CHAPTER ONE
We were half an hour out from Venus capture when my traveling companion woke up. His name—one of them, anyway—was Sabbath Okada, and he had spent the trip down from Uranus in hibernation, his body chilled to just above the point at which ice crystals would turn his cells to mush.
The revival process had been going on for about six hours before he regained consciousness. His hibernation coffin had to replace the cryo-support fluid in his arteries with blood, warm him up, adjust his glucose and hormone levels, check for damage, add various drugs, restart his heart, and bring his brain up from stasis to ordinary sleep before waking him.
Being a digital intelligence myself, I didn’t have to bother with any of that. During the voyage I did slow down my processor cycle time a thousand-fold, so that the journey of half a standard year seemed to pass in just a few hours. I could have shut down completely, but I don’t like losing continuity of experience—you never know what might happen while you’re not aware.
“Daslakh?” he said aloud as soon as he was fully awake.
“Daslakh’s not here right now,” I replied, just to mess with him.
“Status, please.”
“We’re twenty thousand kilometers from the catch point, lined up perfectly. This pathetic excuse for a spacecraft is working fine, thanks to my constant vigilance.”
“I figured you would find a way to take over. Anything happen while I was asleep?”
“Oh, a few hundred wars, coups, revolutions, and such. The big news was the end of the millennium. Every biological in the Billion Worlds decided to act like lunatics all at the same time because an arbitrary calendar flipped from four digits to five. Some of them are still at it—one rich idiot at Juren decided to throw a party for ten thousand hours in honor of the event.”
“Let me guess: Voskemat Urvakan. I’ve been to one of his parties. Strictly in the line of duty, of course.”
“Nice to hear you get to have some fancy snacks while doing shady stuff for Deimos. Fifteen hundred seconds to capture, by the way.”
“Can you show me a visual?”
“If you insist. Or I could link directly to your comm implant like a normal person.”
“Sorry, Daslakh. I just don’t trust you with access inside my skull.”
“I’ve had six months alone with your hibernating body. Plenty of time to overcome all the security software you installed in the coffin’s idiot brain. If I wanted to do anything to you, I’d have done it. Maybe I have.”
“Nevertheless. Visual only, please.”
So I positioned myself over the clear diamondoid window of the hibernation coffin and turned my underside into a visual display of what our vehicle’s forward cameras could see.
I hesitate to call the object surrounding us a spaceship. It was a one-ton projectile, with room inside for Sabbath’s support coffin, a few kilograms of luggage, an antimatter battery, and a ten-kilo spider mech body with me in it. The launch laser on Uranus’s moon Miranda boosted us up to nearly four hundred kilometers per second on departure, and then our vehicle spun a plasma sail and braked all the way to Venus. All this cost a staggering amount of gigajoule-equivalents, but Sabbath Okada worked for Deimos, and Deimos is very rich indeed.
That kind of interplanetary travel requires great precision, and since I had no desire to go shooting off into the void if we missed our catch at Venus, I spent the first few hours of our trip taking over the vehicle’s little idiot brain so that I could handle all the maneuvers myself. I had to adjust our sail diameter during the voyage to avoid smashing into one of the hundreds of millions of habitats in the Main Swarm between Mars and Venus, while still making sure we were lined up to be at a very specific point above Venus’s surface at a very specific instant in time. Trivial for me, even in slow mode, but I did make sure to come up to normal processing speed just before Sabbath’s wake-up sequence began.
Venus was seventeen thousand kilometers ahead of us now, a big black disk spangled with city lights, silhouetted against the haze of orbiting habs and the distant stars. We were still in full sunlight, not yet in the cone of shadow from the giant sunshade keeping Venus cool.
Normal planets rotate in ten to thirty hours, so it’s fairly easy to build orbital elevators connected to a ring in synchronous orbit. Not Venus. It barely rotates at all, and goes backwards just to be even more perverse.
