Palace (51 page)

‘That’s it,’ Kata said. ‘Riva’s done it again, by God! How the hell could she know this stuff had been left out here?’

‘Beats me.’ Elen was eyeing the box as if it might bite. ‘We’d better get this back to the hydrofloat.’

‘Right, but we need to stay out long enough to look like we were fishing.’

‘Let’s fish, then. I’m hungry, and flatties really are best raw. You bite their heads off and just crunch them down. The humans cook them and then complain they’re bitter.’

‘That’s like them, isn’t it? Good idea, youngling. I think we’ll wait to open this box till I have some proper tools.’

* * *

‘Vida, I’m dreadfully sorry.’ On the comm screen Sister Romero’s strong face looked nothing of the sort. ‘I’m afraid I’ve ruined those trousers you lent me. They’re stained and not worth trying to clean.’

‘Oh please, don’t worry about it,’ Vida said. ‘I’ve got lots.’

‘Thank you for being so generous. I’ll send the rest of the things back later. Do we still have our lunch appointment for tomorrow?’

‘I’m looking forward to it.’

‘All right. Good luck at your news conference today.’

Romero powered out, leaving Vida painfully curious. Just why had the Papal Itinerant borrowed secular clothes, anyway? She left her Map terminal and returned to her bedroom, where Samante stood waiting for her, tablet and scriber in hand. Over the dark coverlet on the wide bed lay most of the clothing she’d referred to, spread out and arranged in outfits.

‘Any inspirations?’ Vida said.

‘I’m leaning toward the grey suit, myself,’ Samante said. ‘But you know me and my taste in clothes. You need to pick something you’ll feel comfortable in, remember. The right image is crucial, but you can’t look uncomfortable, either. These press conferences have to be managed just so.’

‘So I’m learning. You really do think we should accept this version of Wan’s contract offer?’

‘I don’t see how we’ll ever get better. It’s extraordinarily generous, and we’ve got him down to twelve years from fifteen. The Lifegivers won’t issue a birth permit for any shorter marriage than that.’

‘Okay, then.’ Vida considered the clothes on the bed and realized that she was tending toward all black - very much the wrong image. ‘Flowered stuff is too giggly girl.’

‘I agree. That tailored green outfit?’

‘I always wear green in public. It’s getting bOring. I know. That royal blue dress with the big collar.’

‘Yes, perfect! You’re catching on to this very nicely.’

‘Am I? Thanks.’

On the vidscreen the morning interactive news spread its logo. Samante called up the sound, then sat on the corner of the bed to watch while Greenie began putting away the rejected clothing. Vida paid little attention to the news until the serious political business of the day had been dealt with. Sure enough, the very first entertainment segment featured her dinner party. Not only did the show roll footage shot out in the corridor, but at least one pix must have been concealed in the restaurant itself long enough to take a couple of still holos of the table, with Jak conspicuously in Wan’s place. and where was wan? floated across the screen while the presenter droned on about the Rommoff family.

‘Damn him!’ Vida burst out. ‘I knew it, I just knew it!’

In a side window the interactive opinions began totalling.

Although Vida’s pop ratings held steady, Wan’s had dropped from the night before.

‘Serves him right,’ Samante said. ‘I’ll bet Karlo hears about this.’

‘I hope he waits to chew Wan out till after the beastly press conference, though. I don’t want him sulking.’

Samante was studying her face so intently that Vida wondered just what she’d given away.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to crack under the strain or anything.’

‘I didn’t think you were,’ Samante said. ‘I was only - well, you look so sad.’

‘Do I? You know, I keep thinking about my guardian. I really miss her. I wish she could be here for all of this.’

‘I suppose you must. She seems to have been very kind to you.’ Vida was remembering Aleen, saying,
Don’t fail me.
‘Kind?’ she said aloud. ‘I guess you could call it that.’

‘What?’

‘Oh never mind.’ Vida snatched the blue dress from the bed. ‘I’d better get ready. At least I don’t have to actually sign his lousy contract today.’

