To Hold Infinity (35 page)

“Have you flown solo yet?” Yoshiko asked, making conversation.

“Oh, yes.”

Edralix tried to look casual, but a tiny golden spark of excitement flickered in his jet black eyes, and was gone.

“It must be wonderful.” Yoshiko sensed the wistfulness in her own voice.

How marvellous it would be to see with one's own eyes the endless fractal dimensions of mu-space.

“Another standard year, and I'll be eligible for my own ship.”

“You'll do well.” Yoshiko hoped she did not sound patronizing. To get his own vessel so young, Edralix must be talented even by the Pilots' standards.

“Well—I might not take it.”

He looked a little uncomfortable, so Yoshiko did not pursue the matter. She wondered, though, what he would do if he did not choose to fly.

She had heard rumours, through old family friends, that many Pilots were choosing not to pilot for a living, but to pursue other careers.

Having once seen mu-space, how could they ever stay away?

Edralix finished his daistral, put the glass aside, and powered up the display once more.

“I know.” Jana tapped her fingernails against the table. “Why don't we try plotting mass against physical space?”

“Physical dimensions?” Edralix grinned. “How passé.”

While the display swirled and coalesced, Yoshiko's thoughts grew grim. Whatever Rafael's crime, this was info which Tetsuo should not have.

She remembered the pain and embarrassment, when she was summoned to Tetsuo's school to be informed of her son's infotheft, hacking the local NetNode.

“Stop.” Jana's voice drew her back into the present. “Go back. There.”

Edralix whistled softly.

“How many plexcores does a Luculentus have? Two, three at most?”

Translucent parallelepipeds—“squidged bricks,” as Tetsuo was fond of calling them—clustered around a central ovoid. The shapes were filled with a black and scarlet network of pulsing flows.

“Dear God.”

Edralix swallowed. “One hundred and two.”

“I don't understand.” Yoshiko stared at the diagram, not believing what it told her.

“This is a Luculentus, with over a hundred plexcores.”

“You're kidding—”

“Each of these—” Edralix indicated a parallelepiped block. “—represents a plexcore.”

“A mind like this,” said Jana, “is scarcely human.”

“Is this a real person? Or, I don't know, a model? Speculation?”

“Real, I think.” Edralix frowned. “These are real scan readings, from the VSI ware—”

“What is it?”

“It's the sheer size.” Edralix stood up abruptly, and began to pace around the dining area. “What do we have here? Attotech?”

Yoshiko had heard the term: twistor engineering, at the lowest level of physical dimension, where even subatomic particles were huge. Attotechnology. Pure speculation.

“It can't be,” she said.

“So what is it? Nobody can fit over a hundred plexcores inside a human body.”

“A disembodied brain? In some kind of plexcore array?”

While they talked, Jana was manipulating the diagram, dragging down sprites and examining what they had to say.

“Not inside a body.”

Edralix stopped. “What do you mean?”

Tiny digits glowed above the main arteries of neural flow.

“Those are distances.” Jana's voice was grim. “In thousands of kilometres.”

Edralix called up a sketch display, transferred info with a gesture from one diagram to the other, and ordered it to plot a physical configuration.

Only an extended sphere could fit the separations as shown.

“They must be scattered all over Fulgor.”

Jana and Edralix looked at each other, and their Pilots' eyes were unreadable.

“One man's mind, spread through a hundred and two plexcores, across the face of the planet.”

Yoshiko shook her head. That couldn't be right.

She touched a sprite. It displayed the distance between two neighbouring plexcores: nearly twenty thousand kilometres.

“The lightspeed delay must be—sixty-six microseconds, is that right?”

Jana's voice was very controlled. “That's why this needs mu-space comms to work.”

“But—”

Tetsuo.

This was the connection to Tetsuo. Mu-space comms, subverted for use in VSI tech, so that a plexcore nexus could be expanded to such an extraordinary magnitude.

But everyone said LuxPrime was incorruptible.