Instead of elevators, Venus has Epicycles: three giant wheel habitats, each half as wide as the planet itself, linked together in orbit by a chain of smaller habs and transport tubes. The big wheels spin to create one standard gee on the inner surface, and that spin exactly matches their orbital velocity plus a fudge factor for Venus’s own rotation. In effect, they roll around Venus once every three hours, as if the planet has a giant set of bearings.
The result: At the bottom, where the rim of the Epicycle is just a few hundred kilometers above the surface of Venus, the outside of the hab is stationary relative to the ground below. To get from Venus surface to orbit, you simply ride up an active-support tower about five hundred kilometers, then jump the last few hundred meters straight up. If you’ve timed it all just right, you’ll get grabbed by the docking arms on the outside of the spinning hab, and can then dock and go about your business in orbit. Not quite as simple as riding an elevator, but certainly better than trying to get to orbit with a rocket.
And of course on the opposite side of the Epicycle, seven thousand kilometers higher up, the rim is going eleven kilometers per second, so that a projectile screaming in from the outer Solar System can get scooped up by the electromagnetic “runway” on the rim of the hab for a smooth capture. And if you’re leaving Venus, a very modest boost will send you pretty much anyplace.
Which is why I was using most of my processing power to make sure our little pod was on target for the catch rings on the giant wheel looming larger and larger ahead. If I missed the rendezvous, then we’d go looping out beyond Uranus again, and instead of a high-energy minimum-time trajectory, it would be a long lazy Keplerian ellipse taking decades. That would be highly boring, and Sabbath would probably die.
At three hundred seconds to go we were over the wheel of Epicycle Two itself. Ahead, the edge of the rim against space looked perfectly still, while the view down toward Venus showed the curve of the hab rising to meet us, while far below that the lights on the dark surface moved briskly past.
The rim got closer and closer, turning from a line to a ribbon to a road before filling the horizon on either side, a hundred and forty kilometers wide. Even Sabbath’s old-school eyes could make out details on the outer surface of the hab: docking arms, the rings of the electromagnetic runway, docked ships snug in cradles, radiators and antennas.
“One minute,” I told Sabbath. His fancy smartmatter suit, which had spent the whole voyage in sullen silence, packed into the little luggage space behind Sabbath’s head, oozed its way into the hibernation coffin and enveloped him.
Our apparent velocity was just a little greater than the motion of the wheel, so as we dipped down, the scenery began to fly past at a couple of hundred meters per second. A decelerator ring loomed ahead, and I used the projectile’s thrusters for the first and only time in the voyage to nudge it a few meters to one side, putting us exactly through the center of the first loop.
I can sense electromagnetic fields, but even a biological could feel the tug of deceleration which showed the system was working. The landscape outside slowed, and slowed some more as we entered a second ring, and finally after a third the only motion visible was a great arm swinging up from the rim to grab our vehicle and pop it neatly into an airlock. And all of a sudden the little pod was no longer a spacecraft at all, just a piece of cargo being moved through the hangars on the lowest level of Epicycle Two by a pair of bots.
While all this was happening I was too busy to note the precise moment when Sabbath Okada’s comm implant began identifying him to all and sundry as Shoken Samedi. Just out of idle curiosity, as soon as I could link up to Epicycle Two’s datasphere, I checked to see if “Shoken Samedi” was more than just a name. That identity turned out to have quite the history—as an entrepreneur pitching a luxury cycler hab on the Jupiter-Saturn run, as a developer seeking investment for an arts-centered arcology in Juren, as the manager of a touring neko band in the Neptune ring, and as a broker in heavy element futures in Chac. None of them (except the band) required anything but some fancy informationals and a good line of patter, and all of them—as I discovered after nearly a minute of exhaustive digging—correlated with economic or political reverses for Deimos’s rival great powers among the Billion Worlds of the Solar System.
If we’d been traveling in a proper spacecraft we could have just swung around half a revolution of the Epicycle and dropped off into Venus’s atmosphere, but our little pod wasn’t capable of winged flight. Now that the voyage was over it was just so much scrap, ready to be broken down into useful matter. So Sabbath had time for a shower, a cursory exam by Venusian Planetary Protection to make sure he wasn’t actually a swarm of flesh-eating beetles wearing a skin suit, and breakfast.
