Palace (52 page)

* * *

Although the new laws banned Leps from the Map, they said nothing against a cybe consulting with a Lep. Hi saw no reason why he couldn’t invite Molos to his office, but he’d sent Rico off to make sure he wouldn’t know about it, and Jevon was gone, too, on her regular day off. On the dining table in the suite’s eatery he spread a printout of the updated schematic for Caliostro. He and Molos stood on opposite sides and for a long while merely contemplated the mysterious repairs, marked in red among the black lines of the schematic and labelled in green with code-bursts that summarized the AI’s disrupted functions.

‘None of these patches are out of the ordinary at all,’ Molos said at last. ‘Except of course for the extraordinary fact that they exist.’

‘You bet. They don’t go to the core of Caliostro’s dysfunctions, nothing dramatic - just a lot of clean-up work. And I mean a lot. You can see the extent.’ Hi paused to lift up one sheet and expose another below. ‘Look at those reconstructed external access codes. That must have taken fifty hours to do.’

‘Just so. Am I remembering correctly? All of this has been done since the festival of Calios?’

‘No, the work started the day before. None of these repairs have route marks, IDs, or log tags attached to them. At first I thought they must have been done by whoever tipped Arno off about the assassin, but he or she would have left marks somewhere.’

Molos extended his claws and sheathed them again, a gesture of bafflement. Hi laid the page down.

‘The only explanation I can think of is a self-repair utility,’ Molos said at last. ‘We know that the Colonizers had some very sophisticated agents at their disposal.’

‘Yeah, but why now? If it’s an agent, why hasn’t it worked in the last thousand years? Who turned it on?’

‘An excellent question, if rhetorical. Obviously I have no idea.’

‘I’m going to examine each repaired area real carefully, next time I jack in. There’s got to be some land of clue, somewhere.’

‘Yes. If we only knew exactly what we were looking for, it would be of considerable help.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that.’ Hi ran a finger over a line of green symbols. ‘I’d like to compare Caliostro’s code with the same functions on another AI. You know, use it as a template. It would work the best if we had an AI that had never been damaged, but as it is-’

‘Exactly. As it is, we don’t. The idea itself strikes me as excellent, however. Dee and Magnus are perhaps the most complete systems we have, but they’re not as complex as Caliostro was.’

‘That’s true, but their core modules must be pretty much the same.’

‘Not necessarily. We know that the various AIs came from different parts of the Rim and that they were brought online over a period of several hundred years.’

‘That’s true, but it’s better than nothing. I’ve got Rico digging in the archives, looking for the oldest schematics he can find for both AIs. If we’re lucky, he’ll find something that dates from before the Schism Wars.’

In silence they turned back to the printout. With one claw extended Molos flipped through the pages, back and forth.

‘I can’t give you a quick answer,’ the Lep said at last. ‘But I think I see a pattern here.’

‘Take the printout if you’d like.’

‘I will. At some point soon we should discuss that other matter.’

‘I haven’t forgotten. In fact, tell you what. Tomorrow night Barra will be leaving for Orbital. After that, I’ll be stopping by the compound regularly, just to keep an eye on things while she’s gone. Maybe you could join me out there?’

‘Why yes.’ Molos flipped his crest to full extension. ‘I’ve always been very fond of your gardens.’

‘Then sure, come on out, and we’ll have a look around.’

They exchanged, each in their various ways, a conspirator’s smile. When Rico returned just after the seventeens, Hi took him straight into his office. He gestured at a chair, then activated his blackbox card.

‘Something’s up, huh?’ Rico said.

‘Your uncle’s just getting careful in his old age, that’s all.’ Hi sat down opposite him. ‘Let me be blunt, okay? Have you seen much of Vida lately?’

‘Uh well no.’ Rico turned bright red, perhaps on general principles. ‘Why?’

‘I’m getting more and more curious about that ferret of hers, that’s why. I’ve got this feeling it’s really important.’

‘Oh, that!’ Rico’s colour ebbed to normal. ‘We made a bargain, kind of a joke, that if I did something for her, she’d let me look it over.’

‘Yeah? What?’

The blush came back.

‘Never mind.’ Hi held up one hand. ‘Why don’t you just do what she wants?’

‘I haven’t had time.’

‘Make time. Tell you what - I’ll get that report for the guild together on my own. You work on your bargain with Vida. If that ferret of hers is the Calios revenant, and I’m thinking that it’s got to be, then we need a look at it soon. Got that?’

‘Yes, Se. I’ll be glad to.’

‘Bet you will be, yeah.’

