CHAPTER TWO
I am a little ashamed to admit that it took me almost twenty minutes to discover Ponardo San’s true identity. I will point out, however, that eighteen of those minutes were due to signal lag between Venus and Clarion.
Sabbath spent all that time in a restaurant overlooking an artificial cavern devoted to parkland, shoving pureed plant matter into his mouth in search of the endorphin hit from a novel combination of flavors. As we were in public and he still refused to link up for private conversation, I had to act like a sub-Baseline bot and sit obediently on the table, ready to pass him plates or refill his drink when the chimp waiter’s attention lagged.
With nothing better to do I spent fifteen seconds during Sabbath’s first course—artichoke and lemon mousse with sesame wafers, accompanied by a small glass of cardamom lager—carefully building an autonomous message to act as my own detective in Clarion. It was almost a full personality fork, except that I left out all my own memories beyond what I already knew about Ponardo San. I fired it off to Clarion and then did my job as Sabbath’s body servant while the message went to orbit, then to a relay, and finally to Clarion on the far side of the Sun.
My message bounced around Clarion’s datasphere for thirty-two seconds, looking for references to Ponardo San and establishing correlations. As it had a healthy share of my own suspicious and skeptical nature, it dug deeper whenever it found inconsistencies or gaps in the data.
Sabbath was just finishing off the third course—baba ghanoush and a garlicky mushroom terrine on pita bread, washed down with a local red wine grown from a Fratecea-bred variety, which he sipped thoughtfully for a couple minutes before starting to eat—when I got my response.
According to my message, Ponardo San probably wasn’t his original name. He arrived at Clarion about twelve standard years before, already an employee of Zadig Underwriters. He socialized with Clarion’s intellectual class, even hanging around with some political dissidents, until a vicious faction fight broke out among the radical set. Scandal, accusation, counter-accusation, betrayal, exile, and suicide wracked the reform movement. And my message was able to find a connection to Ponardo San in each case. Nothing major, nothing legally provable, but there was always a harmless social connection, a perfectly legitimate business deal, an innocent philanthropic gift, or a discreet romantic liaison linking our boy to the key players.
Learning this made me so impatient I had to slow down my processor while Sabbath put away three more courses and then sat still for nearly an hour nursing a cup of brandy-laced coffee.
By the time we left and boarded a bubble back to the Hotel Tanit, I was like a bomb ready to explode. As soon as it started to move I shut off any monitors and made my carapace danger-red.
“He was another agent! Why didn’t you tell me?”
That provoked a lazy grin which made me wish my spider bot chassis was big enough to punch him in the face. “You said you don’t care about the job I’m doing, so I didn’t bother you with extraneous data.”
“He wrecked a reform movement in Clarion—”
“A Lunar-funded ‘reform’ movement,” Sabbath put in.
“—And came to Ishtar three years ago. I’m guessing there’s some group of idealists here that Deimos has decided to betray?”
“Actually, this time we’re supporting the idealists. Ishtar’s government is in bed with the Lunars.”
“Can’t your bosses just, y’know, not keep up this ridiculous cycle of intrigue and tit-for-tat backstabbing?”
“The laws of physics say no. Luna, Deimos, Juren, the Trojan Empire—all of them have an energy advantage from their positions in the Solar System. As long as physical matter moves around in space, they’re going to be the big players, and that means they’re always in competition with each other. Even when they band together in a cartel, all of them are looking for the right moment to defect and grab a bigger share of trade and influence. Don’t blame us, blame gravity.”
“That’s an awfully convenient way to deflect any responsibility.”
“It’s just business. Luna once dominated the solid-element market in the Main Swarm, but ever since the Epicycles made shipping off Venus competitive, the Lunars have no choice. If they don’t control Venus—or at least make sure Deimos doesn’t—they’ll lose their whole industrial sector.”
“Why can’t Deimos just sit back and let them do what they like, then?”
“Because we’ve got the same problem! Mars is our resource base, but the mines down there are getting old and played-out, and doing Venus-style deep extraction would wreck the biosphere. Deimos needs a foothold here, just as we need a piece of Psyche to compete with the Trojans.”
The bubble was due to arrive at the hotel in just a couple of minutes so I didn’t want to waste time bickering. “Fine, fine. Your bosses have to act like jerks because otherwise someone else might get richer than them. Whatever. So you aren’t here to investigate the death of some random employee of a Deimos company, you’re trying to figure out what happened to another agent?”
