The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (14 page)

“You don’t think a man could have created them?”

Aliyu thought about it. “Perhaps if he was trained by a woman. I think I am better now, because women helped me.”

The women around him were all fidgeting as he said it.

Afterward, one of them caught Shaw’s arm. “Emmanuel’s brilliant. One of the best minds for physics I’ve ever met. We all love him, but he is always talking about how women run the world and how lucky he is to be included. It’s exasperating sometimes.”

Shaw smiled. “I bet it is. Although, for what it’s worth, I’ve been to three universities in two days, and I’d guess that the women have outnumbered the men four or five to one. Emmanuel’s just calling it like he sees it.”

Shaw and Yang booked two rooms at a hotel in central Paris, planning to leave for Geneva early in the morning. After their whirlwind tour, they hadn’t found any leads, but Shaw was finding enough on the trip to make him edgy. He wondered if he could talk to Yang—if he was experiencing any of the same anxiety that he was.

They found a bar, and Yang ordered two glasses of wine for the table. The place looked like it could have been there two hundred years ago, if not five hundred. But that illusion was destroyed by two screens with news feeds on them. The owners had caved like so many bars and restaurants back home, but for some reason Shaw had hoped that Europe had avoided that trend.

“What’d you think of that Professor Chavel?” Shaw asked.

“The old guy?”

“Yeah, the one who’s never jumped.”

Yang shrugged. “It’s like people who don’t have sex until they’re married. You think it’s kind of inspiring, because you couldn’t wait yourself, but then you realize that they missed out on a lot of sex.”

Shaw laughed hard at that. “I’m guessing that means you wouldn’t do it,” he asked.

“Go without the Lattice?”

“Yeah. Would you give it up?”

“You mean, as a dare or a bet or something? For money?”

“No, like would you give it up to make your life better? To make it simpler. More … human, I guess.”

Yang shook his head. “I think he’s dead wrong. He’s missing out. Hasn’t jumped into the past, hasn’t jumped into space or into parts of the world he’s never traveled to in person. Hasn’t seen his heroes, hasn’t
been
his heroes, and listened to their thoughts. Why would anyone give that up? It’s too good.”

“What if it is just that …
too
good? What if the Lattice is addictive? Not just the obvious addiction, too—I hear enough from Ellie about that. But I’m not sure I could live without the Lattice. And isn’t that a problem?”

“I’m not sure I could live without coffee, but I’m not giving that up anytime soon,” Yang laughed.

Shaw smiled thinly and had another sip of wine. “This was a good pick. I didn’t know you knew anything about wine,” he said.

“A hobby. You’re not supposed to cup it like that, either. Hold it down here, on the stem. Don’t touch where the wine is, your hand heats up the wine too fast.”

“Like this?”

Yang nodded. There was a lull in the conversation and Yang said, “I didn’t mean to make a joke about the addiction thing just now, sir.”

Shaw waved him off. “I’m just tired.”

“That guy really got to you, didn’t he, sir?” Yang asked.

“This trip has been … annoying, that’s the best word I can think of for it.” He chuckled and sipped at his wine, holding the glass by the stem. “Yes. He did. I mean, I agree Chavel was an old stick in the mud. Like you said, a virgin who doesn’t know what he’s missing. But I’ll add to that, he’s a virgin who has no problem judging all those who have fallen. But he did say one thing that stuck with me. He thought that the Lattice was killing creativity and innovation of everything outside the Lattice.”

“That’s the part that stuck with you? I didn’t agree with him on much, but that one didn’t faze me at all. Technology’s still getting faster and faster, cheaper and cheaper, better and better. How can he think the Lattice is killing innovation?”

“But it’s like we’re playing at the margins these days. Who cares whether your printer can print a complete dining set in three minutes or two minutes and forty seconds? When was the last time there were huge breakthroughs in technology that didn’t involve the Lattice? The Altair rings are cool, but they’re not a breakthrough.”

“The spheres. The hovercraft.”

