Palace (45 page)

‘Minus Seventy Four, sector Q-O. Please.’

The man grunted and keyed in the coordinates. With a lurch and a groan, the tube slid downward. Rico leaned back against the wall and studied his schedplate. The mechanics got out a few floors later. In silence Rico and the liftjockey rode down, and down, a long way down, Rico suddenly realized. He glanced up at the readout over the door and watched numbers slipping by.

‘Don’t usually get anyone going down this far,’ the operator said. ‘You’re Cyberguild, huh?’

‘Sure am.’

‘You must be heading for a look at Caliostro.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘When you want to come back up, there’s a command plate by the door. Hit the emergency alarm. Don’t panic, but it’ll take someone a while to get down to pick you up. You’re not claustrophobic, are you?’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

Rico did see when the lift booth finally reached his floor - hit bottom, really, or so the operator informed him. The doors opened into a narrow grey corridor of some twenty feet with a swing-hatch at either end. Rico brought up the map programmed into his schedplate and took the north hatch, which led into a tunnel, strung with bundled cables in blue and red and just barely high enough for him to stand upright. The only light came from the flashlight in his toolkit, but the little gold dot on his map beeped cheerfully and led him along. They travelled straight for some yards, then turned down another tunnel, then another, until Rico realized that if anything happened to that schedplate, he might never get out of there again. For a moment he found it hard to breathe, then remembered that his guild coveralls had a built-in alarm and tracer. He’d always wondered why. Now he knew.

After they’d spent about ten minutes threading the maze, the map brought him to a red door. Inlaid about level with his eyes gleamed a black sign with lighted lettering.

‘No Admittance without Cyberguild Clearance.’

Rico swore. He’d forgotten - he should have known - he’d never got himself a clear-code token, and now he was going to have to go all the way up to the surface and probably down to guild headquarters, too, if Uncle Hi had already left the suite. He wasn’t looking forward to hearing what Hi was going to say about his oversight, either. He knelt and searched through his toolkit, but as he expected, none of the code tokens in the standard issue set led to anywhere as important as an AI housing. He straightened up and considered the door. On an impulse he spoke aloud the all-meta Arno had given him.

‘Morning light.’

The doors hissed and slid back. Beyond them pale white light panels flickered into life on a ceiling some twenty feet above. Feeling suddenly cold and for no reason he could name, Rico stepped inside.

The room stretched about twenty yards long but narrow, lined from grey floor to glowing high ceiling with alternating panels of metal plate and blueglass bricks. The metal plates flickered with readouts and inserts while reflections splattered the blueglass. Rico walked a few yards in, then stood looking around, turning slowly in this tall box of light.

‘Caliostro.’ Somehow it seemed appropriate to greet the intelligence who lived here.

‘Caliostro, son of the morning.’

Later he’d convince himself that it was only a fantasy on his part, but it seemed to him that the lights dimmed slightly, then brightened again. For a moment, for the briefest of moments, he thought he heard not so much a voice as the echo of a voice, fading from a long time ago, answering him.

* * *

‘The kid’s got guts, all right,’ Hi said. ‘You trained her well.’ Aleen allowed herself a small smile.

‘Before I left for Souk, Aleen consulted me about Vida’s education,’ Molos said. ‘I venture to say that since the child survived Aleen’s training, she will doubdess be able to survive anything.’

Hi laughed. The three of them were sitting in a small parlour on the second floor of The Close. Amid real flowers as well as the floral holos filling the corners of the room, they lounged on green velvet chairs around a low table, where Hi’s blackbox card glowed among the remains of lunch. Aleen’s hair had turned to pale gold since the last time Hi had seen her, and she wore a dress of the same colour, set off by a flower pinned to the wide collar. The blood-red bloom echoed the tattooed sun of her Mark.

‘Well,’ Aleen said. ‘Once I learned who her father was, I knew I’d been handed something useful. I was hoping that sooner or later, Palace society would want their L’Var back.’

‘Useful for what, though, my dear Aleen?’ Molos said with a rustle of his crest. ‘Can you believe it, Hivel? She’s never told me, not during all these years.’

‘Oh, I believe it, yeah.’

Both men looked at Aleen, who leaned forward, picked a crumb off the green table cloth, and flicked it onto her flowered plate.

‘What worries me now,’ Aleen said at last, ‘is keeping Vida safe. I’m beginning to wonder why we pay taxes. The Protectors are worthless, it seems.’