“I hope your new moral standards aren’t upset,” he said.
“I’ll get over it. Does Kappa know about this?”
He thought for a second before answering. “I think it must. That would explain the cursory investigation it conducted. What I don’t know is who Kappa is protecting: Is it covering up details of San’s death to conceal the fact that he was a Deimos agent, or to conceal some treachery by Ishtar—or is Clarion involved somehow?”
The bubble slowed gracefully to a stop at the Tanit lobby, and Sabbath got out, ignoring me as one would any sub-Baseline piece of equipment. I followed, trying to walk subserviently. I did find it a little insulting that Sabbath was perfectly willing to link up to his suit and give it a full account of the meeting. I guess he had to trust it since its whole purpose was to keep him alive.
Since I wasn’t part of the conversation, I indulged in a little more research of my own, trying to get a sense of the political dynamics in Ishtar and Venus in general.
Ishtar is an important polity, especially for Venus’s biological inhabitants. As the oldest colony it’s got more influence than mere size and wealth would warrant. The arcologies, domes, and tunnels sprawling across ten thousand square kilometers of the Lakshmi Planum region at the foot of the Maxwell range hold about ten billion biologicals and a billion Baseline or better digital intelligences. That makes Ishtar the largest state in the northern highlands—though of course the loose federation of digital minds controlling the Guinevere Planitia lowlands south of Ishtar dwarf any of the biological polities on the planet, both in numbers and economic clout.
The sad truth is that Venus is a planet for mechs, not biologicals. It took tremendous effort to just make the world no more hostile to life than the average Outer System moon. Terraforming Mars was trivial by comparison.
Sabbath said that Ishtar’s government supported the Lunar Republic. I wanted to find out how. Was it a genuine alliance, a puppet state, corrupt influence over politicians, or some other arrangement?
The full name of Ishtar is the Venusian Ishtar Matriarchy. Ever since the first humans tried to live on Venus—in balloon cities above the sulfuric acid clouds that once hid the surface—the place has had a disproportionate number of governments privileging human or other biological females. Apparently the ancient mythical associations of the name of the planet and various surface features attracted sex-based ideologues, and they left a lasting mark on Venusian political culture.
Ishtar’s a classic example. The “Invariant Principles” document which established the Matriarchy limits voting and political office to mothers—biologicals who have given birth in their primary bodies to living offspring of the same species. No shikyu-made babies.
Now, I’m aware that there is still a significant minority among biologicals who choose to reproduce using only the organs provided by their genes. I don’t understand why and refuse to make any effort to do so. The whole subject of sex and reproduction strips away all the higher brain functions among biologicals.
In practice, Ishtar’s rule limits the franchise to the more ambitious members of the Nationalist party, and the small but fanatical Natural Wisdom party. Nationalists are your basic political machine organization, seeking power to gain wealth for its members and perpetuate itself. Nationalist leaders invariably bear one offspring in order to qualify for office, and then gestate any others with artificial help like normal people. Egg-layers like corvids and dinos are heavily over-represented in the leadership.
The Natural Wisdom movement is smaller, weirder, and much more intense. Mammals predominate, and they actually appear to like going through the whole reproductive rigamarole. Party members tend to carry one or more infants around even while conducting official business. Under normal circumstances the Nationalists can easily beat them in elections, but sometimes a Nationalist official is just too blatantly corrupt, or faces a rival from within the party, or gets so lazy they can’t bother to mobilize their voters, and a Natural Wisdom candidate slips in. Most of them flame out almost immediately and serve no more than one term, but the handful of Natural Wisdom politicians who are actually competent wind up getting co-opted by the Nationalists and dutifully serve as a controlled opposition in exchange for a cut of the swag.
The rest of Ishtar’s political movements are small and unlikely to ever wield any power. The Reform Principles faction is a bunch of well-meaning sorts who want to open up political participation to all Baseline entities in Ishtar, but most of their supporters can’t vote or hold office, which limits them to public demonstrations and sloganeering. There’s also a Monarchist movement, a Plutocratic party, a Digital Government faction, several varieties of anarchists, and a bunch of others whose goals seem obscure even to themselves.
Oddly, I couldn’t find any connections between Ponardo San and any of Ishtar’s dissident political movements. My little simplified sub-Baseline personality fragment had been able to identify the outlines of his influence network in Clarion, but my own considerably more powerful mind couldn’t see anything in Ishtar. Either he’d gotten so good that his connections were invisible, or he hadn’t been able to build any kind of network at all.