Shaw smirked. “I bet Professor Chavel would agree with that. The only true innovation is from the people trying to take the Lattice down. More motivated, I guess.” He finished his glass of wine. “Really, that was excellent. How does a twenty-three-year-old learn so much about wine?”

Yang looked surprised. “Who said I was twenty-three?”

“You did.”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“You said you were twenty-three when I—oh. Of course.”

“Ono again?”

“Sorry. That must be weird for you. That I keep thinking of him. Damn. What an idiot he was—you’d think he would have bothered to look up how old you were. He could have given the game away if I’d known how old you were supposed to be.”

“I told you, he was inept. Another glass?”

Shaw nodded and Yang went up to the bar.

Shaw stared through the empty glass, his fingerprints still on the bowl from where he’d been holding it incorrectly. Through the smudged glass, the wood table was cloudy and dim. The grain of it was muddied by fingerprints in some places, and stretched by the curved glass in others. He thought of Wu’s story about how the Lattice playback started to fade and get cloudy around five billion years in the past and wondered if it was like this—everything looking smudged until it eventually all turned into one big muddy blank.

Why five billion years? Why would the Lattice not work before then?

And why am I still here thinking about it? I could care less about anything that happened five billion years ago.
But Shaw’s mind wouldn’t let it go.
Was there something here?

His brain was tingling. He felt like somewhere in the back corners of his mind two ideas had floated by each other. And if he could just connect them together …
what was it
? Something about the history of the Lattice? Five billion years. Was there something in how the Lattice couldn’t see that far? In the number? Was five important? Five billion?

No. Something about looking through distortion? Looking where he’d been holding his glass? About the wine legs streaked on the sides of the glass?

Maybe the remnants of the nanoshock on his fingertips? He looked at his two dark fingers. They were still dark and steely. He rubbed them against his thumb, feeling the grain of his skin.

He was snatching at air, and he knew it. This was never the way to figure a problem out, no matter how maddening it was. Sometimes when he would forget what he’d just been thinking about he would jump back to remember. But this time, there wasn’t a conscious thought he could jump to, which made it all the more frustrating.

Shaw closed his eyes and tried taking deep breaths.
OK, don’t think about the glass. Think about—

A call interrupted his thoughts. Braybrook. “Accept … Yes, General?”

“A man just confessed to plotting to destroy the Geneva Lattice.”

“He
confessed
?”

“Fifteen seconds ago. He just called up the news feeds and confessed that he’s been in conversation with the raiders. He has a sphere.”

Shaw looked up at the screen. Sure enough. Yang was watching it as well, grimacing.

“We’ll be on the first train to Geneva, General.”

The two hour trip between Paris and Geneva was a test of Shaw’s patience. All he wanted to do was interrogate the suspect, or—since that wasn’t going to happen—jump ahead and see what he could learn in advance.

He forced himself not to jump ahead. What was the point? He could learn it all when he got there, he told himself. With Yang asleep on his shoulder, Shaw took the opportunity to look through the reports Iwatani and Kanjitech had forwarded.

Kanjitech’s report was short and clear. There were no more imposters at the Lattice.

Dvorak’s research was more interesting.

The pilot wasn’t trained. The hovercraft’s onboard systems were strong enough that the pilot didn’t have to do much more than point it in the right direction. He was also the primary builder of it, with help from two friends whom he told the ship was a “skunkworks” project for one of the aircraft manufacturers.

It was a handy enough lie—it was a popular myth that the major manufacturers employed everyday citizens to build revolutionary products with their home printers. According to the urban legends, the companies could build their products in secret that way. Everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who had been a skunk, the slang word for the job. Until these three built the hovercraft, Shaw was fairly confident it was a mythical job, created in people’s fantasies about how big business worked.

What had Wu called it?
Apophenia
. Even with the Lattice, people could invent the dumbest of ideas that just a few minutes of jumping, or a few seconds of thinking, would disprove.

The report moved on to the plastic surgeon who had given Ono Yang’s face and fingerprints. He had a sphere, and had been instructed to put Yang’s face on whoever came through the door, no questions asked. Amazingly, he’d first received the sphere four years before. This was the first task he’d ever completed. Had the raiders truly been planning the attack for so long?

