Mindstar Rising

CHAPTER TWENTY

The lift halted with knee-bending suddenness, and chimed metallically as the door slid open. The corridor outside was narrow, its walls unpainted breeze blocks; a greening biolum strip ran down the length of the ceiling. Greg and Eleanor walked down to the end, and he knocked on the familiar panelboard door of 206. There was a brief flicker of guilt; he hadn't visited for weeks. Now he'd come because he wanted something.

Qoi opened the door. A thirteen-year-old Chinese girl dressed in a blue silk Mao suit with red and gold fantasy serpents embroidered on her sleeves. She bowed deeply. "He is expecting you," she said in a voice pitched as high as birdsong.

206 was a dole family's accommodation module, three rooms and a cupboard-sized hall. It was on the corner of the tower, which gave it two windows. Being a bachelor, Royan wasn't entitled to it; but as he wasn't listed on the council's occupancy register they were unlikely to insist he vacate it.

The door to Royan's room slid open and a gush of hot humid air, rich with the smell of humus, spilled out. The interior was a bastard offspring of a botanical garden and an experimental CAD-CAM shop.

Thirty blue-white solaris spots shone down on four rows of red clay troughs which grew clumps of orchids, fuchsias, cyclamen, African violets, gloxinias, and jasmine; tall standard hyacinths towered over them, giving off a thick cloying perfume.

A little wheeled robot scuttled along the alleys between the troughs. It was a patchwork of miscellaneous components, something a surrealist sculptor might've built in a fit of hallucinogenic dementia. A droopy flexible hose which ended in a copper watering-can spout hung out of one side, sprinkling milky water over the sphagnum moss that frothed across the surface of the troughs' loam.

One wall was covered from floor to ceiling in TV screens, not modern flatscreens but the antique glass vacuum-tubes of the last century. They'd been taken out of their casings and stacked edge-to-edge, like bricks, in a metal frame. Some were showing channel programmes, some relayed images from cameras dotted around the tower, others had reams of green script unfurling in a constant cascade from top to bottom.

An aluminium tripod stood in the middle of the floor, its camera silently tracking Greg as he ducked round the hanging baskets full of busy Lizzies and fleshy trailing nasturtiums. Twin fibre-optic cables fell from the back of the camera, snaking across the abraded brown limo to Royan's nineteen-sixties vintage dentist's chair; they terminated in the black modem balls filling his eye-sockets.

Greg sensed the gag-reflex of Eleanor's mind as she fought to control her revulsion and shock, barely managing to contain a phobic groan.

He forced himself to grin and nod at Royan's bloated, T-shirted torso. Royan didn't have any legs; and his arms ended just below the elbows, their stumps capped with grey plastic cups which sprouted fibre-optic cables, plugging him into various 'ware cabinets about the room.

All the screens went blank. Then words began to form, metre-high letters, phosphor-green, strangely fragmented by the reticulation of black rims.

HELLO, GREG. WHO'S THE LADY?

Royan was fifteen that night six years ago, Greg's last street fight. Set up as a march on Peterborough's council hall protesting about the latest protein rationing. The Trinities were infiltrating the crowd, thirsting for aggro. It was a big crowd, ugly. The Party called out the People's Constables.

People's Constables: a replacement for Special Constables. Greg could just remember them from his youth; weekend policemen, who used to dress up in their smart dark uniforms and make an enthusiastic cock-up of directing traffic at the Rutland county fair.

People's Constables were in a different league. A different fucking universe, as far as Greg was concerned. Recruited from the ranks of extreme-left shock-troops and black-flag warriors who'd kicked police and beat up press photographers at rallies and marches, it was the biggest case of role-reversal since Dracula turned vegan. The People's Constables came under the direct authority of local PSP committees, employed to smash heads whenever people complained about the latest drop in living standards. Basic Party militia.

Their favourite weapon was a bullwhip, with a lash of monolattice carbon. They were taught to go for the legs first.

Royan, flush with the élan of youth, was in the crowd's front rank. He was caught in the first charge. The crowd retreated leaving their downed behind. People's Constables clustered like angry wasps about each of the inert bodies, slashing with hot fury.

