Primary Inversion (39 page)

      
I returned back up to the trade files. As I reopened the Delos psicon, waves broke against an invisible shore, and a cool wind blew against my cheeks. I remained “silent,” simply reading the list of file names. They looked exactly like what they claimed to be, a record of trade negotiations with Delos. I opened
A.Secretary-S
and found a letter from the Allied Trade Secretary trying to convince our Trade Secretary to re-establish relations. I closed the file and scrolled through the list. What to look for? Opening every file would take too long. Kurj rarely spent more than a few hours sleeping, and I had to be out of EM16 by the time he awoke.

      
A file caught my attention.
Artemis.
The name came from Allied mythology. Artemis was a goddess born on the island Delos with her brother Apollo. It was a reasonable name to find here; these were, after all, files about the planet Delos. But only I knew that Artemis had special meaning to Kurj. Earth’s mythology fascinated him, particularly the Greek tales: the
Iliad
and
Odyssey. Hercules, Medea, Agamemnon. Oedipus.
During one of his rare visits to Lyshriol, when I was a child, he had seen me riding in the woods, a fourteen-year-old girl practicing with a bow and arrow. He told me later he never forgot that sight, the wild, bare-legged girl shooting at trees. He called me Artemis, after the goddess of the hunt.

      
Open Artemis,
I thought.

      
The scroll vanished, replaced by a holoscript of my arrest on Delos. Pah. This was the last thing I wanted.
Close,
I thought.

      
Closed,
EM16 answered.

      
I continued going over the files. Nothing looked unusual. Finally I thought,
Close Delos.

      
Clos—

      
No! Wait.
Why put a file about my arrest here? Yes, sure, if a highly placed Imperial officer alienated the Delos government, it could damage our already shaky relationship with them. But the behavior—or misbehavior—of military officers was Kurj’s concern, and he was unremittingly literal with his organization. He would put the file on my arrest in the same place where he put all his other files about arrests of highly placed officers who could damage negotiations with the Allieds.

      
My aunt must have made this copy. I could see why she might want a notation of the incident here. But the complete record? Whatever for?

      
Open Artemis,
I thought.

      
The holoscript activated, recreating the police station on Delos so vividly that I felt as if I were there. Again. I went through the entire mortifying file. It contained every last detail, even the fact that Blackstar, the computer on my ship, had intercepted a satellite transmission about my arrest that the Delos police sent to ISC. The file was exactly what it claimed; a report of my unplanned visit with the Allied police.

      
Something kept tugging my mind. A small point…Taas? Yes, I remembered. When Blackstar dumped that satellite transmission into my mindscape, it had spilled into the node on Taas’s ship. He tried to stop the spillover, but—what? He used the wrong commands. That was it. He used every one he could think of and none worked. My spinal node still had the list he had tried:
stop, cancel, break, quit, exit, bye, system, chop, stomp, flush, dump, and curse.
I told him—what? To use erase. Yes,
erase
had done the trick.

      
Huh. This file should include the spillover. But it wasn’t here. I went over the record detail by detail, but found no mention of it. I had come looking for data and instead discovered its lack. It couldn’t have disappeared by accident; all the fighters in my squad had recorded it, and I found it hard to believe the same omission would occur in all four reports. I couldn’t imagine Kurj deleting it. In his view of the universe, such an omission would be sloppiness, which he avoided to the point of obsession.

      
It had to be my aunt. Why would she remove such trivial data? She was too smart to do it by accident. She was too damned smart, period. Trying to follow her mental processes often left me feeling as if my brain worked with the speed of a slug.

      
I closed the Artemis file and searched the other Delos records, looking for anything related to Taas. Nothing even marginally promising came up. I was running out of time, and I knew nothing more than when I had started. Taas. Artemis. Delos. Satellite. Spillover. What?

      
The
psicon.
After Taas used the erase command, he sent me an image of his erase psicon, a scantily dressed woman with a big bosom whose scraps of clothing disappeared as she painted them. She
disappeared
whenever she
appeared.
Of course! What better way to hide data than to make it self-vanishing, so that the act of calling it up erased it. It was exactly the kind of solution that would appeal to my aunt.

      
Now I knew where she had hidden Jaibriol’s files. It wasn’t in EM16. She had left Kurj a pointer here as a precaution, in case he came looking for the files. It was an effective method; only someone who knew those facts were missing would realize the pointer existed. The information, however, existed in another place: it was on the key to the cyberlock in her brain.

      
Anyone could have a cyberlock implanted. They didn’t need to be a psion. That was why we called it
cyber
instead of
psiber.
Every member of my family who had a biomech web also had a cyberlock. The Assembly insisted on it. That was why I had recognized the rainbows around Jaibriol’s mansion on Delos, the almost invisible veil of colors that warned of an active cyberlock.

      
None of us liked them. The field disrupted brain function and could cause damage if used too often. To operate mine, I needed my psiberchip, a card with neural tracings created from my brain cells. For most people, such a chip was useless. Only psions could activate them. If I linked to the card through psiberspace, it became a functioning part of my brain. If another psion tried to link to it, the chip would know it wasn’t me the same way I would know if an intruder began thinking in my mind.

      
We kept the keys to our cyberlocks on psiberchips because implanting the keys in our brains was too risky. A head injury could damage it. Separating the key and the lock made it easier to steal the key, but using psiberchips solved that problem. A chip that recognized its owner’s brain could be set to erase if a foreign mind accessed it. What better place for my aunt to hide the data about Jaibriol than on her psiberchips? If someone tried to access the data, the chip would erase. It was an ingenious warning system, too, because if her chips erased it would trigger an alarm in her spinal node.