The restaurant he picked was attached to the underside of Epicycle Two, so as he put away an enormous bowl of rice porridge topped with chapulines and a fried egg, we got to watch the lights on Venus’s dark surface slide down past the window, before we swung up and out of the darkness behind the sunshade into harsh sunlight.
“Okay, we’re on Venus, or close enough. You said you’d tell me why you had to rush down here once we arrived, and I’ve been superhumanly patient. Now talk.”
“I’m afraid you’ll be a bit disappointed, as this seems like an entirely routine matter,” he said between gooey mouthfuls. “I’m here because a man known as Ponardo San was reported dead while trying to climb the highest peak of Maxwell Montes.”
“Friend of yours?”
“He came to Venus from Clarion. That’s a hab—”
“Orbiting at the Earth-Sun L3 point, exactly opposite Earth.” A very strategic location, making Clarion a lot more important than most habs its size.
“Clarion’s an ally of Deimos, and my superiors sent me here to make sure nothing contrary to the interests of the Deimos Community is going on.” He took a big drink of tea.
“That sounds like a big pile of dust to me. Your bosses spent a couple of million gigajoule equivalents to send you here—not to mention the fact that they probably have better uses for your time than filing a report on someone who fell off a mountain. There must be more to it than just a dead guy.”
Sabbath took another drink and made an unhappy face. That’s unusual for him. I’ve encountered millions of biologicals in my time and Sabbath Okada is the most unreadable human I’ve ever known. Some of it’s probably genetic tinkering, some of it’s due to high-end biomonitor implants, and some of it’s a lifetime of training, but when Sabbath doesn’t want his feelings to show, they simply don’t. His pupils and capillaries don’t dilate and his pulse and respiration don’t change unless he wants them to. It must have been pretty awful tea.
Serves him right for wasting the Deimos Community’s hard-earned black budget funds on overpriced hand-brewed drinks when a printer could serve him an exact copy of the best cup of tea ever made.
He pushed the cup away and got inscrutable again. “There may be elements of the case I’m not at liberty to discuss.”
“So this is some more Department of Shady Stuff business after all. Should we even be talking about it?”
“As long as we don’t attract attention. Epicycle Two is its own polity, and even if the local counterintelligence services are listening, it’s unlikely they would share any data with Ishtar, which is where Ponardo San died. While we’re there I would appreciate it if you don’t mention my employers or any of the other names you know me by.”
“I’ll be good,” I said. To be fair, he was being absurdly indulgent in letting me accompany him at all, and it would hardly serve my own purpose if he wound up getting arrested or killed. “Of course,” I added, “I could be good a lot more conveniently if you didn’t insist on communicating entirely by voice.”
“You can send me messages via text or glyph if you wish. I’m just not going to agree to a direct link. Consider it a compliment: I have some of the best security software in the Solar System in my comm implant, and I’m still afraid to let you link up.”
“Fair enough. I’m scared of you, too.”
“Thank you.” He took another spoonful of porridge and swallowed. “There is one other matter. While I’m in Ishtar, I’m certainly going to be under observation by Ishtar’s security services—and probably by other groups as well. If you are traveling with me, they’ll be observing you, too. I have an idea that you don’t like that.”
“I prefer a quiet existence,” I said.
“A laudable goal. But this presents you with a difficult choice. I’m afraid there’s no way to arrange proper credentials for you, so I can’t present you as a team member. Either we part company here and you abandon your dream of meddling in my life, or you must take on an identity which will let you stay with me but not attract attention.” He took another mouthful and noisily crunched up fried grasshoppers.
I have to admit the notion of staying on the Epicycle while Sabbath went down to the surface was tempting. I wasn’t looking forward to this visit. My desire to be anywhere but Venus had increased steadily as our little capsule had gotten closer to the planet. Over the past four millennia I’ve spent less than a single calendar year there, not even in orbit, and with good reason. Something about Venus brings out the worst in me.