“She's right.” Edralix was blank-faced.

Yet a LuxPrime courier was killed at Tetsuo's house.

At my son's house.

“Wait a minute.” Yoshiko stared at the two Pilots, and some of Edralix's strange remarks played back through her memory: how the
original Pilots had been “
Only really alive when they were carrying other people's cargo—
” And he was considering not accepting the offer of his own mu-space ship.

So that's what the Pilots were up to.

“I understand now.” Yoshiko looked from one to the other. “You're colonizing mu-space, aren't you?”

 

“It's obvious, in retrospect.” Yoshiko's voice was strangely calm. “But we all have a blindspot, don't we? We think of Pilots as battling through, I don't know, a kind of wild raging sea. Glad to get back into real-space calm.”

“It can be like that.” A soft smile played about Jana's feline features.

“Well—An unenhanced human couldn't survive a second, conscious. But you're at home there, aren't you?”

Jana merely looked at Edralix. “I told you she was quick.”

The intuitive leap had been obvious: mu-space comms gear could never grow really small, because of the energies involved in tunnelling through from one continuum to the other. But the great machinery could exist in either continuum.

If the hard work were done in mu-space, then real-space hardware could become small enough to interface with VSI tech. It only needed a transceiving film of smartatoms. It could be layered through a brain just like standard VSI, and would probably function better.

“We're renting comms facilities to the various LuxPrime subagencies which run Skein,” Jana said.

“And that's how they're implementing the EveryWare/Skein gateway?”

Jana nodded.

“So this—” Yoshiko's mood darkened, as the implications came upon her. “—this Luculentus is using the same facilities.”

“It's been in place a good while, getting ready. A skilful Luculentus
could hide what's going on: the very architecture of the protocols means we can't monitor info-flow.”

While they were talking, Edralix was pointing at sprites, opening up code-volumes, trawling through the documentation.

Yoshiko pictured vast floating cities in mu-space, in that endless fractal golden ocean among black spiky stars. Great structures, maybe whole worlds, which no one but the Pilots would ever see.

She brought her attention back to the moment.

“Object headers only,” Edralix was muttering. “The actual guts of the code isn't stored here—actually, it's way beyond the capacity of one crystal—but header info of all the main driver modules is here.”

One hundred and two plexcores, plus one organic brain: all one mind.

“So we can deduce what it does, even if we can't see the code?”

“That depends on how helpful the header info is. Right now, the objects refuse to talk to me. They're looking for MindSet validation codes, and I'm just trying to—”

“My NetAgents,” Yoshiko interrupted. “They're developed in MindSet. Tetsuo used it, back on Earth, when he coded them up for me.”

She held up her nonfunctional tu-ring.

“OK. Let's fix that ring.” Edralix got busy. “You just need a protocol driver, and a translation engine.”

“So how long will that—? Oh, thank you.”

Yoshiko's tu-ring was glowing green. Operational at last.

 

The horse reared, hooves striking at the air. A samurai bannerman was mounted on its back; his banner fluttered in an unfelt breeze.

The scroll in his left hand was a sign that h-mail was waiting.

“Later,” said Yoshiko. “I need kensei now.”

The bannerman and horse disappeared.

Above her fist, a scruffy disreputable-looking samurai was sitting on a rock in the half-lotus position, cleaning his swords.

Musashi Miyamoto—or
kensei
, sword saint—was the most powerful of her NetAgents.

“Can you read this?” Yoshiko pointed at the glistening ovoid floating in front of Edralix, the representation of an object header.

“
Hai!
”

A text window grew into being on the ovoid's surface.

Edralix touched it, and a high sprite-voice sounded the text aloud.

“
Author: Tetsuo Sunadomari. Purpose: seventh layer protocol interpreter.
”

“No,” whispered Yoshiko.

“Wait a minute.” Edralix turned to the Musashi image. “Can you give me its provenance?”

Yoshiko nodded, giving permission to proceed.

