Too Like the Lightning (5 page)

There was little in the entryway apart from an ankle-high security robot, which let itself be seen to remind the visitor of its myriad hidden kin. As loyal Humanists, the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' did try their best to line the entrance hall with the traditional relics of triumphs, but since most of them do little but their work, and their celebrity member keeps his home a secret, their tiny spattering of diplomas and pictures—Thisbe's trophies, Cato's book cover—drowned on the walls like an unfinished mural. Is that judgment in the eyes of this young Guildbreaker? Smugness as he surveys the poor showing of the Saneer-Weeksbooths, whose name rivals his own in the triumphant annals of the bash' system? I researched which of the two is really older, since so many bash'es form and dissolve with every generation that any famous bash' which lasts more than three will spawn the rumor of antiquity. I found what I must call a noble tie. Regan Makoto Cullen broke with her great teacher Adolf Richter Brill on November fourth, 2191. “Break with” is easy to say, but not so easy to do, to face the man who has been your patron, teacher, foster father for twenty-five years, the man all Earth hails as the great mind of the century, who mapped the psyche in undreamt-of detail, who revolutionized education, linguistics, justice, to face him down and say, “Sir, you are wrong. So wrong that I shall turn the world against you. It's not the numbers, not these rare psyches you're charting that stimulate great progress. It's groups. I've studied the same inventors, authors, leaders that you have, and the thing that most reliably produces many at once—the effect you've worked so hard to replicate—is when people abandon the nuclear family to live in a collective household, four to twenty friends, rearing children and ideas together in a haven of mutual discourse and play. We don't need to revolutionize the kindergartens, we need to revolutionize the family.” This heresy, this
bash',
which Cullen shortened from
i-basho
(a Japanese word, like ‘home' but stronger), this challenge to Brill's great system Cullen did not dare present without extensive notes. In those notes—still held as relics in Brill's Institute—you will find the test bash'es Cullen set up in the 2170s, including both Weeksbooth and Guildbreaker.

“Is that sound the computers?” Martin half-whispered, not daring to touch the walls, which hummed as if channeling some distant stampede.

“Generators,” Ockham answered. “We can power the system for two weeks even if main and secondary both fail. The processors are farther back.”

He led Martin on to the bash'house's central chamber, a high, broad living room ringed with cushy gray sofas, with a glass back wall that looked down over the next tiers of the sloping city to the crashing blue of the Pacific. The western sunlight through the window cast a halo around the room's famed centerpiece: the pudgy pointed oval silhouette of
Mukta
. You know her from your schooling, duly memorized alongside the
Nina,
the
Pinta,
and
Apollo XI,
but you do not know her as we who walked those halls know her, her shadow across the carpet, her texture as you coax dust from the pockmarks scored in her paint by the bullet-fierce dust of 9,640 km/h.

“Is that the original?” Reverence made Martin's words almost a whisper.

“Of course.” Ockham gave
Mukta
a careful caress, as one gives an old dog, not strong enough to leap and wrestle anymore. “Heart of the family business. Coming up on four hundred years it's never left the bash'.”

Martin gazed up through the glass wall to the sky, where today's cars,
Mukta
's swarming children, raced on, invisibly swift until they slowed for landing, so they seemed to appear over the city like eggs laid by the chubby clouds. “And the computers? How deep would an intruder have to get to reach them?”

“Deep,” Ockham answered. “Many stories, many tiers.”

Thumps through the ceiling made both glance up, the footsteps of a bash'mate upstairs.

“How about to reach an interface?” Martin asked.

“The next room has some interface nets.” Ockham nodded to his left. “But they're set-set nets, Cartesian, no one who wasn't trained from birth could get them to respond.”

Mason:
“Your security is mostly automated?”

Humanist:
“I could have fifty guards here in two minutes, three hundred in five, but human power is less than four percent of my security.”

Mason:
“You think there's no danger this intruder could return and cause a mass crash?”

Humanist:
“A mass crash is not possible.”

Mason:
“You're sure?”