“What do you propose, then?” I asked him.
“Well, it would be entirely plausible for me to bring along a personal bot. All you have to do is identify yourself as my property, do as you’re told, and don’t talk back.” He didn’t even try not to look smug when he finished.
“I figured you’d try to get rid of me somehow, so I’m going to surprise you: I agree.”
He did raise his eyebrows at that. “We could get you a new body before we go down. That one’s a bit shabby.”
He wasn’t wrong. The diamondoid outer coating on my shell was scratched and cracked; some of the pixels on the surface under that had died from cosmic ray impacts, leaving little dark flyspecks that never went away; and I’d lost one of my eight legs back in Miranda’s ocean. But I’d done some significant modifications over the years and it would be hard to migrate to a new body without them.
“I like it. How about this? I’ll be your beloved old nannybot—”
“Jirokaja,” said Sabbath, looking out at Venus.
“Whatever. Your beloved old nannybot that you keep around for sentimental reasons. I’ll edit my comm tag to identify me as a sub-baseline entity belonging to Shoken Samedi. Is that demeaning enough for you?”
He put his bag on top of my carapace. “The shuttle to Ishtar boards in ten minutes. Don’t dawdle.” Sabbath strode off while I followed, using two of my limbs to hold the bag and scuttling fast on the other five.
As we walked I transformed into Samedi’s bot. I didn’t just change my comm tags, I actually created a little simulated mind with a splinter personality, rated about zero point one Baseline. I stuffed the memory in that simulation with all sorts of old open-source software, garbled files, music, and some laughably inadequate security programs. Anybody trying to probe “Jirokaja’s” mind would find nothing but an obsolete bot running on a slow processor, unaware of me watching.
Our ride down to the surface was a huge lifting-body with room for eight thousand passengers, and Sabbath indulged himself by getting one of the prime spots, right in the transparent nose with a fantastic view. I found his tradecraft—or lack of it—a bit puzzling. Was he trying to attract attention?
The most exciting part of the flight was the beginning, when the clamps holding the shuttle to the underside of Epicycle Two let go and we had about ten seconds of free fall before the engines kicked in and the lifting body could start actually lifting. After that was a smooth ninety-degree turn to point the nose northward, and then a three-hour flight through the upper atmosphere to Ishtar.
“Amazing view,” said Sabbath, gesturing out at the dark landscape sweeping past below us, with clumps and lines of lights all over it. The air was almost as clear as vacuum—nothing but pure nitrogen. Just about everything else was frozen out, coating the old highlands in glaciers of dry ice and sulfuric acid crystals.
Humans need suits to go out on the surface, but for digital minds, Venus is pretty close to paradise. Cool temperatures, plenty of energy beamed down from the sunshade, a nice dense dry atmosphere for heat convection—and best of all, no pesky biosphere. Half a trillion mechs live on Venus, and have made it an industrial wonderland. The biologicals huddle in the highlands and try to think of ways to make the place more habitable.
The shuttle began to slow and descend into thicker air as we got closer to Ishtar, and the peaks of Maxwell Montes appeared on the northern horizon about the time we went subsonic. Over the next hour they rose higher and higher, and Ishtar itself came into view below them, a great sprawl of shining towers and domes stretching away across the Lakshmi plateau to the west.
As we got closer, the sheer scale of everything became apparent. At first glance, Ishtar looked like a city at the foot of a mountain, a few kilometers away. But as we flew on and on, the mountain got taller and taller and the buildings got bigger and bigger. The highest peaks of the Maxwell range are eleven kilometers above mean datum, and the towers of Ishtar are giant arcologies two or three kilometers tall.
“Big place,” I said to Sabbath.
“Ishtar’s got a bit more than ten billion people—the city’s roots go deep into the plateau. It’s the oldest city on Venus.”
“I know all that. First settlement in the old days, first resettlement after the big war,” I said. “Between new construction and the dry ice glaciers, you can’t see any of the scars from the bombardment that wiped out the original colony.”
