Flight of the Vajra (19 page)

What I really wanted to do, even when cooped up in
this cushy brig, was
cook.
And not just cook, but cook
for
someone. The last time I’d done that was enough years ago that it might as well
have been someone else’s lifetime. But there was no kitchen here, and there
wasn’t likely to be access to one any time soon.

“How long do you plan to stick it out with these
guys?” Enid had her knees drawn up to her chest and was eating with the box
balanced on it. “You said maybe tomorrow . . . ”

“I’m hoping by then they’ll let the leash go slack
a bit. ‘Course, by then, Angharad might show up and save us some trouble.”

“And how long do you plan to keep
that
act
up? The whole business of being a diplomatic envoy, that is.”

“As long as . . . as long as she allows
me to get away with it, I guess. And as long as there’s a good reason to keep
getting away with it. But I’m not planning on taking the job too seriously. Look
at me: I’m about as diplomatic as the guy who pees in the sink when the john’s
full.”

She only laughed out half the mouthful she was
chewing on. Clearly my timing needs work, I thought.

“Suppose she’s more serious about it than you are?”
She wiped around the edge of her mouth with a finger.

“Then I’ll just have to convince her otherwise. —Why
d’you think she’d be that way?”

“Because she’s serious about everything, Henré.”

“She
was
certainly serious about seeing you.
She didn’t have to tolerate you, but she took you seriously. Seriously enough
that
you
started taking her seriously too, from what I see.”

She didn’t seem peeved when I said that. If
anything, she seemed like I’d given her something even more substantive to chew
on than her meal.

“What if this all isn’t just a dodge, then?” she
said after a moment. “What if she really means it? What if that’s why she was
so . . . welcoming to us?”

It was the same question she’d asked only moments
before, only now it had that much more weight—weight enough to make me stop
chewing.

“I mean, still! It’s kinda hard to say ‘no’ to the
Kathaya, right?” she went on.

“Why not? I’ve done worse.”

“When?”

“Long before I met her, but I have done worse.”

The “debriefing” Kallhander subjected me to
was
so cursory and superficial I suspected Kallhander was just doing it to say he’d
done it on his field report, so they wouldn’t break
his
balls about why
he’d spent so much time with me. Even before we sat down I’d been mulling over
how useful any of it would be to him: who’s to say Enid and Angharad and I hadn’t
all just collaborated on a common story while we were up in the
Vajra
waiting
for our turn to ride down planetside? I doubted anything they gathered from us
would have real strategic value for them, but as long as they made it
relatively painless and we walked out of there with something to show for it,
who cared about why they bothered? And if they gave me what I wanted in
exchange for this rigmarole, fine.

“So apart from the guards in the access corridor to
the garage ramp, did you encounter any other planetside police?” Kallhander
asked.

“No.”

“Did they have anything that might identify them?”

“They wore armor that said POLICE on it. —Look, I
don’t know about you, but if I was participating in a planetary putsch,
I’d
sure leave my shingle at home.”

“Did they refer to you by name?”

“No. They just told us to lie down and turn
everything off, which we then did not do.”

There was more—about Asekhar running interference
for us, about the way the orbital defense grid had powered up and started
targeting us right before we split. All of it Kallhander and Ioné recorded with
no more visible enthusiasm than they’d use for writing up a groundside moving
violation.

“Now. Do any of these faces look familiar?”

Out came a slew of images—front-and-side
headshots, full 3D composites—all projected into my CL. Not one remotely
familiar face in the bunch. Male, female, dusky, husky, blonde, bland. Faceless
faces. I filed them away (nobody stopped me) and shook my head.

“What’s with the mug shots?” I figured it couldn’t
hurt to ask.

“Some possible suspects who may have been involved
in the uprising. They’re culled from publicly-compiled surveillance on various
worlds, so there’s nothing here you can’t find on your own. No names, and no
other matches either.”

“Well, if all you have to go on is faces, you’re
definitely
out of luck.”

He didn’t respond to that.

In this day and age, a face was nothing: someone
could scrap his face and start over a hundred different times in his lifetime.
The same with fingerprints, body type—most everything that was
you
,
short of your brain, could be dumped and reworked. DNA was still hard to hide,
although there were dirty tricks you could use to temporarily disguise your “helixicity”,
provided you didn’t mind nearly poisoning yourself in the process. Only the
desperate need apply. I was not that desperate, and I’d found a long time ago
the cheapest subterfuge was sometimes the most effective—like, say, allowing
everyone around me to think I’d simply pissed my life away.

“Did you have any reason to believe, after coming
planetside, that you were being targeted in any way?”

