James P. Hogan (37 page)

He stood just inside Mirsto Junior’s room, where he had been insistently conducted within minutes of arriving. Mirsto turned back from reaching to the shelves above the bed and presented his latest creation, a wooden box with a hinged lid, about big enough to hold an orange, finished and polished with a simple but neatly worked pattern of marquetry inlay. “I made it in the carpentry class at school,” he announced.

Korshak opened the lid and inspected the inside. “Not a bad piece of work,” he complimented.

“Now, who does he take after, I wonder?” Vaydien said from the doorway. Korshak had materialized without warning. Even though she had become accustomed to surprises over the years, she was still getting over the shock of seeing him with a shaved head and no mustache. “He goes away, saying he may need to stay over for a night or two, and comes back two weeks later looking like some kind of monk from a monastery back on Earth,” she had commented to Mirsto. Wandering had always been in his blood, Korshak had told them. The explaining could wait until after they had eaten.

Mirsto took the box back, picked up one of the pieces from a board game that he and Hori played, placed it inside, and closed the lid. “I guess you know the rest,” he said, offering the box back.

“Can I look?” Korshak asked cautiously.

“Sure.”

Korshak lifted the lid. The box was empty. Mirsto opened a hand to reveal the game piece. “What do you think, Dad?”

“Good.”

“Could you spot it?”

“Well, that wouldn’t have been fair, would it? I know what to look for.” The box would have a false bottom with a section that opened when the lid was closed to deliver the contents into the holder’s palm. As Mirsto put the box and the piece back, Korshak noticed the tapestry adorning the opposite wall. “Hey, you finished it,” he said to Vaydien.

“Finally. Like it?”

“It certainly brightens the room up. Escalos from the hills…. Now, doesn’t that bring back some memories!”

“I cheated a bit with the animals, though,” Vaydien confessed. “Half of those were never within a thousand miles of Arigane.”

“Well, I like them,” Mirsto said. “And it’s my room.”

“Then that’s all that matters,” Vaydien agreed.

“What animals did you see on Plantation?” Mirsto asked as they followed Vaydien back toward the hallway.

“Shh.” Vaydien nodded toward another of the doors. “Kilea’s sleeping.”

“Oh, lots of kinds. I’ll tell you about them over dinner,” Korshak murmured.

“You sound hungry,” Vaydien said as they came into the kitchen.

“Famished.”

“Didn’t you have anything while you were at the Directorate?”

“Could have, but I decided to come straight back. What do we have?”

“Oh… Hori was here yesterday, and we had a steak pie. There’s still about half of it left. I could throw something together to go with that.”

“Sounds perfect.”

“What’s this, Dad?” Korshak looked back. Mirsto was investigating the open-top carrier bag that Korshak had set down in the hall. Korshak had obtained some regular clothes on arriving at Astropolis, but he still had his Dollarian garb from Etanne with him.

“That’s okay. You can look at it,” Korshak said.

Mirsto drew out the gray Genhedrin robe. Still inside the bag was the white novice’s tunic that Korshak had worn under it. “Is this yours?” Mirsto asked, holding the robe up in the kitchen doorway and looking puzzled.

Vaydien couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “It goes with the haircut and the shave. But seriously, what are you doing with it?”

“I ended up on Etanne,” Korshak replied, pulling a chair up to the table and sitting down. “The crack about the monk wasn’t far off.”

“Etanne?” Vaydien repeated. This was the first she had heard of it. Nobody had said anything to alter her impression that Korshak had been on Plantation the whole time. It had been a case of the fewer who knew otherwise, the better. “I thought you were looking for Masumichi’s robot.” She produced a beer from the refrigerator along with the pie dish and set it down on the table with a glass. “You said it had gotten interested in the cults. I’d never heard anything so crazy. So, is that where it went?”

Korshak nodded. “We were pretty sure, anyway. But the only way to find out for sure was to get inside. An opportunity presented itself….” He shrugged and filled his glass, leaving it at that.

Vaydien waited for a moment, then turned and looked at him questioningly, her expression asking to know more.