      
Unfortunately, it also meant I couldn’t access the data. But then, neither could Kurj. Why leave him a pointer to a place he couldn’t go?

      
Wait. Maybe the information wasn’t on her chips. Maybe she put it on
his.
But how? They were also protected. They would erase if she fiddled with them.

      
The Kyle-Mesh. Of course. Boosted by the Triad psilink, she and Kurj could meld their minds even more closely than Jaibriol and I had done on Delos. With their minds blended into one, she could access his chips. I doubted he could do the reverse; it required too much delicacy. Only my aunt had the necessary knowledge, finesse, power, and mesh privileges. Knowing her, she could probably manage it without Kurj even noticing. However, that still did me no good. I couldn’t join the Triad link. The flux of power it generated increased exponentially with each Rhon telepath. Two minds posed no danger. Three worked only if the minds weren’t too much alike. A fourth would overload the Mesh in one giant, star-spanning short circuit.

      
So now what?

      
A thought came to me. Kurj had access to
my
psiberchips. He claimed it was for my protection, but I knew better. He wanted control over my cyberlock, another of his precautions to minimize the chance one of his heirs would turn on him. My chips included neural tracings cultured from his brain to ensure my keys wouldn’t erase if he accessed them. Could I link to my chip, merge with that piece of his brain, and fool
his
chips into thinking I was him? He wouldn’t notice my meddling unless he happened to access the chip at the same time. And right now he was asleep.

      
I shuddered. The risk of being detected wasn’t what disturbed me most about the idea. What if I couldn’t dissociate from his mind when I finished my work? The prospect of being imprisoned in Kurj’s rigidly controlled paradigm of existence scared the hell out of me.

      
I closed the Delos files and deleted all record of my visit. After setting the Hub monitors so they wouldn’t record my departure, I withdrew from the Mesh. Then I stood in the dark, waiting for the psiphon cage to release me.

      
Waiting.

      
Waiting.

      
Sweat beaded on my temple. No, I couldn’t show fear. That, more than anything I had done so far, would give me away.

      
Suddenly the psiphon restraints snapped away from my body. The tube that had surrounded me slid back into the ground, letting cool air waft across my bare skin.

      
I took a breath. Then I put on my clothes and left.

#

The psiberchip lay in my hand, a square the size of my palm. I sat at the console in my bedroom and stared at the chip. Taking it out of the safe here had been easy, but I couldn’t go any further.

      
Alive. This card was
alive.
Nanomeds tended the neural tracings, keeping them ready to link with my brain. I had ten chips, two in a vault in my father’s house, three on Forshires, four at Headquarters, and this one in my apartment.

      
The console waited. I had only to insert the card. My node calculated a 94 percent probability that I could merge with the microscopic piece of Kurj’s brain on the chip. Whether or not that would let me access his chips was another story, but I wouldn’t find out until I tried.
If
I tried. If I could force myself to become Kurj.

      
I stared at the card. One minute passed. Three. Five. The few precious hours I had to work with while Kurj slept were leaking away.

      
I took a breath. Then I slid the card into the console and logged into my personal account, the one I used for private rather than military matters. I entered the optical network anyone could use, but from there I accessed Kyle space, or psiberspace as many of us called that eerie universe. My mind expanded onto the four nodes that served the relatively small civilian arm of the Dieshan mesh. They worked together, swapping among themselves according to whichever happened to be free when a user entered a command.

      
I started on Alto. Its subgrid was subdued, a faint gold color. No sign showed of my father. The whole mesh changed when he withdrew, becoming less vibrant. Nor did I pick up the delicate sparkles of my aunt’s presence or the immense flux of Kurj’s power. Right now Alto just felt like Alto, one of four simple voices singing together with no Triad soloists to jazz up the tune.

      
Greetings, Soz,
Alto thought.

      
Greetings. Connect me with my psiberchip.

      
Chip accessed.

      
I felt nothing. No reason I should have, given that it was part of my brain.
Locate Imperator Skolia’s neural tracings.

      
It was Soprano that answered.
Located.

      
Match my brain activity with his.
I had no idea if that command would work; no formalized procedures existed for doing this.

      
Attempting match,
Soprano thought.

      
I waited, watching the mesh flicker. It was lovely, with an eerie beauty that never appeared the same twice. The infinite gold network hung in a shimmering atmosphere, one more liquid than gas, pale and sparkling. It undulated. The sounds of the civilian nodes were gentler than in the Hub, sweet melodies that rippled like ocean swells. Its smells were honey-corn and spice.

      
Soprano?
I thought.
Is anything happening?

      
Tenor answered.
Your brain resists.

      
That was no surprise. I had shared enough thoughts with Kurj to know that our mental processes were basically foreign.

      
Keep trying,
I thought.

      
I continued to wait. Although the grid exhibited a well ordered pattern of squares, it showed many defects. Those discontinuities came from poorly maintained connections and negligent users. Fluctuations appeared in its environment, concentrations of color and light in asymmetric patches. Civilians were inefficient. Our organization of the military grids was far more ordered.

      
What is the status of matching procedure?
I asked.

      
Bass answered.
Matching complete.

      
What difference exists between my brain activity and that of Imperator Skolia, as determined by his tracings on my chip?

      
1.6 percent,
Bass answered.

      
I felt nothing. That I perceived no difference didn’t prove its absence. However, a 1.6 percent discrepancy wasn’t negligible. The possibility still existed that his chip would erase if I tried to access it, leaving irrefutable evidence I had been in violation of security procedures.