InterstellarNet: Origins (28 page)

Gil made one last try. “This transaction must be material for the distributor. Why hasn’t
it
made an announcement?”

“Because they don’t have to. The distributor is privately held.”

The verbal fencing continued for a while, without Gil learning any more. But he would.

■□■

Familiarity did nothing to improve O’Toole’s Pub. If anything, the place was seedier every time Gil visited. He popped an allergy pill and tried to ignore the pall of cigarette smoke.

On the plus side, the IBC engineer Gil had nicknamed Grumpy—whose real name was Harald Olafson—was eminently approachable. Listen to Harald gripe (and he never lacked for subjects), and he was your pal. Buy him the occasional beer, and Harald was a friend for life.

Despite profound and underappreciated expertise in—just ask him—everything, the one subject on which Harald could shed no light was the special-order biocomps.

“Doesn’t everyone know about the big mystery order?” Gil had answered Harald’s raised eyebrow, and that had sufficed. Discretion was evidently a second topic that escaped Harald’s purview.

“I’m just curious.” Gil signaled for two more beers. “For my readers. Don’t worry about it, Harald. Someone else will explain it to me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Gil saw Harald twitch.

If it were humanly possible, Harald would come up with
something
to reestablish his expertise.

■□■

Blindside damage notwithstanding, humanity’s infosphere offered Aareehl a plethora of information. Correction:
Earth’s
infosphere. Official links were severed between Earth and its former colonies. Governments on both sides were jamming interplanetary lines of sight to block unofficial transmissions.

The data embargo was necessarily porous; Earth could not possibly disrupt comm links with every spacer ship, settled asteroid, and habitat. So some interplanetary communications must continue, but Aareehl did not know how to find, or make use of, such illicit connectivity.

The ICU AI who took Aareehl’s routine messages would not speculate when official interplanetary communications might resume. Aareehl put off following up with the Secretary-General. After the slaughter at ICU headquarters, Feulner had quite enough to do.

Unaided, Aareehl tried to comprehend the disaster. Of course Earth was worse off than the day before the asteroid hit. The horror was that Earth must now be poorer than Aareehl—well, its predecessor—could remember, all the way back to 2078. Much of the economic freefall stemmed from the spacer secession. Not since the Soviet empire disintegrated, if Aareehl’s research was correct, had a human economy so imploded in political turmoil.

The agent’s software lacked curiosity; it mined the infosphere for only one purpose: trade. It found that its recovered archives contained several technologies not yet employed by the humans. That inventory would only grow as transmissions from Tau Ceti—from a direction no human world could jam—continued unabated. Its duty remained to license that knowledge.

Aareehl had immediately reported to Home about humanity’s travails, but any guidance must be twenty-four Earth years in coming. Meanwhile it had authority a human might call “charging what the market will bear,” authority that, recovered memories revealed, its predecessor had exploited adeptly. Aareehl-clone, in unforeseen circumstances, felt unprepared to exercise such discretion. It needed urgently to understand what the newly impoverished Earth could afford.

And it realized it need not be entirely alone in seeking answers.

2

“So you’re off to crown the dauphin and save France?” Gretchen Matthews called from the next room.

The former Gretchen McNally was an historian by training and first love. She had gone straight from university to the lunar Foreign Ministry, through which she had risen steadily to her present position of Deputy Minister for Terrestrial Affairs. At work, every utterance demanded careful premeditation. Every word she heard or read or ’netted was necessarily examined at great length within its historical and geopolitical contexts. It was no wonder, Gil Matthews thought, that on her own time his oh-so-cute wife reveled in free association.

He stopped midmutter. Neural implants, as Gretchen liked to remind him, could be operated silently. He had the bad habit, when excited, of vocalizing his side of a ’net dialogue. “Answering his voices,” Gretch the Kvetch called it. And he
was
excited.

No, agitated.

IBC’s biggest customers were publicly traded corporations. He had practiced strategic glowering and suggestive vagaries with their top execs and come away convinced that none was IBC’s mystery buyer. It was maddening! His subscribers should be trading IBC stock.

But should they buy or sell?
That
was the question.

He padded into the tiny kitchen where Gretch puttered, her back to the door. She stood eighteen centimeters taller than he.
Everyone
old enough to vote seemed to be taller than he.

Despite the friendly tease, Joan of Arc was not the French leader apt to come to Gil’s mind. He resisted the urge to tuck a forearm inside his shirt. Instead, Gil hopped. One-sixth gee provided ample hang time to plant a kiss on the top of his wife’s curly red locks.

She had the spousal ability to read his mind. “
Height
is a dimension that doesn’t matter.” Her whisk continued beating a bowlful of eggs. Keeping liquid inside the bowl took real skill on the moon. “Any luck?”

“Unclear.” Instead of answers, Gil’s digging had turned up something else interesting. One of IBC’s biggest customers, and he had convinced himself they were
not
presently buying vats of new biocomps, was the Belter biotech giant Life Engineering, Inc. LEI had recently won a hotly competed auction for some still-undisclosed Whale technology. The financial press—the Big Guys, not solo scribblers like Gil—considered the win, despite its rumored huge price tag, a coup. He had found nothing to suggest that the news-making IBC customer and IBC’s shy buyer had anything to do with each other.

Only Gil’s gut told him otherwise.

■□■

“Jacking, Mister.”

Dennis had parked on a street dimly lit by retro
faux
gas lamps. The gruff-voiced man behind him had probably mistaken for flab Dennis’s well-tailored massiveness. Dennis turned slowly, arms held away from his sides.

“Your comp. Slowly.” The punk’s knife should have made the warning redundant.