I pointed in the general direction of Enid’s room.
“Does having her latch onto me like a fashion accessory count as ‘targeting’?
Apart from that, no. Nothing until our run-in with the security forces.”

It was all like that: a detail here, a detail there.
Nothing I couldn’t have answered while standing at my own front door, nothing
they couldn’t have gleaned on their own by reviewing a security feed or three.
But no, that wasn’t the point: they wanted
me
to give them these
answers, not cull data from some sensory surface. That was the only reason I
could come up with that mattered. They wanted to see what, if anything, I might
lie about.

“What’s the latest on the revolt?” I said. I could
have read the news while waiting for him to get to his next question, but odds
are he was a better source.

“It’s as over as it would get. We made contact
with our IPS liaison on the ground about one solar hour ago. The instigators
appear to have fled or gone into hiding—there’s a chance they may have used a
low-orbit jump to escape, but there’s been no evidence of that.”

“That and it would have screwed up their guidance
system six ways to the sky. What do we know about the people instigating the
uprising?” I was gambling on the use of
we
to pretend I deserved to know
such things. “The news has all been very unspecific—‘unidentified group’ this and
‘various factions’ that.”

“We’re still not sure ourselves.” (Looks like me
saying
we
hadn’t been a bad idea.) “No manifesto or list of demands has
yet been broadcast, which is unusual to say the least. Usually when someone
tries to seize power, they want the world to know about it.”

“A ‘popular’ movement, that’s one thing,” I mused
out loud. “You talk a good enough game about the oppressed many, you’re going
to want that message to get out as early and as loud as possible. Even if that’s
not what you really
want
, it helps to make it
sound
like you do.
But if you don’t even do that—well, who works like that?”

“Someone for whom seizing provincial power is only
a means and not an end, presumably.”

“Meaning maybe they didn’t care about
seizing
power. Maybe they just needed to
borrow
it for a little bit for the sake
of something else.”

“You have a theory?”

“That’s as much of a theory as I have so far
without more facts.”

“Thank you, by the way,” he said, “for all your
help. Now—for you.”

My CL told me Kallhander had sent something: a
copy of the protomics analysis salvaged from the now-failed Cytherian coup, and
his own notes on same. I was about to stand up when he added:

“We’d still like to be able to talk to you over
the next couple of days, as the situation on Cytheria is sorted out and the
Kathaya herself is debriefed as well.”

I blew out my breath. “Look—I was hoping tomorrow
I’d get a chance to open the door on this gilded cage.”

“We’ll have to see what comes up by morning.”

“Fine.” I stood up. “I’ll remember not to leave the towels
on the floor.”

When I had my own lab
back at home—Cavafy’s
old house, that is—I didn’t like using a full-sensory CL wrap to get protomic work
done. Some people say you get unmatched levels of concentration and creative output
by blocking your senses to everything but the simulation you’re running or the
workspace you’re dealing with. Me, I just got lost entirely too easily in it. I
liked having the real world still around me, to give me something to compare it
all to. I wasn’t alone in that respect; many other people were equally twitchy.

But up in the hotel I had little choice; there was
nothing here like the lab Cavafy had bequeathed to me. It was full CL immersion
or nothing.

CYTHERIAN PROTOMIC ANALYSIS SALVAGE STATE SNAPSHOT,
said a subtitle that remained persistently along the bottom of everything I was
doing. Every now and then it also flashed me a reminder about how unauthorized
use was a no-no and would get me spanked and sent to bed.

The bedroom darkened and the walls melted away,
like a stage set being hauled up into the rafters. In the center of the dark—inasmuch
as “dark” could have a “center”—a circle grew and revealed itself to be a tightly-packed
ball of blue-white threads. Soon the blue-white revealed itself to be any
number of colors, all braided around each other: the red of a memory segment,
the green of a code block, the yellow of some random blob of data. I wasn’t
going to stay in overview mode for long—you couldn’t get any useful work done
there—but the amount of yellow was overwhelming. The junk code.

I let the wisps of yellow drift by in the
background while examining Kallhander’s notes. There was more analysis of the
code segment length offsets than there was of the code itself, but I’d known
walking in that would be the case. And for once the epithet
desk jockey
wasn’t a pejorative, because the sheer level of detail in Kallhander’s work
required me to do no guessing. I saw right away what he meant by the runlength
segments always being a fixed size in the junk code, and about how some simple
snapshots of the code in different states had given them a good hint as to what
algorithms or key lengths might be in use. Too bad none of those hints had
panned out, but at least we knew there was both a key and a keyhole somewhere
in that mess.