It was the Trinities who retaliated, prepared by Teddy and him, driving the Constables back with a berserker bombardment of Molotovs, lighting the night sky with a lethal fallout of fireballs.

Greg had dragged Royan out of the flames, far, far too late. He often wondered if he'd have done the boy a bigger favour by going for a beer instead.

"This is Eleanor," Greg said.

HI ELEANOR. YOU ARE VERY PRETTY.

"Go ahead," Greg told her. "Just speak normally, he can hear."

Royan's ears were the only sensory input he had, lying in hospital, his sole means of clinging to sanity. It was a month before he was given an optical modem, and another fortnight before he got his forearm axon splice. The axon splice gave him the ability to communicate, the nerve impulses intended for his amputated hand feeding a computer input. Whenever he visited, Greg thought of ghostly transparent hands typing a keyboard in some incorporeal alien dimension.

Eleanor cleared her throat self-consciously. "Hello, Royan. Glad to meet you."

I LIKE YOU. YOU DIDN'T YELL, OR ANYTHING.

"Hands off," Greg warned. "She's mine."

LUCKY. LUCKY. LUCKY. GREG IS VERY LUCKY.

"I know. Brought some junk for you."

EVERY LITTLE HELPS.

He directed Eleanor to tip out her bag of redundant gear on to a big flat-top workbench. Royan had fixed up two obsolete General Electric car-factory Waldo arms beside the bench, their spot-welding tips replaced with multi-segment talon-like grippers. Greg could never understand how the floor took the weight of the brutes.

They telescoped out with juddering clumsy motions and began sorting through the pile. He put the Sanyo VCR down next to the scuffed glass bubble which held Royan's micro-assembly rig.

JACKPOT. LOTS OF GOOD BITS IN THAT. THANKS TO BOTH OF YOU.

It never mattered what he brought, Royan would eventually find a way to use it. Patiently tinkering with nominally incompatible modules until they could be fused together and incorporated into his cybernetic grotto.

Another of the potpourri robots rolled up to Greg and Eleanor, a Pyrex jug full of steaming coffee balanced on its roof.

HELP YOURSELVES.

Greg sipped gingerly as the waldos whirred away industriously behind him. The coffee was excellent, as always. Royan fiddled it out of the inventory computer of a plush New Eastfield delicatessen, directing its delivery van to a Trinities safe house in Bretton. Eleanor's eyes widened in appreciation as she tasted the brew.

"Job for you," Greg said.

PARTY INVOLVED?

"Don't think so. But the person who's hired me hates them more than you do."

IMPOSSIBLE. WHO IS IT?

"Tell you in a minute. First part of your help is answering questions for me. I need to know the kind of information floating round the circuit at the moment. Will you do that?"

SHOOT.

"Have you heard about the blitz against the Event Horizon datanet?"

CHUCKLE CHUCKLE. THE CIRCUIT HAS BEEN BUZZING WITH NOTHING ELSE FOR THE LAST THREE DAYS. BIGGEST DEAL SINCE MINISTRY OF PUBLIC ORDER MAINFRAME WAS CRASHED.

"Who set it up?"

NO IDEA. BIG PUZZLE. RECRUITING NOT DONE THROUGH THE CIRCUIT. ODD ODD ODD.

"Could the hotrod pack have been foreigners?"

NO. CIRCUIT KNEW ABOUT IT TOO SOON. HINTS DROPPED. NO NAMES THOUGH. UNUSUAL. IF I'D TAKEN PART I'D WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW MY HANDLE. THAT KIND OF BURN PUSHES THE GOING RATE UP, MAYBE EVEN DOUBLES IT. SILENCE WOULD HAVE TO BE BOUGHT. LOTS OF MONEY INVOLVED.

"So how would I go about recruiting without using the circuit?"

GOOD QUESTION. TEKMERC WHO HAS WORKED WITH SOLO HOTRODS BEFORE. SHRUG. THEY'D HAVE TO HAVE GOOD CONTACTS.

The little robot that'd been watering the troughs ran across the floor to a tap on a wall and eased itself underneath. Water poured into its tank. Greg watched the operation over the rim of his cup. "Tell me about Philip Evans."