Are you disconcerted by this scriptlike format, reader? It was common in our Eighteenth Century, description lapsing into naked dialogue; to such Enlightened readers all histories were plays, or rather one play, scripted by one distant and divine Playwright.

Humanist:
“A mass crash is not the danger. The system will ground all the cars if any tampering's detected, and they can self-land even with the system dead. The problem is shutting down all transit on Earth for however long it took us to recheck the system, could be minutes, hours. The Censor told me a complete shutdown would cost the world economy a billion euros a minute, not to mention stranding millions, cutting off supplies, ambulances, police. That's your catastrophe.”

Mason:
“Or at the very least the century's most destructive prank.”

Humanist:
“Utopians?”

Confess, reader, the name had risen in your mind too, conjured by stereotype, as talk of secret handshakes brings Masons before your eyes, or war brings priests.

Martin frowned. “Not Utopians necessarily, though such mischief is not beyond them.”

Humanist:
“They have a separate system. They're the only ones.”

Mason:
“Do you think they'd reap a profit if they shut you down and then let the other Hives rent out their cars?”

Humanist:
“They wouldn't.”

Mason:
“Rent their cars?”

“They don't have the capacity to put that many extra cars in the sky, they don't have the reserves we do. They'd be overrun.”

At Ockham's signal the house summoned its second showpiece: a projection of the Earth in her slow spin, with the paths of the cars' flights traced across in threads of glowing gold. Hundreds of millions crisscrossed, dense as pen strokes, drowning out the continents so the regions of the globe were differentiated only by texture, oceans smooth masses of near-parallel paths, like fresh-combed hair, while the great cities bristled with so many crisscrossing journeys that Earth seemed to bleed light. Each car's position en route was visible like a knot in the thread, crawling forward as the seconds crawled, so the whole mass scintillated like the dust of broken glass. The display is functionless, of course, a toy to dazzle houseguests, but a Humanist bash' must make some amends for a shabby trophy wall.

Humanist:
“Gold is my system. The Utopian cars are blue, and Romanova's Emergency System cars are red. Can you see them?”

Martin squinted as the end of a baseball game in Cairo made the city blaze with fresh launches. “Not a trace.”

“Exactly. I have eight hundred million passengers in the air at a time. Making them compete for thirty million Utopian cars would do a lot more harm than profit. A shutdown helps no one.”

More footsteps on the stairs above. “¡Ockham!” a voice called down in Spanish. “¿Can you come help move Eureka's bed? A mango fell behind it. Well, most of a mango. ¿Can you bring a sponge?”

“¡Busy!” Ockham called back. “¡Ask Kat or Robin!”

“¡Kay!”

The click of Ockham's boots erased the interruption. “I didn't catch your name, Mason.”

“Martin Guildbreaker.” His eyes widened as he realized his mistake. “I mean Mycroft, my real name's Mycroft, Mycroft Guildbreaker, but everybody calls me Martin. But I'm not in a cult or anything, it's just one of those nicknames that happens.”

Ockham nodded. “And Mycroft isn't an easy name to live with anymore.” He was unable to resist glancing at the corner, where I sat on a work stool, picking away at a scrubbing robot whose self-cleaning function was not quite equal to the combination of gum and doll hair.

“Martin is worse, actually, but…”

Words died. Martin's eyes had followed Ockham's to me: my uniform, my ear, my face. Martin froze. Ockham froze. Both held their breath in a kind of stalemate, searching each other's faces as the questions flowed: Does he know? Why does he know? Does he know I know? What can I say when he asks me why I know?

I tried to ease it for them, interrupting with motion, though I dared not speak first. I rose and bobbed an awkward half-bow to Martin, reaching by instinct to remove my hat, though it was already on the ledge beside me. Ockham caught the gesture, and his face relaxed into the first expression that morning which one could call a smile. “Have we both been feeding the same stray?”

Martin gave a laugh, a quiet one, politely brief, but enough to make his stance less tightrope-rigid. “So it seems. Good morning, Mycroft.”

I renewed my half-bow. “Good morning,
Nepos
.”