“It’s a bit of a sensitive issue,” Korshak said. “I’m not sure that I can say any more right now.” He motioned with his eyes to indicate Mirsto, who was still investigating the robe through the open doorway.

“Political? Is that why you were at the Directorate?”

“Exactly. Later?”

Vaydien nodded that she understood.

Korshak turned the bottle around and inspected the Envoy label. “Ah, the good stuff,” he remarked.

“You said you liked it after you and Ronti came back from Istella, so I got some in. Everybody’s drinking it – except the doomsayers. The launch is in two days.”

Korshak had temporarily put
Envoy
out of his mind. Lubanov seemed to have done all that could reasonably be expected. Korshak had personally experienced the promptly instituted checking of suspicious-looking travelers leaving Etanne, and on arriving at
Aurora
he had learned that shuttles leaving for
Outmark
were being subjected to more stringent procedures. The only way Tek could have avoided detection would have been by getting through as a passenger before Lubanov acted, but reconstruction of the time scale from the information Korshak had provided showed this to be impossible. Nevertheless, Lubanov’s people were conducting diligent searches all through
Outmark
and would continue doing so until the launch was completed.

“Did I tell you that Ronti and I ran into Osgar when we were on Istella?” Korshak asked.

“Yes. He’s running a bar there now. That was the first place you went, looking for the robot.”

“Heard anything from Ronti?”

“He seems to be spending a lot of time at Beach lately. I think he’s found a new ladyfriend there.”

“There’s a surprise. Have you heard anything more about the show there that he was supposed to be organizing?”

“I’m afraid not…. How about some warmed-up mash and corn with this? I can make some fresh gravy.”

“Great. I’ll need to give him a call to find out what’s happening.”

As was inevitable, Mirsto had put on the robe and came in through the doorway trailing it behind him like a blown-down tent. The cowl turned toward Korshak as Mirsto peered at him through the muslin face piece.

“Oh, are you going to Etanne, too, now?” Korshak asked him. “That’s a robe from one of the sects there. They’ve rediscovered an all-powerful god from the old world who was called Dollar.”

“No,” Mirsto said. “It’s my invisibility cloak – like the one that Cosmic Man wears. Can you make it work for me?”

“What do you mean, make it work?”

“To get it to make people invisible.
You
could figure out a way.”

Korshak took another swig of beer. “Well, now, that’s something we’ll have to talk about. There’s what you and I call magic, and there’s…” His voice trailed away as the implication sank in of what Mirsto had said.

“Yes?” Mirsto’s muffled voice said from the cowl after several seconds.

Invisibility cloak. The cape that Morgal had wanted made in a hurry that morning had been of an unusual black matted-fiber material that Korshak had wondered about at the time. It would be ideal as a nonreflector of radiation – maybe to conceal a small object approaching something like
Envoy
amid the bustle of activity going on around it.

And there was something else. When Korshak had called Vaydien briefly from Lois Iles’s cabin on Plantation and talked to Mirsto, Mirsto had described how he and Hori had tried out Masumichi’s neural coupler. It was cool, Mirsto had said. “You think that you really are the robot.” It was more fun being a robot. People had to be stuck inside places like Astropolis and Jakka all the time, where there was air, and temperatures were warm enough. Robots could go outside – over, and under, and anywhere….

Outside
.

“Dad?”

“Korshak, are you all right?” Vaydien looked around from the counter.

Korshak felt a sudden cold wetness on his thigh. He had sat back unthinkingly in the chair and let his glass tilt. A slow, sickening sensation was rising somewhere in his stomach.

“It doesn’t matter,” he murmured distantly. “None of it matters. Lubanov’s people aren’t going to find anything. It’s not going through the internal system at all. It’s going around the outside somehow. It could even be there already.”

“Korshak, what are you talking about?”

Korshak was already rising from the table. “Sorry… I’ll explain everything later,” he said. “But you’re going to have to put that away again for now. I have to get back to the Directorate right now. I think we may have an emergency.”

They met in the outer room to Ormont’s office in the Directorate, which he used as a mini – conference facility. Vad Cereta was the last to arrive, having come from the Hub docking ports. It was fortuitous that events had caught him in a quick visit to
Aurora
and not at
Outmark
, where he spent most of his time. He had been about to board a return shuttle but postponed it until a later one. Korshak filled in the background from his chair at one end of the large table taking up the center of the room, opposite Ormont, and then came to the point.