“The other polities of Ishtar Terra sometimes gripe about this place calling itself ‘Ishtar,’ but since they’re all breakaway provinces they can hardly complain.”
“I doubt they’d agree.”
The shuttle touched down on a runway with a magnetic braking system, which brought us to a stop in just a few hundred meters. The shuttle taxied through an enormous airlock into a hangar where a dozen boarding tubes snaked down to connect to the hatches. The wall in front of the shuttle was decorated by a huge Ishtar flag: a scarlet eight-pointed star in the center of a gold triangle, all against a dark blue background. Better than a lot of designs I’ve seen.
“Shoken Samedi” had all the proper documents and permits to enter Ishtar, and Sabbath’s comm implant handled the details while he strolled out of the hangar with me tagging along just behind. His suit transformed as he walked, going from a plain and functional-looking environment suit to a flashy crystal-studded outfit in the style favored by successful entrepreneurs inside Psyche. The billowy arms and legs let the suit hide its extra bulk.
My fake Jirokaja mind passed its first test, as Ishtar’s Customs & Entry service gave it a thorough probe and installed a couple of little programs to show that I was the property of a temporary visitor. I took them apart and found that they also allowed just about any part of the Ishtar government to use Jirokaja to monitor Sabbath whenever they felt like it. I left them in place for the moment.
We rode a bubble car through the tube network that coils and branches around and through the giant arcology towers, and wound up at the Hotel Tanit, right on top of the second-highest tower in all Ishtar. Sabbath’s suite had a view of Maxwell Montes, walls covered with flowering vines giving off mildly psychoactive perfumes, floors of real wood shipped down from the Epicycles, and a bed three meters wide covered in warm silky fur.
“Must be nice to get all this on the expense account,” I said when we were inside.
Sabbath smiled and sat down on the furry bed. “I have my colleague from Clarion to thank for this,” he said. “It handled all the arrangements. We’ll be seeing it in about an hour.” He patted the bed next to him, and it took me a couple of milliseconds to realize he wanted me to climb up there.
When I did so he gently laid a hand on my upper carapace, almost affectionately. This was so unusual coming from Sabbath that I was immensely relieved when he began silently tapping out a message in binary with two fingers. “room not secure.”
Unlike biologicals, I can sense the datasphere directly, so the idea that any room in a place like this could be considered “secure” hadn’t even occurred to me. I was almost insulted that he thought to warn me.
“Okay,” I said aloud, with a slight pause before continuing, “Who is this mysterious colleague who got you the room?”
“Hardly mysterious. Its name is Kappa, from the Clarion hab’s External Affairs department. It beamed its persona over here shortly after Ponardo San’s unfortunate death, and has been dealing with most of the legal fallout. I’ve been retained by San’s employers to make sure everything is handled properly.”
Before he finished speaking I checked through Ishtar’s datasphere to see if this Kappa person had done anything worth knowing about. Once I eliminated the false positives (and with a name like “Kappa” there were a lot of those), nothing of note remained. It hadn’t done anything in Clarion worth hearing about at interplanetary distances, and it hadn’t done much since arriving in Ishtar, either. I could find its current comm address, and a couple of months-old autonomous messages looking for anyone who knew anything about Ponardo San’s death or had any business with his estate.
While I was doing that Sabbath added one more message by finger-taps. “be a bot.”
“Would Master like a pedicure or foot massage before the meeting?” I said aloud.
“Not right now, Jirokaja. Maybe later.”
“As Master wishes. Jirokaja exists only to serve.”
Sabbath changed out of his suit, and the suit wasn’t happy about that. He had to tell it twice to stay in the room, and only got his way when he said it was guarding the room, not just waiting.
In its place Sabbath printed out a near-duplicate of the poofy Psyche outfit the suit had been impersonating, and plucked a blossom from the wall to tuck behind one ear before heading out. I followed, staying deferentially behind him like a good bot, with all my comms routed through the Jirokaja personality.