* * *

In the sunny white gather of the Cyberguild suite, Rico sat curled in a formfit chair and glared at the vidscreen, where Vida and Wan’s press conference unrolled, announcing that she was accepting his latest contract offer. The couple sat at a table in front of a mound of white and blue flowers while Vida’s factor stood at a podium, reading a summary of the clauses. Hatred felt like electricity, Rico decided, like jacking in to a poorly-wired terminal. He felt it crackling through his soul every time he looked at Wan, who sat stone-still in his perfect Fleet uniform with his perfect looks and gazed indifferently away.

At moments he wondered if he hated Vida, too. How could she smile like that? How could she turn and look at Wan and smile like that? For a moment his eyes filled with tears. Damn her for being so beautiful, damn her. Damn her for lying, for pretending she loved Wan Peronida while the pix clustered around, pointing and clicking, while the intakes stood and yammered, desperate to get their questions acknowledged.

‘Screen off.’ Hi walked into the room. ‘You’re only making yourself miserable, kid.’

The vid went grey and dead.

‘Yeah, guess so.’ Rico got up and found to his surprise that his muscles ached. ‘How long have I been sitting there?’

‘About thirty minutes. Now come on. Caliostro’s waiting for us.’

With the cyberdrugs Rico felt his body fall away and leave only mind. He became a cursor, or so he liked to think of it, a travelling point of consciousness who existed only in relation to the Map. What Vida might be doing meant nothing to that consciousness. Once he melded with the Map, he was free. Although most cybes hated being on the Map without a realistic iconic body, Rico had found that he preferred working as an abstract shape. A personal icon existed only for handling object icons, and images of eyes and fingers weren’t really necessary to see and touch on the Map.

Working with Hi, however, taught him the limits of this approach. As they floated in clan space above the great wheel of doors, Rico showed off his new iconic form - a slender rhomboidal solid like a jack-knife, bristling with tools.

‘Yeah, great, kid. You look like a directory icon, one full of repair utilities.’

‘But it’s really efficient.’

‘Sure. Wait till someone tries to open you.’

‘Oh hey!’

‘Go back down and activate your old icon. Now. I don’t want to forget what I’m working with and reach over for a sort tool.’

By the time Rico returned, a sullen presence in humanoid form, Hi had opened a storage directory and brought out an array of icons that Rico had never seen before. Each circle, seemingly made of blueglass, bore a single symbol in green.

‘AI internal access nodes,’ Hi said. ‘You won’t get the password for these for at least ten years. Let’s slide over and get to work.’

Checking Caliostro’s map against the schematic became bOring fast, as it was a matter of Hi calling off coordinates for objects while Rico confirmed their presence or absence on the diagrams. Every now and then they found a new repair, which Hi noted into a log file in some detail. Occasionally the schematic proved so deviant from the actual map that they were forced to pause and redraw a particular nexus or flow chart. Still, they discovered nothing remarkable until they reached Caliostro’s interior firewall, built over a thousand years before to seal off the major damage of the Schism Wars from those areas that still functioned. Iconic code represented it as an immense obsidian wall, glittering in cold blue light.

‘Remember the meta Arno gave you?’ Hi said. ‘Yes, Se. The all-meta, you mean?’

‘No. He said he gave you two short runs, too.’

‘That’s right, yeah.’

‘Which one do you think applies here?’

‘Son of the morning.’

The wall in front of them dissolved to flow like water, pouring down in a black fall, then parted, as if around a rock, to reveal a gate icon.

‘Good choice,’ Hi said. ‘This is the data dump Arno told us about.’

‘It’s not on the schematic’

‘No. Its location’s been lost for about fifteen hundred years. I’m not even sure now exactly where we are. We can eventually figure it out, but without that meta, we’d never have found this.’

‘I don’t understand. Why wasn’t the location recorded?’

‘Because it dates from before the guild system got put into place. Maprunning used to be a business, Rico. There were a lot of competing little firms, and each had a piece of the Map or its own Map. Objects got lost all the time, because firms hid information from one another. If a firm went out of business, its exclusive cache went with it if they wiped their data storage for resale.’

‘That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Data should belong to everyone.’

‘It does out here in the Pinch because it has to. Redundancy means safety, but we learned that lesson a little late. Now, want to see if you can open that gate?’

‘Sure. I’ll try some old code I picked up.’

