Betrayer of Worlds (15 page)

And that was why Louis’s memories would be purged again before he went home, lest he lead an expedition to New Terra and the Fleet. Beings
far braver than Puppeteers would fear humanity’s retribution if the Puppeteers’ crimes were to become known.

Raiding Pak ships. Consorting with Puppeteers. Whole human worlds unsuspected. A corner of Louis’s mind regretted the stories he could never tell his fathers.

Chest heaving, legs aching, Louis eased his pace to a lope. He ended his cool-down routine at the relax room, synthing a drink bulb of iced tea. He drained it and got another.

He had weeks left on this trip. He could not spend that long running, speculating, and raging inwardly at ancient injustices. Gw’oth, New Terra, and his own past were off-limits.

The Pak and their Library were not.

Suddenly ravenous, Louis ordered a five-course meal and several bulbs of wine. Imagining ways to crack open the Library would take his best efforts.

In the bare confines of his “cabin”—nowhere aboard this tiny ship befitted his stature as a cabinet minister—Achilles brooded.

He had much about which to brood:

—The criminal ineptness of his New Terran hirelings, and the peril into which they had carelessly plunged him.

—Baedeker and Nike conspiring against him. How convenient for them if that dangerous maneuver with
Argo
had eliminated their mutual rival.

—Nessus’ insolent refusal to acknowledge Achilles’ stature, or obey his orders, or even explain how
Aegis
had happened upon him.

—The daily indignity of Nessus ruling aboard this ship.

—The utter humiliation of wearing a stun anklet, as if
he
were some common criminal.

—Locked cabins and storerooms, and whatever petty secrets Nessus hid therein.

—The uncertain future of the Pak artifacts
he
had had the genius to pursue.

—The thinly veiled threats of a trial when he returned to the Fleet.

Achilles circled his tiny cabin, stomping. Nessus:
stomp!
Nike:
stomp!
Baedeker:
stomp! Stomp!

His enemies stymied him at every turn. They had persecuted him for far too long.

Rule over an arcology had been within his bite until Nessus—a lowly neophyte scout!—had denounced him. Banished to serve as a scout himself, Achilles had distinguished himself and returned to Hearth in triumph.

But he had returned too late.
Stomp!
Nike, become Hindmost, had already surrendered New Terra to rebellious humans.
Stomp!

If only the trampling of cushions could ease his rage.

He, Achilles, found a way to force the humans back into servitude and the Fleet—with New Terra itself promised as his reward. But when Nessus and Sigmund Ausfaller forged some unnatural alliance with the Outsiders, Nike reneged.
Stomp! Stomp!

The New Terran government had already surrendered! When Achilles in his righteous wrath would smash his defiant subjects, Baedeker struck. Literally,
struck
: put a sharp hoof through Achilles’ cranium!

He woke directly from the autodoc into a second exile, this time at hard labor on Nature Preserve One. Many years passed before he was deemed “rehabilitated”—and by then
Baedeker
had become Hindmost.

So now Baedeker imagined
he
would exile or incarcerate Achilles? Never again!

But for the vile conspiracy against him, Achilles could have been Hindmost.
Stomp!
He would have been Hindmost.
Stomp!
He deserved to be Hindmost.
Stomp! Stomp!

His turn would come.

He had followers among the masses. And, more helpful at this juncture, he had minions throughout the government, especially at the Ministry of Science. Loyal, well-placed minions.

They would attend diligently to the orders he sprinkled in innocuous-seeming messages to ministry personnel.

A man-tall equipment rack, one of eighty-seven from the Pak derelict, occupied the center of a small workroom. Plasteel spars and mounting brackets held the rack firmly in place. Meters, gauges, and analyzers cluttered two workbenches. Cables and adjustable power supplies covered a third. Wall-mounted cameras continuously recorded. Copper sheets lined the walls, hatch, deck, and overhead lest emissions interfere with any of the ship’s systems.

Clutching a Puppeteer transport controller, Louis admired his handiwork. A touch would rematerialize the rack in a cargo hold three decks away, for he had mounted the Pak artifact over a stepping disc. That hold was empty, its gravity turned off. Drop from hyperspace, open the hatch, and the rack would blow away. . . .

So why did he hesitate?

He had stolen this—whatever it was. He had destroyed the derelict to cover his tracks. To break into the Pak archives was not only the logical next step, this time it was his idea.

He hesitated at a memory: of a face frozen in agony, of a visor filmed with blood.

Gritting his teeth, Louis extracted a random circuit module.

Naked-eye inspection revealed nothing. Scans yielded structural details but not meaning. Replacing the module, he inspected a second component with the same lack of enlightenment. He sampled a random scattering of modules across the equipment rack, and then systematically examined the three top tiers. Every scan and measurement went into his pocket comp.

The most common components were densely packed, three-dimensional matrices. Almost certainly memory arrays. And it was read-only memory, the bits permanently encoded as atomic substitutions in otherwise pure, defect-free, crystalline-silicon lattices.

Ausfaller’s prisoner had spoken of Library knowledge scribed on metal pages. Pak could bomb themselves back to a stone age—and supposedly regularly did—and the Library would survive. Of course that was before the Pak fled the core explosion. The equipment Louis had recovered seemed to offer similar permanence with greatly improved portability.

It was a start. Louis latched the workroom door behind him and called it a day.

What about the circuits that weren’t memory arrays? Access circuits, Louis guessed. Or mechanisms for decompressing compacted data. Or error-correction apparatus, for not even Pak engineering could prevent cosmic rays from inducing random errors. Or security mechanisms. Or—

Why speculate? Louis went to his cabin and uploaded his findings to Voice. Voice, too, failed to deduce anything useful. Louis returned to the workroom.