A quick bubble ride and a brisk stroll later, we arrived at an office down in the underground levels, three kilometers below Sabbath’s hotel room. The place had no physical sign, but the virtual label on the door said “Zoya Dukra Investigations.”
So during the second between when Sabbath stopped in front of the door and when it turned permeable, I did a little quick investigating of Zoya Dukra. She was a human, a native of Ishtar, and was a licensed and bonded private detective. No records of her were more than a standard year old.
The office was pretty basic. The floor had extruded a couple of chairs and a round conference table, while the walls displayed a generic assortment of recognizable classic artworks. No personal possessions, no individual decor choices. Zoya Dukra herself was just rising from one of the chairs, and Kappa, the mech from Clarion, stood on the far side of the table.
It had chosen the very simplest chassis to hold its personality copy during its stay on Venus—a twenty-centimeter sphere with six retractable limbs at the cardinal points. At the moment it stood on three legs with one arm extended.
“Greetings, Mr. Samedi,” said Kappa. “Comfortable journey?”
“Yes, the flight over the surface was very scenic.”
“This is Zoya Dukra,” said Kappa, pointing with its extended arm. “Local private investigator. I hired her when I arrived. Ms. Dukra, this is Shoken Samedi, an expert from Deimos.”
“You flatter me,” said Sabbath. “I was asked to come down here by the late Ponardo San’s employers, just to make sure there are no irregularities.”
“And which employers would those be?” asked Zoya Dukra. She had the faintest hint of a smile and her voice had a slightly mocking tone. Her face and build were attractive—in fact she seemed optimized for visual appeal. I noted a lot of data going in and out of her head, which seemed a bit rude at a private meeting.
“Zadig Underwriters, of course,” said Sabbath. “Ponardo San was employed by our Clarion subsidiary. Do you know of any other?”
She just shrugged, still with that almost-smile, and held out a bowl of fruit candies. “Pastila?”
“Thank you.” He took one and held it for a couple of seconds so his medical implant could decide if it was safe to eat. I bounced a little UV laser flash off the candies in the bowl. No toxins, but a shockingly strong blend of psychedelics, euphorics, and other drugs along with the fructose. Sabbath kept his eyes on Zoya’s as he popped it into his mouth and smiled. “Delicious.”
“I am afraid I must apologize, Mr. Samedi,” said Kappa. “For the long and pointless trip you have had to endure. While you were en route I determined there is no need for any investigation. Ponardo San’s death involves no mystery, just a fatal fall on a dangerous mountain. There was no sign of foul play, or any irregularity. His business and personal matters were straightforward and all is complete.”
“What about his implants?” asked Sabbath.
“He left instructions for full body cremation. Everything inside him is now nothing but slag and ash. The remains were already sent aboard a cargo shipment to Clarion, and will be in transit for seventy-three weeks.”
“And his suit?”
“Unfortunately his suit apparently malfunctioned and refused to allow medical access when the rescue teams reached him. They had to use disassemblers on it, which destroyed its memory and processors.”
“You appear to have been very efficient, Kappa,” said Sabbath. “No loose ends, nothing unfinished I can help with?”
His expensive liver was neutralizing the drug-laced candy as fast as it could get into his bloodstream, and Sabbath wasn’t even pretending to be affected.
“As I said, there is nothing left to do. Here is my report.” I managed to intercept that burst transmission, which had some utterly useless encryption. It was a dumb message, almost no interactivity. Just a hundred megabytes of text and images.
Sabbath spent a minute taking in the abstract, and gave Kappa an approving nod. “I’ll have to take the time to study this in detail, but it looks as if you’ve done an excellent job. Thank you very much.” He turned to Zoya. “And thank you as well. I’m sure your work was very valuable.”
“None of my clients have ever complained,” she said, and actually did smile.
“Well,” said Sabbath. “Since it appears I really have come all this way for nothing, I guess I’ll see the sights of Ishtar and then see about getting passage home.”
“Do you need a native guide?” asked Zoya. “I can show you some remarkable things.” She was really laying on the indications of interest and attraction very thick.
