The Medusa Encounter (9 page)

She walked half a mile through streets of declining prosperity to reach the nearest red-enameled infobox, which stood on a busy commercial corner. She collapsed her umbrella and shook it, then squeezed the door closed behind her. The glass panes were steamy, running with rain; the traffic on the street outside was a colorless blur. She slipped off her thin woolen gloves and leaned over the machine. PIN spines extended from beneath her sensibly short nails and probed the machine’s ports.

The tang of dataflow rose in Sparta’s olfactory lobes. Within seconds she had bypassed a hierarchy of barriers and, like a salmon swimming upstream, followed the current of information upstream to its source, a confidential file in Scotland Yard’s bureau of records. It told her that Blake’s apartment had been firebombed two days after he’d disappeared from the castle on the Hudson. He’d escaped unharmed and gone to join his parents in Manhattan.

The file revealed that the authorities had been irritated with Mr. Redfield for leaving the vicinity without notice. But when they’d finally tracked him down, he’d been most cooperative—and ultimately persuasive. He really had no idea who might want to kill him. He’d been away from home—spending most of his time in France, he explained—in connection with his profession as a consultant in rare books and manuscripts. Scotland Yard had accepted his explanation that he’d fled because he feared for his safety and that of his acquaintances in London.

Nice going, Blake, she thought, withdrawing her spines from the machine. You’re safe and out of my way, which is apparently what we both want—and what I came here to ensure. I don’t need your help on this one. I will smoke out the
prophetae
without you.

She left the booth and walked the wet pavement toward the nearest underground entrance. Robotaxis and private hydros hissed along the busy road, spraying oil and water in an aerosol like a heavy ground fog, but she was a working girl who could not afford the dry luxury of a cab interior. As she bundled herself into the smelly warmth of the crowded tube station, she thought of the files she’d seen back on the Hudson and experienced a moment of regret. She’d let the commander persuade her not to call Blake, not to explain anything, even though she believed he deserved to know what she knew of the truth. But Sparta understood even better than the commander that if Blake learned the truth now, he’d do something. Dear Blake, so eager to help . . . but what he usually did under stress was go out and blow something up.

It always seemed to him so logical and necessary at the time. And it always made the situation worse. In this investigation she couldn’t afford to have Blake going out and blowing things up, complicating matters. She would have to let him believe that she’d fired him, that she’d told him to get lost and stay lost. Or that she’d betrayed him. What the commander said he “remembered.”

She would have to hope that when it was all over, when she could tell him the whole truth, he could learn to remember something different. And that he’d still love her.

That had been her first, not her only, disagreement with the commander. After agreeing not to try to contact Blake, she’d refused to say another word of substance to her boss until he’d kept his own parole. He’d handed her a triplet of chips, grudgingly, she thought, and left her alone in the downstairs conference room of the safe house.

The first chip held files from the long-defunct Multiple Intelligence project. In them, guarded by the logo of the quick brown fox, were details of the courses to which she’d been subjected—everything from quantum chemistry to southeast Asian languages to flight training—and all the surgical procedures to which she’d subsequently been subjected: nanochips in half a dozen locations in her brain, polymer electrical cells under her diaphragm, the PIN spines spliced into her nervous system. . . . It was all here, laid out in depth and detail: the plans and specs for taking a female human adolescent and converting her into a species of wet war machine.

Detailed too was the depth of her parents’ involvement. Far from innocent victims, they had been eager participants in the establishment of M. I. At least in the beginning. As long as they thought the subjects of M. I. were going to be other people’s children. . . .

But the files covered only one side of the correspondence, the M. I. side. The North American government, represented by the man who then called himself William Laird, had asked Linda’s parents to act as principal consultants to the project. They were to be well paid, but that was not the only inducement. Concerning human potential, Laird had a vision that they evidently shared.

