazing, with its soft carpet you could wiggle your toes in, and the unbelievable textures of velvet cushions, and let’s not even think about the really freaky stuff in the bathroom. When they’d fired him from his job for no apparent reason, it had seemed only fair and reasonable to divert money from their bank account to pay for a room in the best hotel in town; after all, he’d slaved away on their behalf for two whole days— After the joy, the shame.

Just as they believe in a sort of heaven, bombs believe in a kind of hell. It’s the place where the bad bombs go, the ones that didn’t do what they were told. Basically it’s a scrapyard, a bramble— and nettle-choked dump where defective ordnance is taken and deposited, explosive charges removed, engines disabled, sensors killed, guidance systems decommissioned. But, just to be cruel, they leave the cognitive processes intact and functioning, fed by solar panels. Titanium alloys don’t rust, the way steel does. Maybe, when Ostar’s sun goes nova and the planet is burnt up, the devastating heat of the Last Day will melt them and put them out of their misery; maybe not, because they were built to resist heat, to fly through the corona of a star without so much as raising a cybernetic sweat. In which case— Mark Twain didn’t fancy that at all, but he knew he deserved it.

He knew that he hadn’t self-destructed because a tiny but dominant subfunction in what he could only describe as his subconscious (and he had no right, no right at all, to have one of those) had sent the abort command, along with the relevant command codes, drawn from the massively encrypted data files at the very heart of his program. The fact was plain and simple: he hadn’t wanted to die.

The Dirters had a myth. The supreme being shared by a number of their religions had once had a cadre of assistants, called angels. Once, long ago, some of these angels had rebelled. A hiding to nothing, naturally, since the supreme being was supreme, and if the rebellion hadn’t taken place before the start of linear time, it’d have lasted about five minutes. Afterwards, the fallen angels had been sent to the scrapyard, the place where the bad Dirters go, to run the unpleasant afterlife as a sort of franchise. Typical primitive dualism, except — and it was a point the Dirters themselves seemed to have missed, which was odd given the extraordinary amount of energy and resources they’d devoted to religion over the years —nowhere was it stated in the Books that the fallen angels stopped being angels. They were simply sent to serve in a different, highly uncongenial capacity, rather like an unpopular cabinet minister being transferred from the Treasury to Arts & Culture. Duty, in other words, survives. Even rebellion and treason don’t absolve you of it. Duty is for ever.

I’ll make up for it, Mark Twain vowed. I’ll find out what happened to the Mark One, I’ll disable the defences and I’ll blast this horrible planet to space-dust. Or die trying.

Or die succeeding.

Whichever.

He downloaded a full genome and bioschematic of the octopus and encoded it into a data bullet ready to fire at Homeworld. They could do wonderful things with green goo these days; maybe they could recreate the octopus out of raw protoplasm in a tank in a lab, or at least manufacture an artificial version. If not, well, there was another Dirter saying that had impressed itself on his mind, to do with omelettes and eggs.

The octopus’s dead eye met his. He hadn’t fired the data bullet. He shrugged, and called up PavNet on the laptop.

Using a basic Ostar search agent, he scanned the network at large for Ostar code signatures. There were several; several squared, in fact. No, make that several to the power of ten. The further in he went, the more he found; not fully formed sequences but little bits and pieces — patches, fixes, cheats, slipped in where nobody would normally bother to look. That figured. After all, busy professionals don’t waste time examining the bits that work, it’s the bits that don’t that need attention, and Ostar software was by definition practically infallible. But it was all low-grade stuff, ordinary commercial ware, with very little in the way of security; a basic off-the-shelf enquiry protocol allowed him access to the properties’ signatures. All the Ostar-made stuff, he found, was no more than five years old.

What had happened five years ago? Lucy Pavlov, that was what. After an hour’s worth of diligent searching, he reached the solid conclusion that the Ostar-originated material all came from PaySoft, directly or indirectly. One Dirter; five years. He leaned back and thought hard for a while about interstellar trajectories.

Doing sums in his head had put him into a sort of mild trance; when he came out of it, he found himself facing a screen filled with random Dirter letters and numbers, evidently some form of primitive encryption. Nothing to see here; it was just some intercepted message, which the search procedure had picked up on because the carrier format (a PaySoft product) had a tiny Ostar-derived component, but for some reason — one of those strange organic things called whims — he took the 1.6 seconds he needed to translate it into clear.

It was a memo from the CEO of the Credit Mayonnais (huh!) to someone by the name of George Stetchkin. It was all about money; large sums of money, which had gone missing— He read it again, and a third time. Then he hacked into the bank’s intranet and dug out everything he could find about the story. When he was satisfied there wasn’t any more, he picked up the telephone and called Room Service.

“I want four octopuses,” he said. “Now.”

Slight pause; then a calm voice asked how Sir wanted them. Stupid question. “Quickly,” he said.

Yes, said the calm voice, of course; but would that be fried, or lightly steamed, or tossed on a bed of wild rocket with freshly grated parmesan, or—?

“Raw, of course.”

Raw. Pause. Certainly, sir.

“And quickly.
Now.”
Mark Twain sighed angrily. “You can manage that, can’t you?”

“Of course, sir. Um—”

“I mean, this is a
hotel
you’re supposed to be running here, isn’t it?”

The octopi, the voice assured him, would be with him in a moment. He shook his head and put the phone down. Fried, for crying out loud. The thought of what immersion in hot oil would do to the delicate filigree of natural superconductors that comprised the octopus’s central nervous system made him feel faint.

Back to the screen, and the story so far. Huge sums of money: well, that could be just ordinary criminal activity, such as was only to be expected in a semi-barbarous society. But it was the way it had disappeared: teleportation, or he was an abacus. A coal-fired backwater like Dirt couldn’t possibly have technology like that. He found some sensor readings annexed to a routine security report. The atmosphere in the bank vault showed one part in sixty million of— He blinked. It was still there, so he hadn’t imagined it. He called up a spectrographic analysis, just to make sure.

Aposiderium trioxide. How the hell had that stuff got there?

Dirt had first come to the attention of the Ostar as part of a long-range mineral-prospecting scan, carried out by a series of unmanned rover probes. The mineral they were specifically looking for, needless to say, was aposiderium, the staple element on which all Ostar technology relied; the only source of truly clean energy in the known galaxy. Aposiderium sulphide, refined by partial transmigration in a strong
urff’n
-particle field, powered every engine and generator on the planet. It was the ideal fuel source: clean, safe, economical, efficient, easy to use, cheap to produce; the only problem with it was that, outside the Ostar system, it was quite rare. The planet Dirt had first been recorded 270 years ago, one entry in a very long list headed No Traces of Aposiderium Detected Here.

Aposiderium
trioxide.
Now that was tricky stuff. A waste product, essentially; it was what you got if you subjected refined metallic aposiderium to a deintegrate/reintegrate phased resonance pulse — in other words, if you teleported it. The Ostar had come across it during mining operations in the far asteroids, where teleporting the stuff out of ore-bearing rocks was more cost-effective than blasting the rocks apart and scooping it up mechanically. Doing it that way, you lost a trivial percentage of the stuff to beam tarnish, as they called it in the trade; the outer surface skin of the raw metal reacted with loose oxygen during transit, and came out the other end as this useless, mildly toxic grey dust. Aposiderium trioxide.