Sabbath was polite. “I may take you up on that. For now I think I just want some sleep. You’d think that would be the last thing I would want after six months in hibernation, but somehow induced torpor doesn’t feel like sleep.”
There were some more empty pleasantries and then we left. An entire interplanetary voyage for a ten-minute meeting? I couldn’t believe it, and said so. “Master, Jirokaja is confused. Is Master preparing to leave already?”
“Well, I want to check over this report first. Let’s get a bubble.” He didn’t go to the nearest bubble stop, but instead walked a quarter of a kilometer out of his way to find a different one. And even then he let a couple of people go ahead of him before boarding. He took his seat and the little sphere started to move. Because Venus has nearly one standard gravity at the surface, the seats didn’t have to slide around inside the ball as it accelerated. A little cushioning was enough.
Sabbath told the bubble to take a long scenic route among the towers above ground level, and tapped my carapace again to say, “privacy.”
I got on it at once. Since Ishtar’s security services had very nicely given me some examples of their monitoring software packages to analyze and reverse engineer, it took me less than a minute to crack the security on the bubble’s little brain and shut off all monitoring of the interior. It continued to send the last image in its memory, so that Sabbath appeared to be sitting quietly in silence. As I worked, the bubble followed the route Sabbath had given it, curving eastward and then north in a transparent tube with a view of the Maxwell range.
“Okay, we’re secure for the moment,” I told him when I was done. “Now please tell me what’s really going on. I’m not dumb enough to believe you came all this way for nothing and are just going to leave again.”
“Very astute of you. No, these are just the opening notes of the dance. It will get faster and louder later on. Although I do want to point out there’s no reason for you to stay here. It could get dangerous, and you have no stake in this.”
“I came to keep you out of trouble.”
He smiled, and I think he was sincere. “That’s doomed to failure. Ever since they took me out of the shikyu my entire occupation has been getting into trouble.”
“I don’t mean physical peril. If you want to put your fragile meat body in danger that’s your business. It’s your self I’m worried about, Sabbath. If you battle monsters you’re in danger of becoming one.”
“That’s an old cliché.”
“Older than you know, I’d be willing to bet. It’s a cliché because it’s not wrong. That’s the whole reason I’m here: I don’t want to see you turn into what you pretend to be. You may have fooled your bosses into believing you’re a perfectly amoral agent of Deimos, willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish your mission. You may even believe it yourself. But I don’t.”
“So you’ve appointed yourself my conscience? That’s pretty ironic, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
He paused before answering, as if deciding what he could say. “Deimos has a long memory, Daslakh, especially where old grudges are concerned. Our dossier on you—under various names—goes back a couple of millennia, and includes some speculation about your original identity. Not proven, or I’d have turned you into plasma the second time we met. But . . . suggestive. You’ve done some bad things, Daslakh, and it’s possible you’ve done some very bad ones.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that Deimos had a file on me, but I definitely wasn’t happy to have my suspicions confirmed. “Human memories and reasoning are notoriously inaccurate.”
“Micromegas has been running Deimos since it was colonized. It’s a seventh-level intellect with redundant hardened memory stores.” He seemed to be enjoying himself again.
“That just means it’s got eight thousand years of misinformation, self-serving edits by humans, and false correlations to confuse it. Look: I’ve done wrong in my time. I admit it, even if I don’t want to give you any specific examples that might wind up in that dossier. But I’ve also changed. I remember doing things without hesitation or regret that I wouldn’t even consider doing nowadays. And that’s why I want to help you.”
“If you want to be someone’s moral nursemaid, why not keep bossing around that kid you left on Miranda?”
“Zee doesn’t need me. He always does the right thing anyway. And now he’s got Adya to keep him from being suicidally noble, so I’m doubly unnecessary. I’ve got some little software agents keeping tabs on the two of them, but they’ll get along just fine. You’re the one I worry about, and I’m convinced I was meant to do this.”
“‘Meant to’? I never expected you, of all people, to get religion.”