To them, this Laird apparently seemed visionary and sensible at the same time; he was not a believer in such superstitious nonsense as “memes” (one of her father’s pet peeves), supposed “units” of culture with no common definition, discernible only after the fact. Laird meant evolution at the level of the organism itself, the physical human being as well as, inevitably, the cultural human being—thus not a teleonomic process, having the mere appearance of purpose, but an actual progression toward a welldefined goal: teleology from within.

Linda’s parents were central in establishing the educational and testing programs of the Multiple Intelligence project. Then, suddenly, the record of their involvement ceased—shortly before the date corresponding to Linda’s admission to the program, as its first subject. And its first, most spectacular failure.

Her parents were not mentioned again in M. I. files. Years went by; suddenly, almost overnight, Laird and many of his top staffers fled and M. I. itself was disbanded, under circumstances Sparta knew intimately, for she herself had precipitated them.

A second set of files consisted of interrogations of captured
prophetae
. Captured by whom? Where the commander had obtained these, Sparta did not know. They were encoded in the commonest commercial system, and all identifying marks had been removed.

These were hair-raising tales. Deep probes had reconstructed the subjects’ living memories: of terrifying childhoods; of failure, homelessness, addiction, and despair before first contact with the
prophetae
; of blossoming hope after recruitment, of indoctrination and training in the tenets of the Free Spirit; of their missions. To plug into these files was to relive a hell of lost souls.

Those whose memories had been extracted for display here had been soldiers of the Free Spirit. Two had been there the night Linda’s father had tried to rescue her, the night his bodyguards had been slaughtered and Linda had been shot and the rescuing Snark, acting on her orders, had carried her wounded father and her mother into the night sky. By the witness of these files, Sparta—living what they felt, feeling what drove them—confirmed what she had believed, that it was the duty of the
prophetae
to kill anyone who had successfully resisted indoctrination.

And from these soldiers she learned the story they all believed, the story that had been reported in all media, that a Snark had crashed that night on a military reservation in Maryland, killing its passengers, her parents—other details withheld “in the interests of administrative security.”

The last set of files was a various batch, some of them from the North Continental Treaty Alliance, some from police records and other terrestrial authorities. The Snark in which Linda’s parents had tried to rescue her had been stolen from the NCTA—how had they accomplished that extraordinary feat?—and the testimony of Laird and others placed the machine in Maryland, where the rescue attempt, described by Laird as assault and attempted kidnap, had failed.

But Sparta knew she had sent it off with orders to take all necessary measures to protect its passengers. It had obeyed, and vanished. The files revealed that no trace of it was recorded on radar scopes. No transmissions from it were overheard. It was never seen again. There had been no helicopter crash. Her parents had simply disappeared.

“Seen enough?” the commander whispered from the darkness. He had returned while she was absorbed in the last of the files, but she had not failed to hear him coming, to identify him in the dark.

 

“You promised to tell me what really happened to my parents. This doesn’t do that.”

 

“I admitted I couldn’t prove what I know. But they are alive.”

 

“You can’t know that from this.”

 

“What I firmly believe, then.”

He was still holding something back, but she would not get it out of him with argument. In truth, he had given her something of great value. Often she’d roamed secretly and at will through the files of the agencies that had reported the helicopter crash. She had never found anything but obvious fakes replacing stolen records—fakes, booby-trapped with sticky bits, so that unauthorized persons who lacked her expertise peeking into those records would be automatically tracked back to their own terminals.

The commander’s files were the stolen originals. Where and how he had gotten them, she didn’t know.

 

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

 

“We’ll be running a team on
Kon-Tiki
, some of them undercover, some in the open. You’ll be on the clandestine side.”

 

“You didn’t keep your promise, Commander—I’m rewriting our contract. I’ll cooperate with you, but not on a team.”

 

“You’re too well known, Troy. As soon as you stick your head up, somebody’s going to shoot it off.”

 

“I’ll keep my head down. I will report to you and you only.”