‘No,’ Molos said. ‘It’s merely that my brother is very clever.’

‘Unfortunately that’s true,’ Hi put in. ‘I’ll have another word with my contact in Military Intelligence, but she warned me that they’d have to wait before coming in on this. Can’t go poaching on the Protectors’ territory, not right away, anyway.’

‘What?’ Aleen tossed her head with a ripple of gold. ‘We have to wait until he kills someone else?’

‘My dear, it must seem that way, but Hivel’s right. There are protocols in this sort of thing.’

‘Stuff the protocols!’

‘Now, now, my dear Aleen. It’s only been what? Six days, seven? Since my despicable brother made his attempt on Vida.’

‘Yeah, six,’ Hi said. ‘It happened on Eight Gust. It’s Fourteen now.’

‘With all the kickbacks I give the Protectors, that should be time enough.’ She glared at them impartially. ‘Hi?’

‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right. It probably will take another death.’

‘It had better not be Vida’s.’

‘Now that I doubt very much.’ Molos leaned forward earnestly. ‘The Peronida’s taking every precaution -’

‘Like driving her right into Finance Sect for dinner? What is wrong with those people? Don’t they think?’

‘When it suits them,’ Hi said. ‘The rest of the time they depend on armed guards. Karlo took half a regiment with him for that little drive.’

‘Oh. Well, that’s better.’ Aleen sat back in her chair. ‘But I don’t like this, Hi, and I know neither of you do either, having Vi-Kata prowling the streets after-’ She paused, glancing Hi’s way. ‘After what happened.’

Hi picked up the napkin from his lap, tossed it in the air, caught it again. Not an hour passed without his thinking of Arno. If only he’d stayed in The Close, if only I’d made him wait longer - he blamed himself even though he knew that Arno never would have listened to him. Molos was watching, his crest flattened in sympathy.

‘So,’ Molos said. ‘Let us review. We know that Riva has hired my less than beloved brother. We also know that Riva must be a cybermaster of great skill. How else could a Lep gain access to the Map these days? Other than these pitifully few datapoints, we know nothing. What does Riva want? The name translates as "unblemished scales", but the actual meaning is closer to "racial purity". I suspect that she leads, a group that sees itself as an answer to UJU. I hear things, now and again, when I’m dining out in Finance Sect, about such a group. The rumour is that the membership is growing. The Benars are worried, very worried. They would have a great deal to lose if violence should give the Peronida an excuse for further actions against our people.’

‘Violence?’ Hi said. ‘What about crashing the Map?’ Molos hissed like a hundred cats.

‘My apologies, my dear Aleen,’ he stammered. ‘And at table, too! I must be getting senile!’

‘No, no, it’s all right. I understand.’

Hi felt his mind ticking over. Of course - it was obvious - why hadn’t he seen it before, that the vandalism on the Map might well be related to the racial tensions in the city? ‘Well, look,’

Hi said aloud. ‘I’ve been thinking that we had two separate problems, Riva and then the vandal, the rogue cybermaster. What if we only have one?’

‘Hah!’ Molos stopped himself from hissing again. ‘It makes sense. Damage to the Map would be the ultimate act of terrorism. And that’s why Arno would be a danger to Riva, a serious danger. By tracing the vandals, he was tracing her.’

‘You bet. And this latest round of vandalism started about twelve years ago, right after Karlo passed his damned laws.’

‘That’s significant, yes.’ Molos’s voice turned dry. ‘I remember my own feelings at the time, and here I was given special privileges, thanks to my dear friends.’ He paused for a nod Hi’s way. ‘Others who were not so fortunate were outraged.’

‘I don’t blame them.’ Hi held up one hand with his thumb tucked behind his fingers. ‘There were only four Lep masters who had the skill to do what Riva’s doing. Two of them left the planet after the ban, and the third one’s you.’

‘And the last, Var En Ha’i, is very old and very ill,’ Molos said. ‘Besides, I can’t imagine him damaging his beloved Map. No, I really can’t. As for the other two, well, they could access the Palace Map through the Hypermap, but it would be extremely difficult for them to do it secretly. They’d have to be as intelligent as an AI to do so, and while I esteem my former colleagues, they don’t qualify for that honour.’

‘Yeah, that’s true. And if Riva’s a woman -’

Molos let his jaw go slack while he thought.

