This Alien Shore Page 10

  How like him it was, she thought, to wear outland robes here, in a private place. Long and tranquil robes, to hide the troubled soul within.

  “Always an honor to have you,” she responded formally, and when he had acknowledged Devlin’s presence with a nod, she waved him toward his accustomed chair at the far end of the table. The next to enter was Anton Varsav, guildmaster of Adamantine Station. If Kent was the epitome of tranquility, then this man was his utter opposite in every way. In physicality—for the Variation that had molded his brain resulted in continual movement, from a host of recurrent twitches to a pressing need to touch everyone and everything within reach. In mentality—for he was as restless in his soul as he was in body, and impatient with any perceived delay. In spirit—for his dedication to the Guild was as fierce as a warrior’s, and she had no doubt that if circumstances warranted, he would happily don a gladiator’s suit and do bloody battle with any who threatened his people.

  “Prima,” he murmured, and he took her hand in his and raised it to his lips in melodramatic reverence. Inside his flesh she could feel the nerves twitching, conscious and unconscious instincts warring for control with every motion. “A pleasure to serve you, as always.”

  “Your service is always valued,” she assured him. She watched him closely as he sat down—at the far side of the table, where those entering would be least likely to join him—his hands immediately roving to the edge of his monitor, touching, testing, exploring. He was dressed in black, as Kent was, but in a tight-fitting jumpsuit that gave his arms and legs a crisp, chitonous appearance. Dressed thus, his quick little movements seemed more like the twitching of an insect than any human motion. She suspected he knew how unnerving the image was, and chose his wardrobe accordingly ; Anton Varsav would never be accused of setting his rivals at ease.

  Next to enter was a graceful figure whose surface glittered with a thousand rainbow gems. Lean, lithe, and dark-skinned, Sonondra Ra wore as little clothing as protocol permitted, in order that the sensors which studded her skin might have maximum data input. They glittered like diamonds as she moved, tiny contacts embedded in her cocoa skin, and if one looked closely enough one could just see the network of filaments beneath it, pathways for a constant stream of sensory data. Her Variation had resulted in blindness, but Gueran science had more than compensated. Colors were now a touch on her skin, shades of darkness and light a tingling caress which she had learned to interpret. She’d had her eyes replaced by faceted gems—and why not, were they not useless things to her?—and Alya suspected she knew just how disconcerting her visage was, as a result.

  “Prima,” she said quietly. Her voice was musical, touched with the lilting accent of Paradise Station. The Prima nodded a silent acknowledgment, wondering how the motion was perceived. It was impossible to read Sonondra Ra, and her kaja offered few clues. Natsiq was the main design, of course, with a few strokes of yuri, the dedicated servant ... Ra was a diplomat par excellence, and knew how to please her Prima. But the crowning pattern was otta, a kaja of joyful abandon. Strange choice, the Prima thought, for a meeting such as this. Then again, upon reflection, she had never seen the woman without it.

  Last to enter was Chandras Delhi. She was an older woman, slender and frail-seeming, her body twisted from years of muscular dysfunction. She wore a harness of hichrome and plasteel that moved in response to her will, in which her body rested like a frail, captive bird. The humming of its motor could be heard as she entered, nodded minimal welcome, and took her seat before the door. As soon as she was settled into the chair, her dark eyes began to flit about the room with restless energy, never settling on one point for more than a second, never seeming to focus on anything. Her primary kaja, the lilitu, warned of an inner vision so intense that sometimes it overrode the demands of the physical world—and Alya knew from experience that she could be hard to deal with for that reason. But that was her own fault, too. The simba liked straightforward tests of dominance, and the lilitu was anything but straightforward.

  When they were all seated at last, she took her own place at the head of the table. Five of her most trusted servants, one of them a master of brainware theory, the others passably capable. All of them Gueran, which meant—by definition—that they could not be predicted. How did you anticipate a person whose inner reality was an alien land?

  “I’ve called you here to share some very dark news,” she said. “You may or may not have heard rumor of it by now. I hope not; we’ve done our best to contain the matter. But events are rapidly reaching the point when that will no longer be possible.” She flashed an icon to the room’s innernet, which brought up matching images on the twelve monitors ; her guests adjusted theirs to comfortable angles. Even Ra seemed to be watching hers intently, though of course it was the jeweled implants that gathered information for her, not her eyes; in her years on Paradise Station she had learned to mimic “normal” body language to perfection. “You see a map of the outworlds, marking each incursion of the so-called Lucifer virus.” Black and white, of course. It wasn’t necessary—Kent’s brainware could compensate for his loss of color vision, translating the most complex chromatic sequence into tones that he could understand—but it was an act of courtesy that she not put any of them at a disadvantage. “Thus far we’ve isolated twenty-seven distinct spores of the original. Twenty-five were stopped before they did any real damage.” Her expression became grim, to match her tone. “The other two, as you know, nearly cost us both ship and pilot. One was in your jurisdiction, Varsav. Please give us an update.”