He didn’t have much of a media presence, nor did he really do any legitimate business for Zadig Underwriters, either—at least, nothing that a sub-Baseline system couldn’t do just as well. In fact, the only personal connection my little agents crawling around the datasphere could identify was with an individual named Marya Arani. Information about her was intriguingly sparse, but she seemed to be a native Ishtar citizen, who was in images with Ponardo San on at least two occasions. She was listed as an independent investment broker specializing in commodity futures, and was romantically linked to a pro athlete. I couldn’t find any political affiliation for her.
While I sifted and re-sifted Ishtar’s infospace for traces of Ponardo San, Sabbath spent a few minutes exercising, took a bath, got halfway through an entertainment, and finally went to sleep. His suit made it very clear to me that I wasn’t allowed to disturb him. So I kept my findings to myself and slowed my processor to make the time pass more quickly.
Sabbath slept exactly four hours, which was standard for him, had tea and printed fruit in the room, then got into his suit and made it assume the form of an ordinary Deimos-style business outfit in dark gray, as anonymous and unmemorable as Sabbath’s own face.
“Where is Master going?” I asked aloud.
“There’s someone I want to meet,” said Sabbath. “Marya Arani, an associate of the late Ponardo San. Come on.” He went out into the hall and I followed.
I admit I was impressed. Evidently Sabbath—or his suit—had put some of that long dinner to good use, doing exactly the same kind of research I had done when we got back to the room. “Was this Marya Arani a business acquaintance or a personal friend of Ponardo San?”
“Unclear,” said Sabbath. “They went out to watch Igribokh matches a couple of times. Might have been for fun, or she might have called it ‘developing a client’ and billed it to her job. Not my idea of a date night, but tastes vary. She seems to be a big fan of the game, or at least one of the players.”
“Jirokaja is glad that Master would never use his employer’s funds for personal matters,” I said.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I want to talk to Arani and see what she knows.”
“Jirokaja is confused. Why doesn’t Master contact Arani right now?”
He waited until we boarded a bubble and it was in motion before answering. “I’ve been trying that since I woke up. She’s refusing all comms, even from new sources and fakes. So I thought I’d go to her physical location and knock on the door.”
“That could be risky,” I pointed out.
“I want some clarity and this seems like one way to get it.”
The commodities business must have been prospering, because Marya Arani lived in Dvorets Neba, one of Ishtar’s tallest and fanciest arcology towers, on the 715th floor with a spectacular view of the whole hyperpolis spread out to the west.
Her place was on a restricted floor, so our bubble couldn’t even stop there without authorization. Sabbath solved this little problem by riding to a public commercial floor five levels up, changing his suit to high-visibility yellow with the logo of the arcology’s maintenance department, and climbing down the side of the central atrium with sticky hands and feet, in full view of everybody, to the correct floor.
“The most powerful form of invisibility,” he remarked as he climbed over the atrium parapet on the 715th floor.
“I knew that was true for bots and mechs, but I didn’t know it worked for biologicals,” I told him.
“Oh, yes. If you look unimportant, people just edit you out of their vision.”
The restricted floor was considerably more posh than the ordinary levels of the arcology. It was double normal height, with a ceiling six meters above Sabbath’s head. The center section, around the atrium, was a park with live grass and flowers, fountains, and mosaic-tiled pathways by some of Ishtar’s leading artists. Live birds and butterflies darted about, feeding on the aromatic blossoms. Beyond the park was a ring road, where radial passages led out into the inhabited parts of the level.
Still in his maintenance outfit, Sabbath proceeded briskly along a walkway, acting like someone who knew where he was going and needed to get there without delay. I matched my carapace to the color of his suit and followed.
But past the ring road he discovered a second barrier: The passage leading to Arani’s residence was extra-super-special private, residents and invited guests only. He stood for a moment before the diamond sheet door, looking at the lovely wood-paneled passage beyond, then walked to a planter, knelt and began fiddling with some of the multiberry bushes in a purposeful-looking way.
He did that for seventeen minutes, until his suit—which could watch every direction at once—spotted someone coming up the private passage. Sabbath stood up, his suit reverting to the businesslike gray outfit he had left the hotel room in, and strode briskly toward the door, timing it perfectly to arrive just as a plump man in a silver-wire tunic riding a personal scooter came out. I followed just behind him, my carapace also gray to match.