Best to get my hands dirty and run the machine state
simulation from the beginning, I thought. Begin from the moment they’d first
started capturing state right after the disaster, up until the captured code
crashed and stopped generating useful state transitions. Even if you couldn’t
tell exactly what it was doing, seeing the message traffic between each code
segment and memory block was still useful. If you spied on someone’s house for
long enough, you might not learn if he was passing state secrets, but you could
sure tell when he went out to eat, or when he visited an amour.

I must have spent an hour of real time
single-stepping, clock-winding and scrubbing through that state simulation, only
to get nothing I hadn’t already guessed at. Come on, you slagger, I thought,
give me
something
. There’s got to be a spot somewhere where all these
gears mesh, some place where I can dig in a finger or three. I tried some
classic heuristic attacks, but the result was always the same: crash, flameout,
zilch. Whoever put this thing together had done due diligence to make sure it
wouldn’t puke its secrets by mistake if you kicked it in the spleen.

So that narrows it down to . . . what,
about a couple billion suspects? No, I thought, worse than that. There’s easily
tens of billions of professional protomic programmers. A tenth of them do
real-world class work—stuff put together well enough to withstand nature’s
slings and arrows, not to mention conventional human incompetence. And about a
hundredth of
those
were universe-class, if you go by
De Re Protomica
and
ProtoDirectory
for statistics. This work was at least that good—maybe
even better, if I could ever pry up the veneer of encryption around everything
and find out how all the cogs did in fact mesh.

The downside of Kallhander’s desk-jockey notes
soon became clear. He didn’t have a word in there about tracing the whole thing
back to its creator. I closed up the simulation space and decided I’d found my
first alternate line of assault. Why pick the locks when you can just
strong-arm the locksmith?

Besides—after seeing that kind of handiwork, I had
a hankering to meet whoever was responsible for it. Maybe I’d shake his hand,
and maybe I’d just paste him one in the face. I hadn’t decided yet.

It only came to me after I’d closed the workspace
that I hadn’t even bugged Kallhander & Cie. about seeing the data from the
Kyritan
.
The fact that I’d been given a puzzle to work on, something to engage my
curiosity after it had been dormant for so long . . . that right
there had nourished me. I’d never expected it to.

Kallhander and Ioné
sat side-by-side on
the couch in the common room as I summed it up for them. On the other side of
the living room, Enid’s feet thumped and squeaked against the polished floor as
she pushed herself through her regimen of bends, twists and leaps.

“It won’t be practical to investigate so many
possible suspects, even in parallel,” Ioné said.

“I’m not saying we have to junk everything else
and do that.” I shook my head. “Just that if we can find some way to refine a
list of candidates, it’ll help.”

“Do you have some ideas about how that might be
done?” Kallhander said.

“For starters, whoever put all this together knows
their field. Not as theory; as practice. Not just algorithms and textbook
processes, but finished products. They know how it works in the real world, and
they know how it fails, too. They’ve built a lot of things like this before.”

“So a likely candidate would be someone who has
achieved one or more innovations in encryption,” Ioné said.

“No, no. This isn’t someone gallivanting off and
inventing something new, only to have someone else poke holes in it a month
later. This is someone who’s studied all the existing research and built on it.
They know what to use and what not to use. He’s not an innovator. He’s an
engineer, in the most conservative sense of the term. A designer’s designer.
People like that are rare enough.”

“Does that mean you have specific candidates in
mind?” Kallhander said.

“Not . . . really,” I groaned. “Just
that that’s the flavor of the enterprise. Also, this doesn’t have to be any one
person’s work. This could be a collaborative project—but I dunno. I’ve seen
some black-market programming jobs in my time, and
all
of them that
weren’t total slagheaps were put together by exactly one person. Two, tops.
This—this is solid work by a single, very capable pro. This is not something
thrown together by some bored kid. This was built to
last.
I doubt this
would be a product of one of the rising stars of the protomic world, but you
never know.”

Rising star.

That was a label I’d sported once, right around
the time I met Biann at an industry mixer. She had been wearing a pearlescent
dress that clung here and floated freely there, but what I saw most was her
smile and her laugh. It was a CL-friendly event, so to natural ears the usual
clinking roar of a party was replaced with a murmuring shuffle, but she had
still wanted to repair outside to a balcony and talk for real. Why me? I had
asked. Her answer: “You’re the first man all evening that started by talking to
me about my
work
. Everyone else wants to know where I got the dress and
the damn
shoes
.” And in short enough order she found out I was a “rising
star” of large-scale protomic assembly. At another party later on, she got
drunk and laughed out nasty stories about her (anonymized) coworkers from a fellow
public-relations job. I also got drunk and tried to kiss her, and she took my
chin and made sure I didn’t simply end up slobbering on her neck. It was hard
not to walk out of there feeling like I was in love.