“Hai.” The swordsman pointed a sword at the ovoid. “Provenance: unauthorized copy of licensed original.”

Yoshiko let out a shaky breath. “Who created the unauthorized copy?”

“Unknown.”

It must have been someone good, to duplicate an object her son had designed.

Jana leaned forward.

“Who was the original copy licensed to?”

Musashi waited for Yoshiko's nod before answering: “Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega.”

Rafael.

Golden fire sparked in the obsidian depths of Jana's eyes.

“Gotcha.”

There were screams from above as an open-topped silver car was flung, tumbling and spinning, in a perfect parabola through the air.

It was time to increase his arsenal.

Hysterical laughter. Shrieks overhead, as mag-fields caught the car ten metres above the ground and slowed its descent.

I could show you some real excitement.
Rafael's thoughts were grim.

The car was spat suddenly sideways, then corkscrewed upwards in a crazy trajectory while its passengers yelled again.

Rafael pushed his way through a queue of tourists and holiday-makers waiting to get on the ride. A little girl stared up at him with wide frightened eyes.

Pennants fluttered in the breeze.

As he passed a row of flagpoles, a great dragon popped into existence and breathed holo fire all over him, then faded into nonexistence with a cartoon grin.

Heart thumping, Rafael lowered his left arm. He had cocked his hand to arm the silver bracelet without even thinking about it.

He kept his fist clenched. That would cause the bracelet to remain powered up.

Tetsuo.

There was no way he could find Tetsuo before the proctors. Not physically.

Rafael crossed a footbridge over a small stream where model sharks swam. Holo tentacles reached up from the gentle waves to threaten children who walked near. None of them seemed fooled.

If Tetsuo was not dead, then sooner or later he would drift into Skein. Then, he would be Rafael's.

At the archery shoot, adults fired solid arrows at flying holo targets. For a moment, Rafael wondered how that could be safe. Then he saw a stray arrow freeze in midair and slowly fall to earth. Safety fields.

Did he want to plunder Tetsuo's mind? Rafael was not sure. He could as easily use his infiltration code to wipe Tetsuo's consciousness completely, without ever copying a thought or memory back to his own mind.

But subsuming Tetsuo would be one way of finding out everything he knew, while dealing with the threat.

The trouble was, Rafael had to strike through Skein, and to do that he needed more reliable, undetectable means of access: high-priority channels which would not log his activities. The sort of channels used by LuxPrime support teams, to dive straight to problem areas regardless of their physical location.

Tetsuo was Rafael's main supplier of mu-space tech, but Rafael had another source entirely for LuxPrime ware.

Beyond the fair's edge, behind gaily coloured tents, lurked a small establishment which obviously assumed its true identity only at night: the Oblivion Café.

Rafael took a seat at an open-air table, and paid for a glass of sparkling water by anonymous cred-ring.

In Skein, he surrounded himself with
a blank room, its walls softening to café au lait. Mirrored panels appeared, then a grey sofa, a potted plant.

It was part of the game. To obtain the weapon he needed to ensure
Tetsuo's silence, Rafael would have to push his contact farther than he ever had before. The risk lay in pushing the man too far, which would be disastrous.

Back in Skein, he constructed a ghost-Rafael to sit upon the sofa. This was one way to minimize the risks: let him think that Rafael was calling from home.

Then, through the medium of his NetAngel, his ghost-Rafael, he opened up a SkeinLink to his source.

 

[[Captain Greflar Rogers, ident 5A27187]]

 

The ghost-Rafael crossed his legs, assuming a comfortable position on the non-existent couch.

 

<<>>

 

In the simulated holo display in Skein, the image of a florid-complexioned man grew into being: Captain Rogers, of the Bureau for Offworld Affairs.

“Rafael. How nice of you to call me at the office.”

Meaning, he wished Rafael had called him anywhere but there.