‘That narrows our field to nobody, doesn’t it?’ the Lep said at last. ‘I can’t think of a single Lep woman master of the requisite skill. Or - wait - there are many Lep masters of lesser grades. What if they were pooling their skills, and our Riva is only their leader?’

‘That would make sense, but how the hell are they getting on the Map without a sign-on code?’

Molos considered, sucking a meditative tooth.

‘Well, yes,’ he said at last. ‘But that problem would apply to a human suspect, wouldn’t it?’

‘Right. It would.’

Aleen was listening, glancing back and forth between them. Every now and then her cybereye flashed, but she would blink the pattern to turn it off.

‘Any thoughts?’ Hi said to her. ‘Sometimes an amateur sees things a pro misses.’

‘Just one thing,’ Aleen said. ‘Do you remember when Arno was telling you about Vi-Kata for the first time? He said that someone tipped him off. Did you ever find out who that was?’

‘Not yet.’ Hi leaned back with a long sigh. ‘Too much has happened, too fast. It’s on my agenda. I’ve got Rico doing a general survey right now, in fact, that will give me the base data I need to make sense out of what Arno told me.’

‘I wish Molos could get back on the Map to help you. That’s the most useful thing I can think of, but it’s impossible.’

‘Alas, yes,’ the Lep said. ‘My special privileges extend only to the lowest possible level of the Map, such as banking tasks that I could do without bothering to jack in at all.’

Hi considered the thought that crouched before him, snarling like an animal. When Molos started to speak, Aleen silenced him with a wave of her hand.

‘By the bloodshot Eye,’ Hi said at last. ‘This is such a damned dangerous idea I can’t believe I thought of it. Molos, if anyone ever caught you on the Map, the pair of us would end up in jail.’

‘Just so. And in the cells of the condemned at that.’

‘Want to risk it?’

Molos extended his crest and waved it in the equivalent of reckless laughter.

‘I take it you see a way to smuggle me on?’

‘I sure do. But oh my God, it’s risky.’

Aleen was watching him with her face utterly expressionless, and her hands lay quietly in her lap.

‘I’m not going to talk about this in front of you,’ Hi said. ‘I don’t want you to know one thing more. Forget what you’ve already heard, okay?’

‘Okay.’ Her voice shook, just barely. ‘I keep having the urge to disgrace myself. You know, by saying stupid things like "be careful".’

‘A useful warning, actually,’ Molos said. ‘But I agree, Hivel. We shall meet elsewhere and soon?’

‘Very soon. I don’t want to see Kata make another kill any more than Aleen does.’

‘No more do I,’ Molos said, then glanced at Aleen. ‘Lep cybermasters have our own code, different than the human and Hirrel systems. The Ancestors developed it before the various maps in the Pinch were merged to become
the
Map. Hivel knows it, of course, just as I know the other two systems, but I think I’m safe in saying that he’s somewhat slower in that mode, just as I am with the human.’

‘It’s one thing to know an alien code,’ Hi took over. ‘It’s another to be able to think in it. But what really counts is the way you know the Lep community. I’m probably missing a lot of clues that might lead you to one of the vandals.’

‘I was thinking the same thing. And Riva’s a greater danger than my brother.’

‘We’ll let the Protectors go after him while we go after whoever hired him.’

‘It sounds like an excellent plan - if we can manage to put it into action. Have your factor call me -’

‘No.’ Hi shook his head hard. ‘I’ll call you myself. I don’t want anyone else implicated in this. Hell! I’ll have to tell Rico something. Maybe. I’ll think about it. But I’ll call you myself. I don’t want anyone on my staff to go down with me if it turns out that we go down.’

‘Excellent! I shall follow the same policy, not that I have much of a staff these days.’ Molos rose, bowing to Aleen. ‘My thanks for the marvellous lunch, my dear. I shall be off. No doubt you have other matters to discuss with Hivel, and I have some thinking to do.’

In a swirl of pale gold skirt Aleen rose to see him out. At the door she turned, glancing back at Hi. ‘Can you stay for a while?’ she said.

‘I shouldn’t, but I wrestled some time out of my damned schedule.’

‘Why don’t you wait for me upstairs, then? Make yourself comfortable.’

‘Good idea. I will.’

Aleen smiled, just briefly, then walked out after Molos. Hi felt his desire for her welling up like warm water. Maybe it could, for a little while, wash his grief away.

* * *

‘Come in, my dear, come in,’ Cardinal Roha said. ‘Brother Dav, you’ll make sure we’re not disturbed?’