Deep Secret (6 page)

I was, to tell the truth, quite worried about that. I’d wrapped all four disks in every protection I could think of, but I didn’t have exact enough knowledge of the Emperor’s methods to know what to protect them from.

“What are you going to do?” Dakros added.

“I’m going to take the other two disks home and work on them there,” I said. “Could you let me know anything – anything – that you find out from yours? You have local knowledge I don’t. And I’ll fax you when I’ve got something.”

He responded by pointing his thumb at the vast heap of rubble and gave me a wry look. I remembered that the fax machine to which I was tuned was somewhere under there. So was my overnight bag.

“I’ll call you,” I amended. “Give me your battle-com number and I’ll tune it to my fax machine at home.”

He gave me the number, looking doubtful. “But how will you get home now the Magid Gate has gone?”

“That was only used by custom,” I said. “I can go from anywhere.” He looked so surprised and respectful that I felt that I had been boasting – and I had, a little. Some places you can’t make transit from. But there was no problem with the courtyard. I said, “See you soon, I hope.” Then I walked out across the court, the uphill Naywards way home.

T
he first thing I did at home was to put the two disks into plastic with magically enhanced protection and then lock them in a drawer. I did that even before going to the bathroom and coughing up what felt like two pounds of brick dust. Then I showered and changed my clothes. By that time I felt slightly less shaken, but still too shaken to get back to work. I decided to take my filthy clothes to the cleaner instead and buy a new razor on the way. I was on my way out of the house when I heard piano music, loudly, from the living room.

I opened the door. The Diabelli variations were coming over my CD player, quite thunderously. “I don’t remember leaving that on,” I muttered, going to turn it off.

“You didn’t,” Stan’s voice said. He sounded slightly ashamed. “It was in there and I found I could do that – turn it on. It’s the kind of brain-music I seem to fancy in this state. I can turn it down if you’d rather.” The music became suddenly blessedly faint.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m going out. Enjoy yourself till I get back.”

When I got back, the same CD was still playing. It finished, and started all over again, while I was in the kitchen finding something to eat. I stood it for half an hour and then went in there. “Want me to put a different CD on for you?” I asked.

“No, no,” Stan said. “This suits me fine. But I’ll lower it right down while you tell me what’s been going on.”

The Diabelli variations once more sank to a distant tinkling. Invitation hung in the air. It seemed pretty clear that Stan was bored. It had not occurred to me before that a disembodied person could be bored – but why not? “There was a bomb in the Throne Room,” I said, and sat down and told him the rest.

“Those disks’ll wipe,” he said decidedly, when I had done. “If there are any kids, no one will find them and that will be that. There’ll be six trumped-up Emperors in the next year, and then the whole thing will fall apart. No more Empire. Just what’s supposed to happen.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m professionally bound to try to help – even though it almost certainly means ruining a computer over it.”

“You can do that in your spare time if you want,” he said. “Don’t forget your main job is to find a Magid to replace me. You’d better go to Bristol tomorrow.”

“No,” I said. “Not with a computer puzzle like this one hanging over me. I couldn’t concentrate.”

I did not want to say I was sick to death of the fruitless Magid hunt. I thought of every other possible excuse instead. Stan protested. We argued for the entire length of the Diabelli variations. As they started yet again, I said, to placate him, “All right. I’ll write the four we know about a letter, asking them to get in touch with me. How does that grab you?”

“I’d be surprised if anything grabbed me in this state,” Stan retorted. “Fine. What are you going to tell them?”

“Different things, depending,” I invented. “Thurless is a writer. I can send him a fan letter. Mallory’s a student. She’ll want money. I’ve already told her mother she’s got a legacy. I can write about that. Fisk sounds as if she would be interested in a new miracle cure, and Kornelius Punt…”

“Yes?” said Stan.

My invention, which had been flowing so freely, dried up on Punt.

“He’s been travelling. Ask him if he’s interested in doing a travel book,” Stan suggested.

“Good idea!” Because I knew he’d give me no peace until I did something. I wrote the letters then and there. I was rather pleased with my artistry. Regardless of the fact that I had never even seen a book by Mervin Thurless, I wrote lyrically of the beauties of his style. To Mallory, I wrote that she had inherited £100. I reckoned I could just about afford that much. To Tansy-Ann Fisk, I was the friend of a friend of a friend who had heard that she was in a clinic and wanted to tell her about the marvels of the Stanley Diet. To Kornelius Punt, I was a small publisher touting for interesting books.

“What’s this Stanley Diet?” Stan said at my shoulder.

“Airy nothing, like you,” I said.

“I thought so,” he said. “Go on. Take the mickey. I don’t care.”

I posted the letters and then, at last, Stan allowed me to get on with the Empire disks. It took me the next three days.

I started studying one of the disks by every Magid means that were relevant. When I thought I knew enough about the nature of the program and the safeguards implanted in it, I stripped down my oldest computer and started forcing it to become Empire-compatible. This was a major task in itself. The Empire used a different size and shape of copy disk, different power and a more streamlined approach to programming. I had to render the metal and plastic of my poor old Amstrad into a sort of jelly and then harden it into the correct form. I had to create a power adapter. Then I had to program it to reflect, as near as I could conjecture, the nature of the machine I had copied the disks from. This was the hardest and most finicky part of all. I can safely say that only a Magid could have done it. I remember remarking to Stan, “Lucky I’m in practice with this sort of thing. It’s probably cheating, but I use Magid ways a lot in my ordinary programming. Did you use Magid methods with your horses?”