He heatedly argued the need for constant communication—impossible if she worked alone—the need for surveillance teams to follow suspects one person could not follow undetected, the need for close coordination with intelligence support, logistical support, etc. . . . She was unmoved.

“Alone then, if you must,” he said at last. “I’ve arranged clinic sessions beginning tomorrow afternoon, at Earth Central.”

 

“What sessions?”

 

“You can’t keep that mug, Troy. You’re an interplanetary viddie star.”

 

“No.”

 

“Do you like your looks better than the ones you were born with?” He sounded genuinely astonished.

 

“No more surgery.”

 

He grew very still. “All right, why don’t you just tell me now: what orders
are
you willing to take?”

 

“No orders, Commander. I’m willing to hear your suggestions.”

 

“You think you don’t need us, is that it?”

 

For an instant her gaze slid away, evading his.

 

“You’re very wrong, you know,” he said softly. “I hope you don’t learn it the hard way.”

 

“Everything of value that I know, I’ve learned the hard way.” She meant to be hard when she said it, but she knew he wasn’t fooled. She hadn’t even fooled herself.

 

They had further fruitless talks, but before long he was saying a short goodbye to her in front of the Earth Central building on Manhattan’s East River.

She was wearing Space Board blues and carrying a regulation duffel bag when she took a magneplane to the Newark shuttleport, but she never arrived there; as the saying around the investigative branch had it, she had gone off the scopes.

To disguise herself, she didn’t bother with time-consuming and expensive plastic surgery. Surgeons kept records, and there was always the possibility that their greed would not stop with bills for services rendered but might extend to blackmail or betrayal. Instead she drew on an older tradition.

An altered hairstyle or a wig, colored contact lenses, a tuft of cotton under the tongue—sometimes just a spot of color on the cheeks—was enough, when combined with subtle changes of gesture and expression and accent, to make her unrecognizable to anyone but a well-programmed machine. Her first transitory disguise made use of a greasy black hairpiece with a ponytail down to her belt.

In a cosmos of strong and varied perfumes, altering her smell was even simpler. She wore leather pants and a leather jacket around the clock for a week and frequented New Jersey waterfront bars where the occupants mistook her ripe aroma for their own.

It needed a couple of days of stalking, keeping her eyes and ears open—she had very good eyes and ears —and some hours of haggling prices over pitchers of beer, but Sparta managed to acquire two illegally programmable I. D. slivers. She never met the people who’d made them, and the people who sold them to her had no idea who she was.

Less than twenty-four hours later, a pretty redhead named Bridget Reilly showed up at Newark and boarded the supersonic jitney for London.
VIII

Wearing a conservative dark suit and red silk tie, carrying the large black document case he usually carried, Blake left the fortified lobby of his parents’ building at the same hour he had for the previous two weeks and headed uptown, taking one of Manhattan’s restored antique subway trains.

He’d deliberately established a predictable pattern, spending the early morning hours on the commlink seeking job interviews and leaving home shortly before the lunch hour. He liked to travel by subway rather than robotaxi; by switching trains he could tell whether anyone was following him on foot.

He got off at his usual stop in the upper sixties and walked two blocks east on sidewalks bustling with happy workers and shoppers. It had rained the night before and the robosweepers had polished the shining marble streets. Now the clouds were breaking up, as Blake and everyone else who’d paid attention to the weather report knew they would, and their ragged remnants were tinged with gold in the noonday light.

Blake walked past the Indian restaurant that he’d made his favorite lunch place, but he didn’t go in. He continued to the end of the block and used the public commlink on the corner of First Avenue to make a reservation for a compact hydro coupe, to be picked up in a village north of the city, on the east bank of the Hudson.

Then he caught a swift, quiet, hydro-powered uptown local bus and rode to the 125th Street plane station. The elevated station was the crystalline jewel of its renovated neighborhood, its entrance resplendent in an autumn display of maroon and yellow chrysanthemums.