Century Rain

THIRTY-EIGHT

The bleed-drive was still not ready for maximum thrust. While they toiled at a leisurely one gee towards the suspect portal, Floyd led Auger and Tunguska back to his quarters.

“This had better be worth it,” Auger said.

“You got any viable alternatives?”

“I just mean… don’t raise false expectations here, Floyd. I know you’re trying to help, but really.”

He looked back at her, wounded pride on his face. “ ‘But really’ what?”

“This is a very technical matter,” she said.

“What she’s saying,” Tunguska interjected, adopting a conciliatory tone, “is that there are some things you might be reasonably expected to have a useful opinion on… and some things you might be reasonably expected not to have a useful opinion on.”

“I see,” Floyd said tersely.

“And I’m afraid the matter of hyperweb navigation falls resoundingly into the latter category,” he went on.

“At least hear me out, Jack.”

“Floyd, I know you mean well,” Auger said, “but we really should be preparing for when the bleed-drive is back on-line.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know that you’re headed in the right direction, before you light that torch?”

He opened the door into the vast enclosure that served as his temporary quarters. The three of them walked towards the bed and its little entourage of attendant furniture.

“Floyd—give me a clue, will you?”

“It was something you said yourself, Auger: how the hell did they make sense of the numbers coming out of that antenna thing, if they had to do it in nineteen fifty-nine?”

“Enlighten me,” Auger said.

“And me, while you’re at it,” Tunguska said.

“We were looking for a microdot, or something like it,” Floyd said, “because we thought we were only looking for ten or twelve digits—the map reference of the ALS.”

“Go on,” Auger said, feeling a little shiver of excitement despite her misgivings.

“Well, we were dead wrong. I think.”

“Floyd—don’t drag this out.”

Floyd sat down on the bed and offered Tunguska and Auger the two remaining chairs. “Face it: it was always hopeless looking for something like that. You said it, Auger—the message could have been buried anywhere, in the tiniest smudge or the tiniest change in the position or weight of some printed characters. You’d have to know exactly what you were looking for in order to find it.”

“Floyd…” she said warningly.

“But that still leaves a big question unanswered: how did they come up with those numbers? It was one thing building that antenna, but making sense of what it was telling them—well, even you speculated that it would have been difficult, given the way things are in my nineteen fifty-nine.”

“Computers don’t exist in Floyd’s world,” Auger explained to Tunguska. “They are even further behind than our fifty-nine, since they never had the Second World War as a spur to drive computing progress.”

“I see,” Tunguska said, stroking his chin. “In which case, it’s difficult to see how the data from the gravitational wave device could ever have been processed. It would be a tricky little exercise even now.”

“Not too tricky, I hope,” Floyd said, “because I think you’re going to have to do it.”

“What have you found?” Tunguska asked.

Floyd reached into the box at the foot of the bed and pulled out one of the records inside it. Auger saw the label: Louis Armstrong.

“This,” he said simply.

“I had the distinct impression that you were a little under-whelmed with those discs,” Tunguska said.

“You were damned right.”

“And now?”

“I’m wondering if that wasn’t the clue we were looking for all along.” Floyd tipped the sleeve so that the grooved disc slid into his hand. “I think the information you’re looking for is here,” he said.

“In a microdot on the label?” Auger asked, still puzzled.

“No. Something more complex than that. I think it could be in the music itself. Not just ten or twelve digits, but the actual numbers from the antenna. You were right, Auger: there was no way to interpret the data in nineteen fifty-nine. So they didn’t even try.”

That shiver of excitement had now become a full-blown tingle, lifting up every hair on the back of Auger’s neck. “So what did they do?” she asked impatiently.

“They shipped the information back through the portal. Niagara’s boys got their hands on it and did all the clever stuff on the other side.”

“So there’s something encoded in the music?” Auger asked.

“Someone’s been flooding Paris with cheap bootlegs,” Floyd said. “It’s been going on for months. Now we know why.”

“You can’t be sure there’s a connection,” she said.

“Yes, I can. My old friend Maillol even pointed me to a link between the Blanchard case and his own anti-bootlegging operation. I just couldn’t see how they could possibly be connected at the time.”

“And now you can,” Auger asked.

“Custine spoke to one of Blanchard’s tenants—guy by the name of Rivaud—who’d seen one of your nasty little children hanging around the building. When I tried to talk to Rivaud myself, he’d put on a disappearing act. A few days later, Maillol tells me they found his body floating in the flooded cellar of a warehouse in Montrouge.”

“Nice,” Auger said, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

“It gets nicer. Guy had abrasions on his neck, as if one of those children had been encouraging him to keep his head below water.”