* * *

Whenever Jevon visited her mother, she took along food: loaves of real grain bread, slices of real meat, sacks of cereals, and a bag of fresh fruit. She and her mother, Mag, kept up the fiction that Jevon was just bringing ‘a little something’ to go with the meal Mag would put out for Jevon and her third husband, Ben. Since Mag had only been able to qualify for a single birth permit, Jevon had no siblings. Mag and Ben lived in a tiny apartment on the third floor of a bright pink dwell in Service Sect. There was no lift booth, and Jevon puffed up a twisting staircase made of cast metal through a stairwell that always smelled faintly of urine, even though the super of the building was scrupulous about fixing the drains. When Mag opened the door, Jevon saw at once that something was wrong. Although her mother had put on a clean print dress for the visit, her hair straggled around her thin face, and she wore no cosmetics whatsoever. Mag never allowed herself to look unkempt. Ben, a tall heavy-set man with dark skin and darker hair, appeared immediately to help with the bags of food, instead of allowing Jevon and her mother their usual few minutes of ‘girl talk.’

‘What’s up, Ma?’ Jevon said. ‘Feeling under the weather?’

‘A little. Ben says I should go to the doctor. I don’t know about that. I’m just tired, these days.’

From behind Mag Ben mouthed, ‘Make her go.’

The apartment had three small rooms arranged in a row, so that you walked right into the kitchen and could see the tiny gather, its vidscreen turned to some drama filmed in a jungle somewhere, through the far door. After he’d put the food down, Ben ostentatiously withdrew to watch the end of his show and leave them alone.

‘What is it, Ma?’ Jevon repeated. ‘Something’s wrong.’

‘I don’t know.’ She reached up and tucked one strand of greying brown hair behind her ear.

‘I’m just tired.’

‘Well, the doctor can give you something for that.’

Mag shrugged and began to open packages.

‘I invited your cousin Jay over for later,’ she said. ‘Real nice of you to bring all this, honey. Jay’s lost his job. Did I tell you?’

‘No, you didn’t. That’s too bad. I thought he was working in well there.’

‘So did I, but they had a cutback. They have a lot of cutbacks, these days, seems like.’

‘It’s the damn lizards,’ Ben was back, standing in the doorway. ‘Between the damn lizards and the Stinkers, there isn’t going to be any work for human men pretty soon.’

‘Well now,’ Mag said. ‘The Leps got to do something. They lost some good jobs themselves, didn’t they? And they’ve got families, same as us.’

‘So?’ Ben snapped. ‘Why can’t they raise them on their own turf? I don’t wish ‘em any harm. I just want ‘em gone. I know your daughter there agrees with me.’

‘I do,’ Jevon said. ‘They should have been deported, that’s all, sent back to their own people.’

‘Well now,’ Mag said. ‘I just don’t know. I keep thinking about Ba Ridda, she was so nice to me when you were just born, Jev. She was a real grandmother - to us too, not just to her own family.’

‘I’m not saying there aren’t any good ones,’ Ben broke in. ‘I’m just saying they belong with their own kind. And we belong with ours. That’s just the way it should work.’

‘Well, I don’t know.’ Mag shook her head. ‘Come eat, you two. I found a nice soyloaf at the market, and there’s gravy, and then this nice little something Jevon brought us.’

People in Service Sect ate soy in one form or another flavoured with fungi of some species or another for practically every meal of every day. There was always plenty of it - the Palace government let no citizen starve - but it was always soy, no matter how you disguised it. The squishy texture and cool taste of the loaf brought Jevon memories of other meals, crammed into tiny kitchens like this, where her elbow would rest on the window sill beside the narrow table. After the meals she would study at the same tables, bent over to stare at the tiny Mapscreen that the government issued to poor people. Education was the way out of Service Sect, and Jevon had taken it.

‘How’s your job, honey?’ Mag said. ‘I saw on the screens that your Se Jons’s boy was killed. That’s a sad thing, poor man, losing his son that way.’

Jevon had drilled herself against this moment.

‘Very sad,’ she said. ‘I liked Arno myself. It doesn’t seem to bother Se Jons much. He says it’s because of the drug thing, that he had to keep thinking of his son as already dead.’

‘Well, that’s the way it works.’ Ben took another slice of bread. ‘I hate to say it, Jev, but he was right about that.’

This Jevon had never expected. She felt her face sealing over like ice freezing.

‘Guy I worked with, trucking,’ Ben said. ‘He got into trash drugs, and there was nothing any of us could do or say. Nothing. It broke his wife’s heart. And they had a baby, too, a little boy.’