And if so, why would one of them suddenly get cold feet and confess out of nowhere? Shaw wondered, his mind turning back to the man he was traveling to meet in Geneva. It didn’t make any sense. Why come forward now? Had he been scheduled to meet with Shaw in Geneva and panicked? That didn’t seem likely. He had obviously already avoided detection by the Geneva Lattice security staff, so why Shaw would scare him wasn’t clear either.

Yang stirred in his sleep and sat up quite suddenly.

“I’m so sorry, sir. I didn’t realize I was on your shoulder.” Yang flushed.

“It’s no problem. It’s been a long day.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Really, forget about it. The drool stain will fade,” Shaw said with a smile.

Yang still looked embarrassed, and even grimaced slightly. “I may as well do this now. There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you, sir. It’s a … personal question.”

Shaw raised an eyebrow. “I’ll do my best.”

“You’ve confused me with Ono a couple times now. I mean … one day you’re working with a guy who tries to kill you, and two days later you’re basically working with him again. Or at least I think it would feel that way. It’s the same face. You said in the bar it must be weird for me. But what’s it like for you?”

Shaw looked at the back of the seat in front of him. He thought back to seeing Yang coming at him with a nanoshock. Had Yang picked up on some wariness in Shaw? Was Shaw treating him differently than he would have otherwise?

“I don’t see Ono when I look at you. It is the same face, I suppose, but at the same time, it’s not. Like twins who have grown to adulthood—there are subtle differences, more in mannerism than looks, maybe. But they’re there.”

Yang seemed to be expecting more and Shaw felt like he had to keep going. “You’re more mature. Something about him was … cloying, maybe? He was a boy, and you’re a man. Maybe it’s as simple as that.”

Yang nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

“My turn to ask you a personal question.”

Yang looked surprised. “When we left Paris, you seemed distinctly unhappy about coming to Geneva. Is there a reason?”

Yang looked away, rocking his head back and forth as he thought. “Yes and no, sir. It was my home for most of my life. My parents were scientists at CERN for years. When my mother transferred to the University of Sydney, we decided that I should stay in Geneva to finish school. I was only thirteen, but with chat rooms and the Lattice, it never felt like they were half-way around the world. That’s how I grew up until I went to the academy. When I was stationed back home in Geneva, I didn’t think anything of it. Until one day I was walking down the same street I used to walk down to go to school and something in me just snapped. I was alone again in the same city and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted out. The Nevada Lattice was the most likely place to go. I was so excited to get the assignment …”

Shaw thought he saw where this was going. “And then the night before you start you’re drugged, you have your identity stolen, and a few days later you’re suddenly on a train headed back for Geneva. I get it.”

“Not the smoothest job transfer in the world,” Yang said, looking out the window at the approaching lights of his hometown.

They arrived at three in the morning, an ungodly time to be awake normally, but Shaw’s body was still confused by his around-the-world flight. He felt mostly awake, excited by any chance for a real lead.

A man was waiting for them on the platform.

“This is getting weird, all these people waiting for me at train stations,” Shaw whispered to Yang as they approached him. “I liked it better when the only thing waiting for me was an empty cab.”

The man introduced himself as a member of the Geneva police,
Sûreté
division.

“Once we heard on the news that he’d confessed, we isolated him in his apartment, mostly for his protection.”

“
His
protection?” Shaw asked.

“A lot of people in Geneva make their living from the Lattice. They won’t stand for someone trying to destroy it. We thought he might be in danger.”

The three men left the station. Three police cars were out front. “If you would like to go directly to him, I can take you there. One of my men can take your bags to a hotel if you’d like.”

Yang said, “Hotel Jardin Anglais.”

“I know the place,” the officer said. “We will arrange two rooms for you there.”

Shaw and Yang parted with their backpacks, and let the driverless car speed them and the officer away from the train station. “I always wanted to stay there,” Yang said. “You never get to stay in hotels in your hometown.”

They continued in silence, and Shaw looked out the window at the lights of the city.