“And the significance of this warehouse?”

“It was the same place Maillol turned up that counterfeit pressing plant.”

“Do you think Rivaud was in on the bootlegging scheme?”

“He might have been,” Floyd said, “but then we’d have to explain the coincidence of him living in the same building where Susan White ended up as a tenant.”

“Big coincidence.”

“Too big. More likely, Rivaud caught sight of one of those children again and decided to do some gumshoe work of his own. Tailed the child all the way back to the warehouse. Maybe he was even lured there, if the children thought he’d seen too much already.”

“Floyd may be on to something,” Tunguska said. “Here. Let me examine that disc.”

“Is that an original?” Auger asked.

“No—it’s a facsimile based on the surface scan of the original made by Cassandra,” Tunguska said. “But it should be accurate enough for our needs, if there’s genuinely latent information buried on it.”

“Take my word for it,” Floyd said, “either that music-killing virus has already found its way into my head or there’s something wrong with that recording.”

“There could be a high-frequency signal encoded in the groove,” Tunguska said. “Enough to hold a significant chunk of that antenna data. I can verify this very quickly—”

“How quickly?” Auger asked, her impatience getting the better of her.

He blinked. “That quickly. It was just a question of examining Cassandra’s holographic data and looking for something anomalous in the structure. It’s always much easier to identify a pattern if you have some idea of what you’re looking for.”

“And?” she persisted, barely able to keep still in her seat.

“Floyd is correct. There is an additional channel of information imprinted on to this recording. Not enough to render the original music unbearable, but enough to upset someone with Floyd’s refined tastes.” He awarded Floyd a gentle, rather admiring smile. “We’d never have noticed it otherwise.”

Tunguska turned the platter this way and that, admiring the play of light across its reflective black surface. “A thing of beauty, really. But also something of a double-edged sword.”

“We helped them,” Auger said. “We got that information out of Paris, thinking we were saving priceless artefacts.”

“They must have known all about your efforts to smuggle cultural data out of the city,” Tunguska said. “Given that Niagara’s agents needed to smuggle their own data out at the same time, your operation suited their purposes perfectly. All they had to do was bury the information in those recordings and make sure they fell into Susan’s hands. Flooding the market with fakes was by far the simplest option.”

“You know what?” Floyd said. “I wouldn’t be too surprised if the Paris sphere was in that same warehouse complex. Even if Maillol had found it, he wouldn’t have had any idea of its significance.”

“They tricked us,” Auger said, outraged and embarrassed at the same time.

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” Tunguska said sternly. “Thanks to Susan’s efforts, a vast amount of priceless material was saved from Paris. It’s neither your fault nor hers that some of those artefacts were deliberately tainted.”

“But that one disc can’t possibly hold all the information,” Auger said. “We have a box full of records,” Tunguska said. He blinked again: some part of his mind whisking away to sift through Cassandra’s data and her report on it. “It appears that a third of them have a similar microscopic structure. The rest, presumably, are genuine recordings.”

“But we’ve been extracting records ever since we opened the Phobos portal,” Auger said. “That’s hundreds of thousands of recordings.”

“It may not matter,” Tunguska said. “You’ll remember that Niagara was extremely keen to get his hands on the final shipment. It could be that the earlier shipments contained data that was in some way provisional or flawed. They may only just have got their antenna into a properly functioning state. Allowing time to combine the data strands from all three spheres… and to imprint the signals on to these recordings… and to distribute the recordings in such a way that they would fall plausibly into your hands… well, I have no difficulty believing that the final cargo was the most significant.”

“Then we have a chance,” Auger said. “If you can decode that embedded signal, of course.”

“I don’t anticipate huge difficulties,” Tunguska said. “Remember, it would have taken significant computing power to effect a complex encryption, which would have been as problematic for them as interpreting the data on E2 in the first place. I don’t believe the encoding will tax us.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’m already merging and processing the data,” he said. “I’ve assigned a significant portion of my ship’s computing resources to the effort. Of course, we could still be chasing shadows—”

“We’re not,” Floyd said firmly.

With a certain reverence, Tunguska slipped the Louis Armstrong record back into its sleeve. “We’re nearly ready for full bleed-drive thrust. We’ll continue on our present heading, taking the most likely portal. Once in transit, we’ll have eight hours to crack the numbers and determine the position of the ALS. It will be difficult—it may even be impossible—but at least it gives us the hope of one more lead against Niagara.”

“You have your uses after all, Floyd,” Auger said.

“Don’t thank me,” Floyd said. “Thank the music. I always said it would save the world.”