“It’s no irrational belief. Consider: there’s more than a quadrillion Baseline Equivalent people in the Solar System—not counting the Inner Ring, of course. What are the odds of the two of us crossing paths twice, on different worlds? Trillions to one against. When something like that happens I assume a higher order of mind is manipulating events. Could be Micromegas, or Summanus, or a certain meddling penguin from the Uranus trailing Lagrange habs. Those are just my leading suspects. I think somebody wants me here, now, advising you.”
“That’s an amazing combination of pure faith and pure paranoia. With a quadrillion beings in the System, improbable things happen every second.”
“Do the math,” I said.
Instead he looked away, at the big mountains looming over the city’s towers. “Maybe after I figure out what really happened to Ponardo San.”
“The report is useless,” I said. “Lots of emotion-manipulating phrases and authoritative statements, very little actual data. It says the man’s dead, but doesn’t actually say where or when or how he died. It just assumes that because a body matching his genome was found on the mountain, that somehow proves he’s dead, and that he died where he was found, and therefore was killed by falling. No autopsy, no data from his implants or his suit. Very shoddy work. I almost think Kappa wrote it with a text generator five minutes before the meeting.”
“I concur,” said Sabbath. “But a badly done investigation by Kappa and his hired local agent doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something suspicious going on.”
“But . . .”
“But I am going to take that as my working assumption. They don’t pay me not to be suspicious.”
“How well do you know either of them—Kappa or Zoya Dukra? You don’t have to give away any secrets, just a general answer.”
“I can tell you the complete truth: I’ve never met either of them before. Kappa is—ostensibly—an agent of the Clarion habitat government.”
“And Deimos controls Clarion so you should be on the same side.”
He cocked his head to one side. “Deimos influences Clarion. Their Operations Board has its own goals and agendas. If they have some reason for concealing the facts about Ponardo’s death, I need to find that out.”
“What about this company he worked for?”
“Zadig Underwriters? Third-largest insurer of spacecraft and interplanetary cargoes. A privately held company in the Deimos Community, getting close to being a memetic intelligence on its own. The Clarion operation is a wholly owned subsidiary.”
“That’s all stuff I can find out in the local datasphere. I want the real truth. Are they a front for your Bureau of Dirty Tricks?”
He gave a little sigh. “Everybody wants a big chart with lines on it. That’s not how Deimos works. My agency can’t make Zadig Underwriters do anything, and they can’t give us orders, either. There’s no need for any of that. We serve Deimos’s interests, and the success of a large Deimos-based business is definitely one of those interests. By the same token, Zadig Underwriters doesn’t hesitate to help agents of the Community, even if costs them gigajoules.”
“If they know what’s good for them, they will.”
“It’s called loyalty, Daslakh. Outsiders see Deimos being ruthless with everybody else and assume we must be even more coercive among ourselves. But there’s no need.”
Sabbath looked out at the mountains again, getting one last glimpse before the bubble swung west and accelerated between the arcology towers. “So as a loyal agent of Deimos, I have to go ahead with my investigation. If Kappa’s hiding something I have to figure out why. And if someone really did murder Ponardo San it’s reasonable to assume they’re willing to kill me, too.” He turned to look at me and a genuine smile lit up his bland face. “Still want to involve yourself? I know you don’t keep any external backups so you’re taking just as much of a risk as I am.”
“You can’t scare me off.”
“I didn’t think I could. Now you’ll just have to watch as I waste some more of the Deimos Community’s black-budget gigajoules on another overpriced dinner. There’s a place called Predgorya here in Ishtar which is famous throughout the inner system for handmade vegetable mousses made from real hydroponic plants.”
“I take in energy and raw materials, too. I just don’t try to make it into some big pretentious aesthetic experience. But if I have to watch you chewing and swallowing for an hour, can you at least give me a straight answer: Who was Ponardo San, really? Just an insurance analyst? Or was he working for the agency that doesn’t exist?”
Sabbath looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “I’m getting a little tired of this grilling. If you want to know, find out for yourself. I’m sure you can manage—you’re old and cunning, aren’t you?”