  The man nodded sharply, his finger tracing restless figures on the tabletop. “MedTech says we’ve lost the outpilot, too much damage done to his brain. We may salvage him as a civilian, no more.” She glanced at Kent and saw his expression tighten; what must be going on inside his head as he heard that, one could only wonder. “It looks like a spore of Lucifer, all right. Only this one ...” He hesitated, glancing nervously at the others as if assessing whether or not they could be trusted. “The damage it did wasn’t an accident. This time it was a direct assault.”

  The Prima nodded grimly. “That’s why I’ve called you all here, to meet in realspace. That’s why I won’t trust to public transmission, even with encryption.” Resting her hands on the table before her, she leaned forward aggressively. “Early generations of Lucifer invaded the brainware for the purpose of recording data; that pilots were harmed was little more than a side effect. Recent versions, however, seem to have been striking directly at the brain itself, and that ...” she drew in a deep breath, giving them time to consider the consequences. “That is a whole new level of threat.”

  “Do we know for a fact that this one is Lucifer?” Kent asked. As always, his voice was quiet, without emotion; he could have been discussing recent weather on Guera with that tone of voice, rather than the impending downfall of a civilization. “Or are we perhaps dealing with a second virus, launched independently.”

  She looked sideways to Devlin and nodded for him to take over.

  “It’s hard to be sure,” the programmer said. “There’s no question that the two viruses come from the same designer; that’s been confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. And we know that Lucifer was a fully evolving program, so theoretically it could have spawned anything ... but is that what happened here?” He shook his head in frustration. “We collect new spores of Lucifer every day. Hopefully one will help us answer this question. The one man who seems to have the vision necessary to sort out this mess is still in transport, and not due to arrive in the outworlds for another month.”

  “Masada.” Delhi mouthed the word slowly, testing it.

  Alya nodded. “Masada.”

  “Isn’t he the one who claims the outernet is alive?” There was a clear edge of contempt in Delhi’s voice. “Do you really think such a fringe philosophy can help us here?”

  “This ‘fringe philosophy’ as you call it,” Alya told her, “is holism, and it’s becoming quite respected in scientific circ
les. And it involves treating the outernet as a living system for analytical purposes ... which isn’t quite the same as you describe.”

  “And what makes you think this professor will be able to interpret this new development any better than our own people?” Varsav demanded. “It’s not like we lack for experts here.” A short, jerky wave of his hand indicated Devlin, and implied a host of others associated with him. “And they’ve spent months working on the problem; he’ll be starting cold.”

  “First of all, he’s not starting cold. He’s spent the last five months working on Lucifer while in transport, with regular updates from my office. The fact that it’s taking him half an E-year to get to the outworlds himself doesn’t mean that our data transmission is limited to the same pace. The only information he lacks is of this most recent development ... which, as I said, I will not trust to any manner of transmission. Neither will you, by the way; this matter is realspace-only. As for whether Masada will be of aid to us ... we discussed all that before he was hired. I’m not going to go through those arguments again. It’s a waste of time. Devlin Gaza says we need him, and it is his job to know what we need in this area; I suggest you respect his expertise, as I do. I will offer you this, however, for your consideration.”

  She flashed an icon to her brainware that triggered new displays on the room’s twelve monitors; the guildmasters studied the charts before them, their own inner systems adding silent commentary. “What you see here is a breakdown of the initial reports on Lucifer’s potential. As you see, no one predicted the kind of development we are now seeing ... except for one man.”

  “Masada,” Ra mused.

  She flashed an icon to change their screens; Masada’s own words scrolled up before them. In that we are dealing with true evolution here, we cannot assume that this virus will limit its development to paths its makers would have approved of. Its primary mandate is to survive and reproduce, and, like true life-forms, it will make what adjustments it must to accomplish those ends.

  We must be prepared for the possibility that, like so many biological infections, it will discover that a weak or damaged host is far less likely to interrupt its reproductive cycle at a crucial moment, and will do what it must to cripple its carrier.

  “Only that?” Varsav asked sharply. “Colorful metaphors, granted . . . but nothing more concrete?”

  “Colorful metaphors, as you put it, are the language of life,” Sonondra Ra reminded him. “If the Lucifer virus is truly alive—as this professor claims—then it deserves such a description.” And she mused, “He has a poetic soul, this man.”

  “This is an iru we’re talking about,” Varsav reminded her.

  “Whose wife was an iru, and a musician. To her the world was music. To her this virus would have seemed like a discordant phrase in an otherwise perfect symphony, and she would have described it—and predicted its development—in those terms.” She turned her faceted eyes to the Prima and nodded. “Please continue.”

  “That’s one quote from out of nearly two thousand pages of analytic work. Most of it is in terms, I am told—” she shot a brief glance to Devlin, “—that even our programmers would have trouble following. The point is, that was written nearly five E-months ago. Before the virus had undergone any major mutation; before there was any hint that it might begin to attack our pilots directly.”