HE WAS THE OWNER OF EVENT HORIZON. DIED A MONTH BACK. RICH. RICH. RICH.

"That's it?"

NO. THERE'S WHOLE MEMORY CORES LOADED WITH BIOGRAPHICAL DATA. YOU WANT A PRINTOUT?

"No thanks. What I meant was, is there anything current?"

OPPOSITION MPS PROTESTED ABOUT COST OF HIS FUNERAL. THAT'S THE LAST ENTRY.

"OK, I've got a big hush for you. Philip Evans's memories have been stored."

AH HA.

"Tell me how you'd go about doing that."

BEST WAY WOULD BE IN A BIOWARE NEURAL NETWORK. FERREDOXIN HAS THE POTENTIAL. YOU'D HAVE TO SPLICE EVANS'S SEQUENCING RNA INTO THE NODES, DUPLICATE HIS BRAIN STRUCTURE, THEN SQUIRT HIS MEMORIES INTO THE CORE WITH A NEUROCOUPLING. THE COST WOULD BE UTTERLY LOONY. BUT I SUPPOSE PHILIP EVANS COULD AFFORD IT AFTER ALL, THAT'S ONE WAY OF TAKING IT WITH YOU. RIGHT?

"Right." Greg thought for a moment. "So all you'd have to know to deduce the nature of Evans's core was that his memories had been translocated, nothing else?"

YES. IT'S BEEN RAPPED ABOUT FOR YEARS. HAMBURG UNIVERSITY LOADED A TURING PERSONALITY INTO THEIR BIOWARE CRUNCHER A FEW YEARS BACK; ITS RESPONSES REALLY WERE INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM A HUMAN'S. ALL IT LACKED WERE BACKGROUND MEMORIES. I RAPPED WITH IT ONCE. CREEPY CREEPY CREEPY.

"If you knew of a bioware core which housed some kind of sophisticated personality-responses program, how would you set about disabling it?"

MACRO DATA SQUIRT FORCE THE PERSONALITY PROGRAM OUT OF THE CORE.

"Did you think of that yourself, or was it something you picked off the circuit?"

ALL MINE, CROSS HEART IT'S OBVIOUS SOLUTION.

"Does that mean it wasn't a personal attack against Evans?" Eleanor asked. Intense interest had resulted in her coffee going cold. She'd either forgotten, or had accommodated, Royan's state, acting perfectly naturally. There weren't many who could do that.

Royan would've noticed, too; he was an acute observer within his small kingdom. For some obscure reason Greg was delighted. He wanted them to be friends, to approve of each other. It meant a lot to him, although he couldn't say exactly why. The bloody quacks would have lots of psychobabble about resolving the past, no doubt.

He poured himself another coffee. "It's a possibility," he admitted. "Any hacker observing the Event Horizon datanet would know a lot of management decisions were originating from that one core. Whether or not they knew it was Philip Evans himself, I'm not sure."

IF IT WASN'T FOR VENGEANCE, THEN IT WAS PROBABLY CONNECTED WITH EVENT HORIZON'S GIGA-CONDUCTOR. AM I RIGHT, OR WHAT?

"You're right." Greg wasn't surprised; Royan kept himself well plugged in to the circuit, trading data whenever it was to his advantage. "Philip Evans believes the blitz was an attempt at a spoiler; reducing Event Horizon's ability to market the giga-conductor by removing his managerial experience. So how did you find out about the giga-conductor?"

EVENT HORIZON HAVE A GIGA-CONDUCTOR DEVELOPMENT CONTRACT WITH THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE.

"My God," said Eleanor, "Does everyone know about the country's military secrets?"

NOT NECESSARILY. BUT THE GIGA-CONDUCTOR IS SUCH A BIG DEAL IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP IT UNDER WRAPS. WEAPONS APPLICATION PROJECT DETAILS HAVE BEEN LOADED INTO THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE MAINFRAME. THAT MAKES THEM AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE LIKE ME, AND THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE LIKE ME. CHUCKLE CHUCKLE. WELL NOT QUITE.