Three fat stubs of insulated copper cable, their ends burnished like mirrors, protruded from the bottom of the rack. The remainder of the cables had been lopped off during the stepping-disc transfer between the Pak ship and
Aegis.
To Louis the wiring looked like a power hookup. Wearing an insulated glove, he unplugged the cable stubs. The copper terminals beneath looked suitable for connecting power.

“Time for the smoke test,” he muttered, straightening his improvised cables. He had had to synth alligator clips for quick disconnects. Nothing in
Aegis
’ parts bins had sharp teeth.

He ran cables from the rack to one of his power supplies.

According to Nessus, Citizens had an adage: nothing ventured, nothing lost. Louis thought of that as he made the final connection.

No smoke.

Better yet, no pain. Louis released the breath he had not known he was holding.

LEDs now glowed in the rack. On his power supply, a virtual needle jittered about a simulated dial before settling at a modest output level. His RF receiver showed a new low-energy carrier signal.

The Pak equipment was ready to talk.

.   .   .

Heads craning, Nessus circled the test setup in Louis’s workroom. “I am impressed.”

“Thanks, but there is much left to learn.” Louis summarized his experimentation over the past several days.

Too often those techniques were trial and error. Nessus managed not to flinch. “You have not gotten us killed. That is commendable.”

“Now watch.” Louis tapped the touchpad on one of his bench instruments: a network analyzer interfaced to a human-model pocket computer.

Gibberish flooded what had been an empty display. Nessus recognized characters from Interworld, but most of the symbols were unfamiliar to him. Text reached the bottom and the image began scrolling.

Louis said, “When the rack powers up, it broadcasts a short sequence of pulses. Identifying itself? Asking for a command? Whatever it is, I took it as an instance of an input/output protocol. It took some . . . effort, but now I can elicit responses. Parts of the format appear to function as an index or address. When I vary that part of the message, the rack replies with different information.”

Nessus caught the hesitation. Maybe he
had
flinched. Trial and error? Madness!

“That said,” Louis continued, “there is less here than meets the eye. The raw data stream from the box is clearly binary, but after that? Your guess is as good as mine.

“All data transfers have lengths in multiples of ten bits. Supposing that the Pak encode characters in ten-bit blocks, I assigned symbols to the 1024 possible values. I used Interworld characters for the most common bit patterns until I ran out. After that, the marks are computer-assigned squiggles.

“Presumably we’re seeing Library data. But what does it mean? I can’t say.”

The workroom hatch opened and Achilles came—stomped—in. His heads swung in opposite directions, glancing about the workroom. “You cannot read it.” He spoke in Interworld, adding a sprinkle of undertunes surely meaningless to Louis.

But not to Nessus. Achilles had gibed:
I
know all that happens here.

The Library might hold secrets to mitigate the situation with the Gw’oth. If so, the sooner the knowledge could be obtained the better. And Achilles, after his rogue assault on the Pak, would surely step off this ship directly into prison. He might as well do something
for
the Concordance first.

“Perhaps,” Nessus said, “Louis will allow you to assist him.”

Achilles raised his left foreleg. “Perhaps I will, if you first remove this ridiculous, insulting anklet. You control the ship. Where am I going to go?”

Louis was a fair mechanic: he understood what things could do. But how they did it? For that he needed help, and Voice remained, most of the time, off limits. Nessus was less technical than Louis. That left Achilles.

Achilles was brilliant.

Louis had queried at random into the Pak archive, hoping to find message formats that did
something.
He was far from a theory what any of it—query or response—meant.

Achilles pored over the responses, comparing inputs and outputs, and occasionally encountering long, identical data blocks in the responses. That was sufficient hint for him to derive the addressing scheme within the Library message format, and the representation of digits.

They had translated their first Pak binary codes.

Achilles used the newfound numeric characters to define fundamental dimensionless constants, physical parameters independent of units of measure. (A few, like the ratio of rest masses of fundamental particles, Louis understood. Most, like something Achilles called the gravitational coupling constant, Louis did not.) Achilles used those numeric values to locate what had to be discussions of specific topics in physics. Citizen knowledge of those physical constants hinted at the content of nearby Pak text. Mathematical relationships implied additional meanings. Citizen translation software, until then without a point of departure, began to contribute.

“I need more data,” Achilles complained.

Louis retrieved a cargo floater and moved two more racks of Pak gear to the shielded workroom. By the time he had braced the new racks in place and supplied them with power, Achilles had already begun identifying physics terms. Even among the first scattered snippets of Pak science, things he read—and Louis usually could not—made Achilles trill.

Pak and Puppeteer science had evidently reached enough similar conclusions about the universe to constitute a Rosetta Stone of sorts. Most terms Achilles encountered many times over, for the Library saved the discoveries of all clans, across countless cycles of collapse and rediscovery.

Concepts Achilles expected to find in proximity sometimes were not. He
pondered that incongruity for a while, softly chanting to himself. “Ah,” he finally said. “Active links.” He suggested condescendingly that Louis might be able to work out the command formats that would follow such hyperlinks.

While Louis experimented, Achilles isolated simple two-, three-, and four-dimensional data structures in the data streams. He declared them flat, holographic, and animation images. Often he was right. Labels within the images suggested a few more physics terms.

Achilles was still dealing with half-recognized, ill-defined phrases scattered across a sea of untranslated data when Louis had his
Eureka!
moment.

The waiting was the hardest part.

Nessus cowered, burrowed deep within a nest of soft cushions, as, in the ambiguous safety of hyperspace,
Aegis
crisscrossed the Library fleet. Again. He had come to his cabin to sleep, but sleep, as it had for days, eluded him. With one head he gulped warm carrot juice from a drink bulb; with the other he tugged and twisted at a mane already stirred beyond further disarray.