“Still—” Rogers appeared to relax, realizing this was personal—not a recorded emergency call—and feeling confident in SkeinLink confidentiality. “I was hoping to get together with you, at some point.”

“Can you meet me for lunch?” asked Rafael through his ghost-image. “I can be at the Aphelion Fair on Actrevnia Common in forty minutes.”

Rogers glanced to one side, checking something.

“That's fine. I'll meet you at the fair.”

“There's a place called the Oblivion Café, behind the archery shoot. It'll be quiet at this time of day.”

“I'll see you there.” Rogers' gruff voice was abrupt. “Endit.”

In the ghost-room in Skein, Rogers' image winked out of existence.

Rafael kept a straight face in reality, while his NetAngel chortled. The man's attempts at manoeuvring Rafael were pitiful: about what one might expect from a Fulgidus bureaucrat whose ambition seriously outweighed his capabilities.

Rafael checked his bracelet. Still powered on.

He hoped he would not have to make use of it.

 

Sweet herbs dropped into the glass, colouring the water. Above him, the pale green sky wavered. A caramel-coloured cloud wobbled out of shape, then regained it.

There was an established pattern: Rafael had always turned up for his meetings with Rogers exactly on time. Rogers would not expect him to be here already, and so well prepared.

Rafael sprinkled more sweet herbs from the complementary packet into his drink, and leaned back in his chair. From his table, in the open, he could just discern the ripple of movement which led, like an awning overhead, from the café building behind him, to a dense copse of trees, a hundred metres away. Among the trees, a covered entrance led to the Actrevnia Common metrotube station, and to the network of underground scenic riverpaths which spread out from the city.

Rafael had visited the men's room on the café's second storey, waited till the corridor outside it was empty, withdrawn a long translucent rod from beneath his cape, pushed it through a window membrane, and placed it across the sill.

By now it would have spread out, a long five-metre-wide ribbon-shaped stretch of smartatom film, like an awning which joined the café to the dense stand of trees. In load-phase, it would be absorbing the ground-image below, and transmitting it, unchanged, vertically upwards.

Rogers' office was in Bastren East, the next district over from Actrevnia. He could walk here in fifteen minutes, but would probably get a taxi.

 

<<>>

 

The film's main routine would be running now: from above, if a SatScan sweep were running, Rafael would be seen walking into the stand of trees. At Rafael's table, the image of a blonde-haired woman would seat herself, at the chair which he actually occupied.

He ordered a crinchnar from the table's terminal, a kind of open-topped spiced sandwich. He knew as soon as it rose through the table's delivery membrane that it was going to be unappetizing, but he chewed at it anyway.

A SatScan snapshot now would show a fair-haired woman, eating.

The food sat like lead in his stomach.

Remaining out of Skein, Rafael blanked his thoughts, and waited.

Rogers arrived five minutes late.

“Nice of you to come.” Rafael kept his voice urbane, as he rose from his seat and motioned to the other man to sit.

Rogers flushed, though there had been no sharpness in Rafael's tone.

“Sorry I'm late.”

“I'm sure it was unavoidable. Drink?”

Rogers nodded.

A glass of sweetened sherry rose up—Rogers' favourite, already ordered by Rafael—and Rogers grasped the glass and half-drained it in one gulp.

“Very good.” He sighed as he placed the glass down. “I needed that.”

“Work must be very pressing at the moment. A lot of offworlders around, because of the conference.”

“Yeah, well,” Rogers nodded self-importantly. “A few robberies, but we're hopeful of apprehending the perpetrators real soon now.”

“I'm glad. Tell me, Captain, do you think you might be able to help me with my latest venture?”

“I—don't know, Rafael. I honestly don't know.”

“I can give you the specs.” Rafael held out a crystal. “Here's the list of interface instructions I need to be able to call. It's quite low level. Engineering comm-channels in Skein.”

Rogers looked at the crystal, but made no move to take it.

“You mind if I ask the purpose of this? What are you designing?”