Old it may have been, but not old enough. Rico shaped five different sets of archaic commands into icons, not a bad try for a journeyman, but the gate stayed locked until the master took over. On the second attempt, Hi’s icon worked. When the gate opened they slid through to find themselves in a virtual room, papered with glowing silver directories. Rico allowed himself to float while he struggled to make sense of the object tagging system, which might have been code but could well have been words in some archaic language.

‘Arno called this a garbage dump,’ Hi said. ‘Maybe it is, but garbage this old can be pretty damn valuable.’

‘Do you think there might be information in here about AIs? About how the Colonizers made them come alive, I mean, like we were discussing.’

‘I doubt it.’ Hi had thrown an analysis icon against one wall and was studying the directories it highlighted. ‘None of these are high-level archives. Huh. So far what I’ve seen looks like business records, some kind of commercial logs, anyway. I can’t translate this old code fast, not without reference tables.’

‘Oh. Real garbage, then.’

‘Not to a certain kind of scholar. I think we’re going to copy the lot and pull it into clan space, just in case someone else finds it and decides to wipe it off’

‘But if anyone’s snooping they’ll find the record of the move.’

‘Good point, kid. We can use the Chameleon Gate as a donkey and then store our copies in an off Map backup cube. Your next job is going to be running translate utilities on these files and sorting them out.’

‘Yes, Se.’

‘You sound really enthused.’

‘Well, uh ...’

‘Yeah, yeah, it’s going to be bOring as hell. Tell you something, Rico. Eighty per cent of a cybe’s work is bOring. Details - they’re our line of work. Finding details, stOring details, sorting details. Boredom comes with the territory.’

‘Unless something goes wrong?’

‘You got it. And these days there’s a little too much excitement to suit me.’

Later that afternoon, working alone at his own terminal, Rico found himself wishing for some of that excitement. He took what seemed to be the oldest of the captured files, in the hopes that it would contain ancient and valuable secrets, and ran it through two sets of translation utilities. While the data was ancient, all right, dating from before the Schism Wars, it turned out to be spreadsheets for a small business. With a randomizer he picked three more files and translated those: they were all business transactions, spreadsheets and inventory lists. When he read through one list, he realized that these businesses had been dealing in saccule neuters.

Why had the shadowy figure who’d tipped Arno off chosen to hide the audio tape in a data dump like this? Did that person for some odd reason want Arno and thus the guild to find these particular files, or did they just assume that no-one would be looking for life-and-death information in such an odd location? He translated a few more files and all at once saw a pattern. In the earliest records, saccule neuters were rare and extremely expensive. As time went on, however, the buys out in the swamps became larger and the price dropped. When Hi came in to see how the work progressed, Rico pointed out the change.

‘See?’ Hi said. ‘I told you historians would find this stuff interesting. That’s the kind of thing they look for, meaningful patterns.’

‘Okay, I can see that. And I found an embedded note, too, on this file here.’ Rico tapped the listing on his Mapscreen. ‘After the Schism Wars, the number of available neuters suddenly jumped, and the gendered saccules became really eager to sell them off. The guy who wrote the note doesn’t know why.’

‘That
is
interesting. Tell you what. When you get these files translated and organized, we’ll donate them to the University Map. I’ll bet they keep a couple of professors over there happy for years.’

‘Sounds good to me.’

‘And speaking of happy, you’ve put in a lot of work today, Rico. Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off? Get out in the fresh air or something.’

‘Hey, thanks! Sure.’

As he powered down his station and saved the translated files to an off Map cube, it occurred to Rico that he had money now. His journeyman’s salary wasn’t much, but he was getting his room and board for free. He could convert some credits to cash and go to Pleasure Sect, if he wanted. If he dared. And why shouldn’t he? No reason, he told himself, no reason at all.

* * *

By sheer chance Kata saw the end of Vida’s press conference. He and Elen had returned the hydrofloat and were waiting for the wiretrain when the station’s vidscreen switched over to the news. For a few minutes he stared at her images, all red hair and smiles. Her youth infuriated him. How had this little human, barely a hatchling, outsmarted him? Even though he reminded himself that hatred, that any personal emotion, was a trap and a danger, all the way back on the train he brooded his hatred the way a Lep mother brooded her eggs.