Ockham frowned at Martin's title, an unwelcome reminder of this Mason's intimacy with his distant Emperor. “Of course, Mycroft was also a
Familiaris
.” He nodded at Martin's armband. “You know them from that?”

“Yes and no.” Martin had no obligation to be so honest. “I commission Mycroft frequently.”

“What for?”

“Mostly languages. Hive-neutral translators aren't easy to come by, and a sensitive case like yours may turn up documents in any Hive language, or all of them.”

I fidgeted with the robot in my hands as I stared at Ockham's feet. “
Nepos
Martin is as fastidious about Latin as you are about Spanish,” I began, “and … I do have some functional knowledge of poly-Hive criminal law.”

Ockham gave a snort that verged on laughter. “True enough. And will you have Mycroft working on my case? An unreasonable investigator for an unreasonable crime.”

The Mason smiled, “I'd be eager to have Mycroft, if you're comfortable with it.”

“If I trust a person with my dirty underwear, I'll trust them with my irritating interruption.”

Martin blinked. “You commission Mycroft Canner to do your laundry?”

Ockham paused a moment, weighing, I think, whether this Mason would be easier or harder to get rid of if he told the truth. (Or rather what he believed.) “Mycroft is my sibling Thisbe's lover. They manufacture odd jobs as excuses.” He nodded at the robot in my hands.

I feigned appropriate embarrassment.

Martin's lenses flickered with fresh files. “Thisbe Saneer?”

Ockham nodded. “I know there are many ways it could be unhealthy, but I watch the psych profiles of my bash' as strictly as any other aspect of security. A Servicer has nothing to gain by exploitation, unlike most people one of us could date.”

“Very true,” Martin acknowledged. “Mycroft is most trustworthy, and dangerous to no one. I'm glad they've found another bash' that sees that.”

Ockham cocked an eyebrow. “Now you've got me imagining Mycroft wolfing down leftovers in the Guildbreaker kitchen.”

“There is not no truth in such speculation,” Martin answered, with that awkward precision which infects his speech sometimes, and makes more sense when you remember he's thinking in Latin.

The two men looked me over now, and the surreality of it swept over me like headache, the wrong sides of the Earth together, as in some dream when a long-dead friend and some recent celebrity stand impossibly side by side. But this was no dream. “If I may add something, Members?” I waited for approving nods. “I think it would help,
Nepos
Martin, if you told Member Ockham that your team isn't Masonic, it's—I mean, when you do this work it's for Romanova directly, yes? It wasn't the Emperor who sent you.”

“Correct,” Martin confirmed. “In fact, I believe Caesar is not aware of this particular errand. I'm here as a personal favor for President Ganymede.”

Ockham's face brightened instantly. “The President sent you?”

“Yes and no,” ever-honest Martin answered. “Your President is not aware that I'm doing this particular favor at this particular time, but they know me very well, and they've used me often in cases like this. My team and I are not police detectives. Romanova sends us when polylegal tangles require an investigation but the place is sensitive, high-level, a Senator's personal bash'house or the Sensayers' Conclave, situations where all seven Hives need to be satisfied but the affected Hives' privacy must remain inviolate, or the investigation itself might cause more harm than the original problem. We solve things while leaving as many feathers unruffled as we can. When your name came up in the
Black Sakura
tracker log, Commissioner General Papadelias had the warrant sent to me immediately, to make sure your doorbell wasn't rung by someone your President trusts less.”

As the Mason finished it was my face, not his, that Ockham studied, and I nodded eager confirmation. Ockham's curious expression made me bold. “If … if a little of my own opinion wouldn't be unwelcome?” I waited for him to nod permission. “Now that the hand of law is moving, Member Ockham, I think you're not going to get a gentler touch than
Nepos
Martin's. I've seen their work before; they really do focus on delicate situations like this, turning only the stones that must be turned. You're seeing it already: they have a warrant, they don't have to be this accommodating. You can trust Martin. They're a good person, genuinely good. If you can trust anyone Romanova might ever send, you can trust them. May I show them the paper?”