“You don't normally bother with those details,” Rafael said pleasantly, though every sense was on full alert. “Surely we can do business without getting into the boring tech stuff?”

“I'm sorry.” Rogers swallowed. The movement caused his jowls to tremble, as though he had been slapped in the face.

“Well.” Rafael paused, as though in thought. “It's a module that will contact a Luculentus through Skein, even if he's not actually logged on.”

 

<<>>

 

A smartatom cloud, hovering above Rogers. Rafael's smartatom film would be preparing a gamma-ray burst.

Rogers said nothing, so Rafael continued. “Quite a useful concept, don't you think? Lots of applications. Soul-parents monitoring their offspring, for example.”

“Are you sure that's all you're using it for?” The strain in Rogers's voice was obvious.

“Of course. What else?”

 

<<>>

 

“By the way, Captain—” Rafael smiled easily. “—Your surveillance cloud has been defused. I just thought you should know that.”

The blood drained from Rogers' face.

“Just a precaution—”

“Why, Captain. What have you got to fear?”

“We—can't do business any more. That's what I came to tell you.”

“Tsk, tsk.” Rafael shook his head. “The prices I'm offering are increasing. Business is very good.”

Rogers picked up the sherry glass, then replaced it without drinking.

“There's no contact.” Rogers swallowed. “I've lost my contact.”

“What do you mean?” Rafael closed his left fist around the crystal which Rogers had refused.

Sunlight glinted on his silver bracelet.

“My source in LuxPrime,” said Rogers, “was a courier called Farsteen. And he's dead. Murdered. Don't you watch the NewsNets?”

“And he was your only source?”

“Didn't you hear me?” Rogers' voice was beginning to rise. He caught himself, looked around guiltily, then continued in a lower tone. “The man was
murdered
. LuxPrime pride themselves on being incorruptible. Maybe they found out about Farsteen, and did him in.”

“I don't think LuxPrime employ hit squads.”

“For God's sake—with their power, they can do whatever they want. It only takes one man to go over the bounds, you know?”

Like you
, Rafael thought.
Just one man stepping outside the rules, for his own greed.

“And you don't,” he asked reasonably, “have any other contacts inside LuxPrime?”

“No. We—I—found out about some, er, incidents in Farsteen's past by accident. Sheer fluke.”

“I see.”

“You can't get any handle on a LuxPrime employee, not normally. You know that. That's why they've got that stainless reputation—”

“I know.” Rafael shook his head. “You said ‘we.' But no one else knows about you and me, do they?”

“God's sake, man. Do I look crazy? Of course they don't—”

Rogers looked surprised.

The bracelet tingled briefly around Rafael's wrist, and Rogers slowly slumped back in his chair. His corpse already had the toneless absence of the suddenly dead.

Rafael left before the inevitable smell rose.

 

What the hell was going on?

Under smartatom cover, Rafael made his way to the trees. He kept his gait slow, his manner pleasant, but inside he was spitting with the rage. In Skein, a thousand ghost-Rafaels were howling through dataseams, searching for connections between Captain Greflar Rogers and Tetsuo Sunadomari.

He sent the dissolve command to the antisurveillance film. Then he pulled up his cape's hood, drew on a smartmask to disguise his features, and walked through the copse and back out into the fair.

One link came back almost immediately: among the LuxPrime briefing-clusters which he had been sent as Tetsuo's sponsor, there was Tetsuo's immigration authorization, countersealed by Rogers' ident. So, on one occasion at least, they had met in person.

“Bad luck, sir.” A girl spoke to an unlucky customer, pulling Rafael briefly from his reverie.

Farsteen.

Rafael had always been so careful to keep his tech sources apart, never hinting to Tetsuo that he was interested in LuxPrime ware, never letting Rogers infer that he might need mu-space comms capability.

Now they were linked, and the real tie was a dead LuxPrime courier called Adam Farsteen, whom Rafael had never heard of until his name was bandied about the NewsNets.