Greg considered that; Event Horizon's giga-conductor wasn't half as secret as Morgan Walshaw had believed, yet the Ministry of Defence had only been brought in after the patent was filed. He still couldn't believe a kombinate would bother with a spoiler like the blitz, not after the chance of filing their own patent had been lost.

"When did you find out about the giga-conductor?"

THIRD WEEK IN DECEMBER. MINISTRY OF DEFENCE BEGAN A NEW ULTRA-SECURE FILE AT THE START OF THE MONTH, I WAS INTERESTED. TOOK A COUPLE OF DAYS TO BURN.

He used the teaspoon to lift the skin off his coffee, running the dates through his mind. If he assumed another hotrod had burnt open the Ministry file around the same time as Royan, then the blitz could well be a kombinate operation. But how had they discovered the NN core existed? He was back to the question of the mole's existence again. "Could you pull data from Event Horizon's security division memory cores without tripping any alarms?"

IF YOU ASKED ME TO, I MIGHT CHANCE IT BUT I'D HATE TO HAVE TO TRY. WHAT DID YOU WANT PULLED?

"The Zanthus microgee-furnace production-monitor programs."

WOW, WEIRD WEIRD WEIRD. ANY MEMORY CORE CAN BE BURNT OPEN, BUT SOME ARE MORE DIFFICULT THAN OTHERS. EVENT HORIZON IS MOST EQUAL OF ALL.

"Do you know anyone else who could do it?"

THERE ARE ABOUT FOUR OR FIVE OF US WHO COULD WRITE MELT PROGRAMS GOOD ENOUGH. BUT IF YOU WENT TO THE CIRCUIT WITH THAT REQUEST IT WOULD COST YOU TWENTY THOUSAND NEW STERLING, MINIMUM.

Greg grunted, the answer was about what he expected. Kendric could afford that, no messing, but would he have bothered to asset-strip Event Horizon if he hadn't known about the giga-conductor? There were still too many unknowns. "Does anyone on the circuit know how the blitz ties in with the Merlin failure?"

WHAT MERLIN FAILURE?

"That answers that," he muttered in an undertone. He gave Royan a quick outline of the spaceprobe's breakdown. "Intuition tells me they're connected. But I can't see how. I'm just not convinced about the validity of the blitz. What could it hope to achieve?"

DUNNO. THE AMOUNT OF EFFORT EXPENDED MOUNTING! THE BLITZ IS COMPLETELY OUT OF PROPORTION TO THE DAMAGE IT WOULD CAUSE. EVENT HORIZON LOST A LOT OF DATA IN THE RESULTANT DATANET SHUTDOWN, BUT NOTHING CRITICAL. THAT IMPLIES VENGEANCE.

The green letters with their subliminal flicker jolted him. He shook his head at his own slowness. The blitz had exactly the kind of protective layers as the memox-crystal spoiler, each one a cover for the one underneath, and progressively more complex, more subtle, Kendric di Girolamo's method of operation. A bright sensation of satisfaction rose up; identical patterns, and intuition now both focused on Julia's nemesis. That coincidence was far too much to ignore. Except… Kendric was smart, he wouldn't use the same pattern twice. Unless that was what he wanted people to think.

Greg sipped the last of his coffee reflectively; there were limits to paranoia. Go with your intuition, he told himself, at least you know you trust that.

SO WHAT DO YOU RECKON, HOLMES?

"Insufficient data. You want to do me a huge favour?"

FIND OUT WHO WAS IN ON THE BLITZ?

"Got it in one."

GRIN. SILENCE IS GOLDEN AT THE MOMENT, SO IT'LL MEAN HACKING HOTRODS, ACCESSING THEIR MEMORY CORES TO SEE IF THERE'S ANY REFERENCE TO THE BURN. AND IT'LL HAVE TO BE THE SOLO HOTRODS, THAT COTERIE WEREN'T VIRGINS. OOPS, PARDON MY FRENCH, ELEANOR.

She looked straight at the camera, brushing loose strands of titian hair from her face, and gave him a warm smile.

"If that's too big a deal for you, I can bring some help in from Event Horizon's security division," Greg said solemnly.