‘They didn’t have the money for private hospitals like Se Jons does.’Jevon forced her voice to measure out each word whole and steady.

‘No, they didn’t, but I don’t think it would have mattered a snowball in hell.’

‘Maybe not, then. Ma, want some of this fruit?’

‘In a bit, maybe, honey. I’m full already.’ Mag turned, glancing at the clock above the tiny white stove. ‘Jay should be here soon, anyway.’

When Jay arrived, the evening turned predictable with talk of relatives and worries worries about jobs, worries about the cousin who desperately wanted a birth permit but probably wouldn’t get one, worries about children who wouldn’t study hard enough on the School Map, worries about Mag’s health, which she refused to discuss whenever the subject came up. It wasn’t until Jevon was leaving, and Ben walked her to the wiretrain stop, that Jevon finally got some solid information.

‘It’s time for her to start the Geriose,’ he said. ‘God knows we qualify for the subsidy, and she could have it, but she keeps saying she doesn’t want it’

‘What? I don’t understand! Why wouldn’t she want it?’

Ben shrugged, his shoulders hunched, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets. In the flickering light from the street lamps he looked suddenly old.

‘She keeps saying she’s too tired,’ he said at last. ‘Keeps saying she’s lived long enough.’

Jevon nearly broke down. Only the other people on the street, the curious faces passing them by and glancing at her expensive clothes, kept her from weeping.

‘Talk to her, honey?’ Ben said. ‘I can’t get through to her. God knows I’ve tried.’

‘I will. Don’t worry about that. I’ll call tomorrow. And you can always call me if things get worse.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that, calling you in Government House. It was one thing, when you worked out at the compound, but Government House is well, it’s just different.’

On the ride back to Government House, as Jevon stared out the window and watched the long lawns and parks of Centre Sect whipping by her in the night, she was thinking about doctors, specialists in depression and mental illness. To refuse the life-extension treatments was slow suicide, plain and simple. She knew that Se Jons would allow her time from her work to shepherd her mother to specialists, if it came to that. He was so generous, Se Jons. It shocked her just how much she wanted to hate him. The memory of Ben’s calm voice ate at her, ‘it wouldn’t have mattered a snowball in hell’.

If she couldn’t blame Se Jons for Arno’s death, there was no-one left to blame but Arno himself. She pressed her face hard against the glass and tried not to think at all for the rest of the ride home.

* * *

Even though Hi had told him to do whatever was necessary to gain access to Vida’s Calios meta, Rico waited until his uncle went to bed before hacking into the Protectors’ databanks. All that evening he worked in his room at his Map terminal, using the open guild records to plan out his strategy. Once or twice Hi walked in to ask him a question, but each time he saw onscreen nothing more dangerous than a condensed Map of all the administrative stations in Centre Sect.

Once both Hi and Nju had retreated to their quarters to sleep, Rico jacked into the Guildhall Map. While he watched fields of icons drift like spores across the pale blue screen, he debated tanking up on cyberdrugs. Although he worked so much better with them, he found himself yawning, and every guild drug manual warned against using them when you were tired. Better not, then. He was surprised at how irritated the decision made him. You’re getting lazy, he told himself. Concentrating without them is hard work.

He reminded himself that he was doing the work for Vida and jacked in, logged on in his normal Map body, and hurried over to clan space. Now that he was a journeyman, he could seal off his personal work area. Behind a secured door icon, guarded by green jadewing defenders, his iconic rhomboid hovered waiting for him. He transferred into it, then left his work space by the back exit he’d built the day before. Once back in clan space, he could summon the Chameleon Gate.

When he ran the open sesame meta, the sight of the encircling portraits of Arno made him freeze with grief. For a moment the entire illusion of clan space and doors wavered as his body threatened to assert its right to mourn and drag him back. He could feel the jack plugged into his hand, hear his own breathing. Desperately he concentrated on the wheel of doors. With a ripple of colour the Gate appeared. He threw himself into the enveloping cold of the Gate’s membrane and with the motion forgot all about his body. In his iconic form the clutching feeling of suffocation no longer bothered him, as if having the illusion of a body had programmed his mind to fulfil a body’s expectations. This time his brain conceptualized contact with the Gate as a smooth click and a sense of rightness, as if he were the icon for some essential subroutine slipping into its socket. Yet he and the Gate both knew that he commanded their dual operation. As they floated in clan space, all he needed to do was speak the location codes for the Protectors’ databanks for the Gate to start moving.