Sabbath stepped aside politely with a nod at the man, then we slipped inside before the door shut. I will admit to being just a little bit impressed at this application of a technique which must date back to a few days after the first humans started locking doors to keep people out. After twelve thousand years of civilization, acting like you are supposed to be there is still an excellent way to get into someplace you aren’t supposed to be at all.
Marya Arani lived at the very end of the radial passage, in the expensive real estate on the outer edge of the floor, with real exterior views. Sabbath walked the kilometer to the edge in a relaxed and confident way, barely glancing at his surroundings as if he was completely familiar with this part of Ishtar. That must have taken some effort, as the district had obviously been designed to impress.
My time among the ultra-rich oligarchs of Uranus’s moon Miranda taught me some of the tells of real wealth, and they were all here in abundance. The real wood panels on the walls weren’t printed, but actually shaped by living hands, with all the irregularities and imperfections they can’t help but leave. The inlays, in contrasting wood or polished metals, formed soothing abstract patterns. The plants growing here and there looked like custom original genomes. We passed a few people along the way, and he gave each one a friendly but preoccupied smile—a perfect portrayal of a very busy man with flawless manners.
The smooth elegance of the passage walls was interrupted here and there by doorways, and it was easy to see that they were more than just entrances. They were advertisements for the status of the residents. An ambitious student of psychology could create a whole informative about the semiotics of doorways in Ishtar’s wealthiest arcology levels. Some were deceptively plain, to draw attention to the hand-polished wood from slow-growing trees. Others went in for fractal density of decoration, whether carved or painted. A few boasted doors made of copper, either lovingly polished or with cultivated oxidation making patterns like windblown dust. One door pulled a symbolic judo move, a plain slab of reinforced graphene with a layer of protective smartmatter—telling the world “I don’t need to show off my status with public display, I’m so important I need extra security.”
That one, in turn, was trumped by the most elegant of all, a few dozen meters further along: a simple velvet curtain, conveying the message “I think this is absurd, and also I’m so powerful I don’t need locks.”
The passage ended at a small domed rotunda, where the residences with exterior views had their doorways. Sabbath’s suit reverted to its maintenance worker appearance as he puttered about, and I could see that he was puttering in the places which would give a good view of Arani’s door and down the passage. It didn’t take a second-level intellect to guess he was leaving surveillance mites behind him, so that he could see who visited and track Arani’s comings and goings. The mites were little millimeter-wide bots, just big enough for a functional eye which doubled as a photoelectric power supply, four sticky legs, and twenty-four hours of data storage. I didn’t interfere with them at all, other than adding a cutout address of my own to their data distribution list so that whenever Sabbath got an update, I’d see it, too.
Arani’s own doorway, by the way, was hand-carved and painted wood, obviously of great age, with a crude-looking but attractive folk art pattern of bright yellow crescents and stars on a blue background. A subtle virtual tag identified it as a 77th Century work from the region around Lingga, on Earth. I noticed that Sabbath never approached within about five meters of it, doubtless to avoid attracting extra scrutiny from any security systems Arani might have in place.
My own attention was suddenly drawn to a figure approaching up the passage, redoubled when I resolved the calculatedly beautiful face as that of Zoya Dukra, the local investigator Kappa had hired to help produce its useless report on Ponardo San’s death.
Sabbath’s suit must have noticed her, too, because I could see him glance over his shoulder and move away from the patch of wall he’d been examining. His suit shifted subtly as he did so, going from a faux maintenance worker’s high-vis yellow to a canary-colored Juren boulevardier’s outfit. He was still a man in yellow, but now it was something a tourist might plausibly wear.
Thus altered, he walked boldly up to Arani’s door and actually knocked on it with his knuckles. I could sense some chatter between his implant and the local comm system, but the door did not open. Looking visibly frustrated, Sabbath turned away—just in time to see Zoya Dukra. His glum expression turned to a big smile, and he waved.
“Investigator Dukra! Whatever are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same question, Mr. Samedi,” she said, also smiling. I noticed that her body wasn’t giving off any of the normal involuntary human responses you see in social interactions. Heart rate was rock-steady, temperature absolutely even, and her only movements were conscious and voluntary. Just like Sabbath.
I also noticed that once again she was keeping up a large data flow, as if perhaps all this was going to some public stream. When I looked her up earlier, I hadn’t noticed anything like that under her own name, so during the interval between her statement and Sabbath’s reply I checked to see if her face was attached to any alternate identities. Nothing.