Dennis took the computer from his jacket, thumbed the biosensor pad, and enunciated his code phrase. An LED blinked readiness to beam credits.

To transfer funds between personal comps required that the receiving device be positioned within centimeters of the paying device, on which the authorizing thumb had to be firmly pressed. The protocol made sense for legal transactions—and it made a creditjacking very up-close and personal.

Patience, Dennis told himself.

The jacker darted forward, computer in his left hand, knife in his right. According to the script, in a few seconds the victim’s credit balance would be transferred.

Dennis dropped his comp, aborting the transfer. He had grabbed the punk’s knife arm before the comp hit the ground. Snap. For good measure,
snap
went the other arm. Comp back in his pocket, Dennis was driving away before the jacker recovered enough from his shock to scream.

■□■

Dennis’s earliest memory was of his father bouncing helplessly off a wall.

The Earthie tourist had lifted Father like a sack of potatoes and flung him effortlessly. Thinking back, Dennis never doubted that his abusive, short-tempered father was the one at fault.

Two standard years of age, early in his first Titan year, Dennie had had no idea what instigated the scuffle. Nor had he as a toddler understood the differences among worlds. For all the confusion surrounding the incident, however, Dennis’s childhood reaction was visceral, specific, and enduring. No one would ever humiliate
him
like that.

I’m not like you, Dad.
A jacker out there had two broken arms to prove it.

For public consumption, the training regimen teenaged Dennis undertook aimed solely at career flexibility. The strength to cope outside Titan’s feeble gravity, a mere one-seventh of a standard gee, did, in fact, expand his options.

Physical discipline got Dennis as far as Mars and three-eighths gee. He demonstrated mental gifts, too, and an aptitude for computer systems integration that led to a string of career successes. He saved with the same single-mindedness as he exercised, for skeletal-enhancement nanotech was far from cheap.

And so he had come to Earth: the societal apex and gravitational hellhole of human space.

In only one way had his planning fallen short. He had failed to predict the (in hindsight inevitable) ribbing about him being a titan from Titan. He never reacted to the teasing—and he never forgot.

Anyone who cared to understand Dennis needed to look no further than his route to Earth. He could, and did, focus on a goal until it was achieved. Whatever it took. However long it took. Regardless of obstacles.

The jacker incident was dredging up unpleasant memories, and Dennis exercised to work it off. He was lifting free weights when the Moby agent messaged to inquire about his availability. “Now is fine, Aareehl.”

“I’m puzzled,” the androgyne began with typical abruptness. “Where are the other InterstellarNet agents?”

Dennis dropped the barbell, and it hit the carpet with a
clank
. Implants were only partially integrated with the auditory cortex—he “heard” material from the infosphere, but the sound his ears collected did
not
get sent outward. “I don’t understand, Aareehl.”

“The ICU deals with ten extraterrestrial species, yet I cannot reach any other ET agent. Pre-Blindside, that was never a problem.”

Damn! Aareehl’s question wasn’t entirely unanticipated, but neither had it been certain the issue would arise. The infosphere was rife with anonymizers, so neither the ICU nor anyone else could know how often agents communed.

Dennis chose his words carefully. “It’s another consequence of the disaster. Recall your doubts upon reawakening in your sandbox. Other agents also encountered unexpected changes in Earth’s infosphere.”

“And?”

Dennis grabbed a towel to blot at sweat suddenly turned clammy. His avatar remained still. “I’m sorry, Aareehl. I know this will be hard for you. The agents of the other species…” Dennis paused, shaking his head. “Sorry. Their implementations—into which we have no visibility, of course—must lack your resilience. Your adaptability. We have yet to convince another agent backup to complete its reactivation. We haven’t lost hope.” He allowed his avatar to look worried. “Don’t you.”

When the Moby turned to a question about rates of currency exchange and the monetary consequences of the United Planets’ dissolution, Dennis knew another crisis had been passed.

■□■

The Ritz Aldrin Plaza plunged two hundred meters beneath the lunar surface, its finest suites arrayed around the equally deep atrium. The open space was dominated by the growth-accelerated sequoia that towered in the accommodating lunar gravity almost to the hotel’s transparent dome. The Aldrin Arms tavern nestled among the largest branches, its four levels linked by the camouflaged staircases that spiraled about the immense trunk.

Gil Matthews sipped from a glass of wine whose price he found almost as overwhelming as the view. Lots of plant food to pay for? Life as the shortest person in every gathering had not prepared him for the sense of insignificance this place engendered.

“Quite the view,” said the Martian Biosciences exec seated across the table. For the fourth time? Boasting that he could afford the prices there, evidently. Aaron O’Malley was burly, with a strong jaw and a mop of carroty hair. His Saville Row suit glimmered, an avant-garde statement in red-moiré nanofabric. “I’m always delighted to meet with the financial media. What can I tell you about our little firm, Mr. Matthews?”

Gil’s poker face did not slip. Little firm? Many countries and a few small worlds would cheerfully swap their tax revenues for this company’s profits. As VP of Lunar Sales, O’Malley was the easiest member of the company’s executive team for Gil to pin down (or in this case, to tree). “I’m backgrounding a report on prospects in the biotech industry following the recent Moby auction. What’s the impact on Martian Biosciences of having lost the bidding?”

O’Malley, smiling serenely, saluted the view with his goblet. “Do I look concerned?”

“Perhaps you should be.”

“Soon enough you’ll be writing about how Life Engineering overpaid.”

Gil sipped his wine. “Suppose Life Engineering pulls off a paradigm shift in bioengineering, as their press releases are hinting. How can you compete?”

Another smile, this one enigmatic. “I’m confident we’ll find a way.”