  “So we are to admire him,” Delhi assessed; a microphone at her throat magnified the sound so that all could hear it. “Point made. Let’s move on.”

  She sensed Devlin stiffen at her side. Ah, he knew her well—or at least he knew the simba that was her primary kaja. Was Delhi’s tone meant deliberately to challenge her, or was the woman so lost in thoughts of her own that she’d just forgotten herself? Alya remembered too many similar moments in the past to be able to accept that it was a simple social gaffe. This woman bore close watching.

  “The point,” the Prima stressed, “is that none of the other analysts saw this coming. The point is that we’re dealing with something that may appear similar to other viruses, but in fact is a whole new category of threat. The point, Mistress Delhi, is that if we don’t get this virus under control—and soon—we are going to watch our Guild crumble from the borders inward, and following that, all of outworld civilization as well. The ainniq system is what binds the human worlds together. If we reach the point where we can’t use it reliably for transport, we are going to see cultural devastation to rival that of the Isolation period.”

  She paused then, her posture challenging Delhi—or anyone else—to interrupt her. “Guildmasters,” she said quietly, “someone launched this thing. Its initial purpose was to spy on us, that we agree on: to copy details of outpilot medical programming and return to its maker with it. Only now it has turned into something more. Was this planned from the beginning? Did Lucifer’s designers upload it to the outernet merely to steal Guild data, or was that just the opening foray in a far more deadly campaign? These are the questions these new spores have forced upon us ... and we need the answer soon.”

  “Who would benefit?” Kent demanded. “I can name a thousand businesses and stations who would want the information it was designed to steal ... but direct assault against the Guild? What purpose would that serve?”

  “It’s the question we have to try to answer now. And I am entrusting my five senior officers with it.” A short wave of her hand encompassed the four Guildmasters, as well as the absent Luis Hsing. “Find me answers. Find them soon. I want every possible motive investigated, no matter how bizarre it might seem. If someone is striking at the Guild, then I want to know who stands to benefit. Businesses, individuals, stations, political fringe groups: start within your own domain and then I’ll assign you others. Focus on the isolationist stations first, those who would obviously enjoy the disruption of Guild service. Varsav, you have the New Aryan Nation and the United Terran Front in your node; Kent, you have the Hausman League. There are at least two dozen stations more that I can name off the top of my head, which were founded for the express purpose of keeping outsiders away. Most of them can’t afford to lose the ainniq any more than our own stations can, since they depend upon the Guild for commerce and supplies, but there might be one who’s decided it would be willing to sacrifice all that if it meant no outsiders could reach their territory.”

  Varsav nodded grimly. “Destiny hates the Guild with a passion, for forcing the law of Universal Access down everyone’s throats. If not for that, they say, they would have the homeland that was their birthright.”

  A faint, tight smile flickered across the Prima’s face. “That’s the test of human tolerance, isn’t it? How many stations are up in arms about the fact that they must let strangers pass through their space ... you’d think we were sending them through a Hausman jump, the way they squawked about it. Destiny Station’s on top of the suspect list,” she confirmed, “and several others now listed on the screens before you.” She flashed the icon that would make the innernet change its display, and gave them a moment to shift gears and record what they were seeing. “Have these stations watched, and I mean, watched closely. I want every transmission, every visitor, every shipment accounted for.”

  “That’ll be—” Kent began.

  “Costly? Difficult?” She paused. “Then I suggest you begin immediately, so we can settle this matter in all due haste. Before this virus has a chance to mutate again.”

  “I note that you’ve assigned us stations in other nodes,” Ra pointed out. “I assume we can ask for help from the local guildmasters?”

  “No.”

  “No?” It was Varsav; his tone was indignant. “Since when don’t we trust our own people?”

  “She didn’t say the issue was one of trust,” Delhi pointed out coldly. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “If not trust, then what is it?”

  The Prima waited until all eyes were upon her before speaking again, until that instant when the nantana in her sensed that there was no chance of interru
ption. “I told you Masada has been working on this project en route. Several days ago I received his latest report. It contained a suggestion I found most disturbing ... and I have decided that until we learn more, I would rather err on the side of caution.”

  She looked them over, one by one, the four senior guildmasters and her Director of Programming. It was the look of a nantana, who knew how to analyze the slightest gesture—the briefest flicker of an eyelid, even—to render a human soul bare. She trusted these people as much as she trusted anyone; they had her highest security clearance, and lifetime records of impeccable service. But she had not gained her position by being careless, and would not endanger it by becoming so now. Even if none of them had launched the virus, that didn’t mean that they might not choose to take advantage of it for some more private rivalry. Guildmasters were loyal to the Guild, but notoriously treacherous in dealing with each other.

  She was recording the meeting, of course. Later she would study the holos of these people in painstaking detail, analyzing their reactions through her presentation. Especially at this next moment, her announcement; that was the kind of instant when someone might give themselves away.

  She said it quietly, and without fanfare. “The Guild may have a leak.”