“Just trying to make sure I follow all the loose ends,” he said. “Marya Arani’s a known associate of Ponardo San, and I was hoping to find out if she has any information to add to what you and Kappa have already discovered.” He sighed a bit theatrically. “Sadly, she’s not interested in talking to me so it seems my trip here was a waste of time.”
“You should have asked me first,” said Zoya. “She’s not in the report because she didn’t have any relevant data. I could have saved you a long walk.”
He looked over his shoulder at Arani’s front door, and shook his head ruefully. “It was a gamble that didn’t pay off.”
“Let me give you a little consolation prize. Do you like tea? I understand you’re something of a gourmet.”
“Hardly. I have a terrible weakness for overspiced tudoki and printed beer.”
“There’s a delightful chaikhana on this level, with lovely pastries. Printed, of course, but I believe the patterns are all original.”
“That sounds delightful,” he said, and the two of them walked off down the passage back toward the center of the arcology. I trotted along behind them, a bit mystified. A moment ago, both of them had been as unreadable as statues. Now both were throwing off torrents of social and sexual cues. Warm skin, big pupils, mirroring movements, clouds of pheromones. And since I knew Sabbath had complete control over his “involuntary” responses—and a strong suspicion that Zoya did, too—watching this blatant display by the two of them was both fascinating and baffling.
“Why are you here, Mr. Samedi?” Zoya asked as they took their seats at the tea shop. It had a dozen little tables on transparent platforms above a pond where colorful fish and crustaceans swam and scuttled among lotus flowers and rough-cut chunks of basalt.
“You said there would be tea and pastries,” he said.
“In Ishtar, I mean. And I want the real reason—Zadig Underwriters could have sent an autonomous message, or hired someone local to wind up Ponardo San’s affairs. Why go to the expense of sending you?”
“I didn’t make that decision. I go where I’m sent. And please, call me Shoken.”
“You have an interesting history,” she said, then paused long enough for the serving bot to set down plates of rugelach and cups of strong tea. “I’ve found traces of you all over the Solar System, popping up here and there, then going dark for decades.”
“I guess I’m a sucker for new experiences.” He took a long swallow of tea and smiled, holding up the cup as if offering a toast. “Like this one: I’m sure millions of people have drunk this cup of tea before, but it’s new to me. If I stayed in the outer system I probably never would have had it.” His eyes met hers for a long moment before he continued. “Your own history is interesting in a different way: it doesn’t exist. As far as I can tell, you condensed out of primordial elements not long before I arrived here. What’s your past, Zoya Dukra?”
For just an instant she didn’t move. Aside from breathing, her body was absolutely motionless. Even her eyes were still. Then she was back, smiling a little archly at him. “Sometimes a person chooses a new path in life. What came before doesn’t matter.”
“A woman of mystery. Appropriate for an investigator, I guess. I should warn you, though: When I come across a mystery, I don’t give up until I get deep into it.” His eyes were locked onto hers as he spoke.
She didn’t look away. “Just be sure you don’t go so deep you can’t get out again.”
“Hasn’t happened yet. So: I’ve got some free time left in Ishtar. What will I enjoy the most here?”
She glanced at the plate of rugelach and selected one. “Depends on what you like. I could give all the standard answers: fly over the mountains, listen to the bells at Maty Zerkva, take a boat tour of the tunnels, see the museum tower—but I have a suspicion you’re not the sort of person who goes in for the conventional sights.”
“You’ve seen right through me,” he replied. “I’d rather do than watch.” He took the last pastry and munched it appreciatively.
“I think I know something you’ll enjoy.” She finished her tea and stood.
“Good. You can tell me while I walk you back to your office.”
“I believe your hotel is closer,” she said.
At that point this display of hard-wired biological imperatives got to be too much for me. I let the two of them stroll off arm in arm, and chose a random direction for my own course.
I wound up in the museum tower—a whole kilometer-tall arcology pyramid devoted to Knowledge and High Culture. Each level was a museum, a performance venue, or a pocket ecosystem reproducing an environment on Earth or Mars. As I’ve never understood the human desire to look at random objects just because they happen to be old, I skipped the history museums and headed for the Ishtar Collection of Superlative Works. The place claimed to hold the best artistic creations made on Venus, and sustained an entire cottage industry of critics and scholars debating which works in the collection actually deserved the title.