HOW SOON DO YOU WANT THE ANSWER, SMART-ARSE?

Greg saluted the camera with his empty coffee mug. "Soon as possible, if not before."

Royan's mouth parted a slit, revealing bucked teeth yellowed by the pulped vegetable mush Qoi fed him. His version of a smile. THE HUNT IS ON.

A whole load of apprehension lifted from Greg. Nobody hunted better than Royan, nor had more practice. And he took it seriously, deadly serious. Royan had monitor programs stashed in every major public data core in the country, sleepers watching for key words and names, Out of the four hundred and seventy People's Constables on duty the night of the riot there were less than two hundred left alive. The boy had been hunting them out ever since he plugged his axon splice into a gear terminal; seeking out their home addresses, tracking them through promotions, transfers, redundancies. Greg and the rest of the Trinities were told where to find them, what they looked like now, at what point in their daily routine they were most vulnerable.

Greg had personally taken out sixteen for him.

"Thanks," Greg said.

SNEAKY PRESENT FOR YOU, GREG. YOU MIGHT HAVE A USE FOR IT. GIVE ME YOUR CARD.

One of the waldos stretched out across the work top, claw opening, He fumbled in his Levis pocket and fished out the Event Horizon card. The tarnished silver metal closed about it, and the arm retracted, rotating on its vertical axis, then slid out again, pushing the card into a slot on one of the gear consoles banked up behind the flat-top bench.

HEY, GREG, DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH CREDIT THIS BUGGER CAN TRANSFER, QUESTION MARK, TRIPLE EXCLAMATION MARK.

"Yeah, so go careful."

TRUST TRUST TRUST WHERE'S IT ALL GONE? PUT YOUR RIGHT HAND ON THE BLUE SQUARE.

He leant across the bench as a square lit up on a gear module, and did as he'd been told, pressing with his fingertips. Nothing visible happened.

I'VE BEEN WRITING THIS FOR THE TRINITIES. THOUGHT THEY MIGHT BE ABLE TO USE IT TO GAIN UNLAWFUL ENTRY.

The card popped out of the slot like a slice of toast. Greg snagged it neatly.

THUMBPRINT WILL ACTIVATE CREDIT AND ID CONFIRMATION AS USUAL, LITTLE-FINGER PRINT WILL ACTIVATE DATA-CRASH CANCER. ITS SQUIRT SHOULD BOLLOCKS UP GEAR LOCKS, AND TAKE OUT ENTIRE MEMORY CORES.

Greg looked at the card. Out of the two of them it was rapidly becoming the more useful.

YOU'LL BOTH COME BACK TO VISIT ME, WON'T YOU?

The screens blanked out, then, PLEASE, appeared in bright scarlet letters, fuzzy round the edges.

"Yes," Eleanor said quickly, and looked at Greg for confirmation.

"Yes," he echoed.

I'D LIKE THAT, said the letters, reverting to green.

One of the waldos slid out in front of Eleanor and opened its claw with the panache of a conjuror producing the coin that'd just been swallowed. There was a Trinities card resting in the mechanical palm. FOR YOU, MY NEW PRETTY LADY FRIEND. THE TROOPS OUTSIDE WON'T GIVE YOU ANY HASSLE IF YOU SHOW THEM THIS. SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR HIM TO BRING YOU.

"You do know him well, don't you?" Eleanor said coyly, her eyes danced with amusement.

The camera whined as the lens twisted round, zooming in for a close-up on Eleanor's face. She held her poise without flinching.

WE CAN HAVE A GOSSIP. IT'S BEEN YEARS SINCE I HAD A REALLY GOOD GOSSIP ABOUT SOMEONE BEHIND THEIR BACK. IT'LL BE FUN. THE STORIES I CAN TELL YOU ABOUT HIM.

"You've got a date."

"Hey," Greg protested.

YEAH. SNEER. YOU GOT A COMPLAINT?

He held his hands up. "I'll be back, too."

GOOD. MISS YOU, GREG. BAD.

"Promise," he mouthed to the camera.

Qoi materialised silently at their side and showed them out.