“Checking the passengers leaving Etanne, and controlling traffic from here to
Outmark
isn’t going to do any good. Tek isn’t using the regular routes. They’ve got some means of moving it outside.” A silence fell while those present digested the information. Cereta shuffled his feet and fidgeted. Masumichi was looking out of his depth and crestfallen, as if all of this were somehow his doing.

“Maybe across Constellation,” Cereta said finally. “But all the way to
Outmark
? Two hundred fifty thousand miles? How? I can’t buy it.”

“They don’t need an independent vehicle,” Lubanov pointed out. “We supply those already. The robot functions outside. It can hitch rides – from Etanne to here, and from here to
Outmark
. All it would need is a device for local maneuvering when it got there. A simple pressurized thruster. What little thermal there was would be lost against the background. With the absorbent surface that Korshak’s talking about, you’d never spot it.”

Cereta was already nodding to concede that he had spoken too hastily. “Then we mobilize full external checks of the ferries and shuttles right away,” he said.

“That wouldn’t be sufficient,” Lubanov replied. “The robot could be out there already. It’s had enough time. We have to go over every inch of
Envoy,
too.”

Cereta made a conciliatory gesture. “Okay. If that’s what we have to do, it’s what we —” He left the sentence unfinished as he saw that Masumichi was still looking worried and shaking his head. “What’s the problem?”

Masumichi wrinkled his face up and bit his lip while he sought to put it into words. “Consider the situation.
Envoy
is a large, complex structure with all kinds of external niches and recesses. You say, we go over every inch of it. So how do we do this? Maybe with something like the mobile cradles that the construction crews use. You put some people in suits, send them outside in cradles, and they deploy around
Envoy
with spotlights and glasses, trying to find where Tek, and whatever the device is that it’s using, are hiding.”

“Well, something like that, I suppose,” Lubanov agreed. He looked at Cereta, who shrugged and nodded.

“How else?” Cereta asked Masumichi.

“I can’t think of anything else. And that’s the trouble. You have these platforms nosing around, shining lights into here and there. Obviously, Tek is going to see them before they see it. Now, from what we’ve surmised, Tek has accepted to go on what we assume is a suicide mission involving some kind of bomb, which to fit in with the propaganda we’ve been hearing would ideally be detonated to coincide with the launch.” Masumichi glanced around briefly. Nobody interrupted. “That’s if all goes according to plan. But how would a robot like Tek react to realizing that it was about to be discovered? It could sit there and let its mission be thwarted. Or it could decide to act prematurely on the grounds that less effect is better than no effect at all.”

A few second passed before Cereta voiced the obvious. “Well, you tell us. You’re the one who made it.”

“That’s the problem. I can’t. It’s a dynamic, self-modifying, associative system developed specifically for research into making autonomous inferences. Being predictable would defeat the whole purpose.” Masumichi shook his head. “I can’t tell you what it would do. If it’s in the grip of some kind of religious zeal, it might well opt for martyrdom and glory. And with all those search parties out there, we’d be risking a lot more than just an unmanned probe and a lot of work that’s gone into it.”

“Oh gods.” Cereta sat back heavily in his chair.

“Do we know for sure that it’s acting autonomously?” Ormont asked. He had been following intently but so far said little. “Isn’t it possible that the final fire command would come from Etanne? It could presumably link into the web wavelengths operating around
Outmark
.”

Vogol, who had accompanied Lubanov from the Research Section, looked dubious. “We’ve been scanning continuously to detect any open channel. But it’s been switched off ever since it shut down on Etanne.”

“Having it depend on a remote authorization would be inefficient in any case,” Lubanov put in. “Its capacity to act autonomously is precisely what makes it ideal for this kind of operation.” He thought for a moment longer and then added with a growl, “I wouldn’t trust those people to hold back, anyway, even with the search parties out there.”

“Then we have to find some way of getting it to switch its communications on again and try and reason with it remotely,” Cereta said.