There was no reply. I heard the Diabelli variations
again
, coming from my living room.

“I bet he did,” I murmured. There is almost no way not to. It seems to permeate everything you do, being a Magid. Sometimes it’s so nebulous as to seem like intuition. Sometimes, when you hit a fierce problem, there seems no way forward without, and you push, the way I was pushing that program then.

At the end of the first full day, I was ready for a trial. I put in the Empire disk and told it to copy to the hard disk. It resisted all my attempts to make it, even when I very cautiously took the protections off it. So I sighed, put the protections back, and told it to display its files. Nothing. I pushed, unwisely.

The computer went down so comprehensively that things melted inside. Small flames played over it, and I only just saved the power adapter. I did not want to have to make another. I swore. I had to make haste to study the fused and mangled remains while they were still hot too, which was no fun. There turned out to have been no fewer than three magical safeguards embedded in that program, two major mistakes in my attempt at the Empire’s software, and several more in my adaptation of the unfortunate Amstrad. I spent the evening feverishly tracing pathways.

“What did that fool Emperor think he was playing at?” I said irritably to Stan, through the tinkling of the CD player. “You’d almost think he’d said, ‘I can’t be Emperor when I’m dead, so I’ll make sure nobody else can.’”

“Maybe he did,” Stan said. “But some of the other ones who were blown up must have been in the know. He maybe relied on them. It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to get involved.”

“It’s the people who matter,” I said, thinking of the strained nightmare look on the face of General Dakros. “There’s an ordinary, honest man over there, trying to cope. There are millions of other ordinary people who could get slaughtered when the men of high rank in the other ten worlds start to move in on Dakros. There’s going to be an almighty civil war. It may have started already.”

“Don’t get sentimental,” said Stan. “Either the high-rankers will win, or your general will get a taste for ruling and keep the Empire for himself. These things happen.”

That night in bed, I had to admit he was right. But I also wanted to solve the
problem
.

The next morning I got a letter from young Mallory. The hard-up student had replied by return of post.

“A graceless and slightly suspicious letter,” I remarked to Stan.

“Yes. You get quite a feel of her from it,” he said. “You’ll know her if you see her across the street after this.”

He was right. The letter was full of a personality. The paper had evidently been borrowed or purloined from the uncle. It was headed, in gothic type,
From Ted Mallory, author of Demons Innumerable
, and printed on a hideous dot-matrix printer with almost no ink. But it all breathed a very strong personality.

“A nuisance, her being adopted,” I fretted. “Who on earth can her legacy be from?”

“Me,” said Stan. “Say I did research and thought I was her uncle. I did have several very randy brothers, so it could even be true.”

I dashed off a courteous note to this strong personality, saying that I would give her the money and explain its origin in person shortly, and got back to work on my second-oldest computer, a Toshiba I had barely touched for a year.

It was hard, detailed going. And it put me under pressure, knowing that I only had the one disk left. I wished I had not left two with Dakros now. In fact I became harassed enough towards the end of that day to get through to the com number Dakros had given me and ask him to spare me another. The answer came back, a prompt and laconic fax:

Both disks melted.

Damn. And I really did not want to melt another computer. There seemed to be nothing for it but to cross my fingers and put the second disk in.

V
IRUS DETECTED
, announced the Toshiba.

I got the disk out quick, but at least I was on familiar ground here. I clicked my tongue at the paranoia of the Emperor and set about dismantling the virus. It was a magical implantation. It was like undoing old lace.

“Aren’t you going to eat today?” Stan asked a while later.

I looked up to find night had come, early, since it was early in the year, but time to stop for a bit. I made a cup of coffee while I wondered what to eat. Next thing I knew, I was in front of the Toshiba again. It was after midnight. But the virus had gone when I tried the disk.

“You’re getting obsessed with that Empire,” Stan warned me.

“Correction,” I said. “I’m obsessed with a computer problem. It’s not every day I get a magical virus.”

The third day, I actually got the program to copy and display. That was a relief, since I could now reshape some of my own disks and make backups. But it did me no good. All I could get on the screen was the statement that Timotheo was deleted and the perpetual P
ASSWORD REQUIRED
. This was maddening, since I had been behind the scenes of it, so to speak, dealing with the virus, and ought to have been able to bypass the need for a password. But if I tried that, I got nothing at all. And I did not dare push, Magid fashion, for fear of another meltdown.

Stan heard me swearing and drifted into my workroom. “Give it a password then,” he said. “And when you’ve a moment, put me another music disc on, would you?”

“What’s the matter with Diabelli? Have you learnt it by heart?” I said.

“Every note,” he said, quite seriously. “I know Beethoven like a friend now.”

I put him on a choral medley, because that made a change, and got through to Dakros again. The reply was from the mage Jeffros:

A nursery rhyme! Well, Lady Alexandra was definitely not just a pretty face and the suggestion fitted, as we were dealing with children here. Empire nursery rhymes are not so different from Earth’s. They are one of the things we Magids put into circulation. But seven letters, like a mad hand of Scrabble, in any one of the fourteen languages spoken in the Empire! Actually I was full of hope as I went to set up one of my other computers to run through all the possibilities. I think my only problem was surprise that Timos IX knew such things as nursery rhymes existed.