The works in the museum were a very diverse assortment, spanning a couple of millennia. Some were what I privately classed as “stunt art”—such as a piece of stone carved into the likeness of a veiled female chimp, which the virtual tag claimed had been made by a chimp sculptor using only hammer and chisel. The sheer effort and skill was the main appeal. Others were exercises in applied semiotics, making full use of post-Neolithic tech to create shapes intended to evoke an emotion in the biological viewers. A few were impossible to classify, like a printed copy of a human artist’s own skull with a hive of living bees inside it.
As always, half the fun of visiting a museum was watching the other visitors. The place boasted a fairly typical off-peak crowd: visitors from other places on Venus or the Epicycles trying to do something elevating before hitting the nightclubs, children getting some mandatory culture under the supervision of colorful nanny-bots, and a handful of self-identified artistic types looking at everything with almost comical seriousness.
However, among the biologicals I spotted a solitary mech, a little disk hovering on three ducted fans, moving from exhibit to exhibit. Its virtual tag identified it as Tiejiang Jian 51. Expanding that revealed that Tiejiang Jian was a collective intelligence located several hundred kilometers to the south.
My minimal interactions with their tag apparently attracted 51’s attention, as they pinged me. “May we help you?”
Hanging around with Sabbath was making me even more suspicious than usual, but since this little mech was in the museum when I arrived, I figured the odds of them being sent specifically to spy on me were pretty low. So I replied, “I’m just a little surprised to see a mech looking at an art exhibit.”
“We might say the same. Who are you, if we may ask? You aren’t displaying any tags.”
I gave them a temporary comm address. “My actual identity wouldn’t mean anything to you. I’m a Baseline mech, visiting Ishtar on private business.”
“It must be very private indeed. Our own business is entirely public. For the past two millennia we have been digging a hole in Sedna Planitia, which any good telescope can see from across the Solar System.”
They shot me an image of a vast conical pit, twenty kilometers across and ten deep, with half a dozen spiral ramps running from the rim to the mist-shrouded bottom. About halfway down the pit, each ramp was completely blocked by a gigantic excavator machine carving away methodically at the ground while a steady traffic of haulers ran back and forth carrying material to the ring of refineries surrounding the hole on the surface. Cubic meter after cubic meter, ton after ton, without stopping, second after second, century after century, had removed enough crust to make a large mountain. On the plain around it were piles of elements and feedstock compounds, neatly sorted and refined.
“All those machines are you?”
“Yes, either part of our collective mind or subordinate systems. We are a Level 3.9 intelligence.”
“I guess you must really like digging.”
“The work is profitable, although our primary interest is in planetary geology. We have directly learned much about the crust of Venus and the processes which have shaped it. Eventually we hope to reach the mantle boundary.” The mech appended a list of several hundred scientific instructionals.
Their name and the topic explained why they were here. “Killing time before the conference?” The meeting was due to start in four hours, in one of the function spaces near the top of the arcology.
“Exactly. All the conference members will link up into a meta-intelligence to analyze the deep crust sulfuric acid cycle and how the transformation of the atmosphere may affect the transport of materials.” They shot me a draft instructional which I gave a thorough vetting before digesting. “With a couple of hours to spare, we chose to enjoy this display of creative works.”
“I don’t mean to pry, but—are you digital or biological?”
If we hadn’t been communicating electronically I expect they would have chuckled. “You are very perceptive! Yes, long ago we were a Baseline legacy human—born naturally, in fact. That wiggly infant was among the last subjects of the Glorious Unique State, which finished its death throes while we were still a human adult in a hab orbiting Venus, running remote drones on the surface. That was back when the atmosphere was still hot and massive, before the cryoforming project. How could you tell?”
That made them almost as old as me, though of course I didn’t mention that fact. I didn’t think our paths had crossed before—at least, their name wasn’t on my short list of important people, or the longer list of people to run away from. “You use language for things a mech would just transmit directly.”
“Old habits remain. When our human body wore out, our brain moved to a tank, and finally got digitized and moved down to the surface. At first we stayed in tunnels, chilled to just under the boiling point of water to prevent our processors from melting. When the sun shield was finally done it took half a standard year for the surface to cool enough for us to go up safely. Call it residual biological sentimentality if you like, but finally standing in person on the surface of Venus was one of the greatest moments in our long life.”
“You got up to the surface and immediately started digging back down again?”
“Very nearly. We waited another year for the carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid to condense and freeze. That was another great moment: looking up in visible light from the Ishtar plateau and seeing stars in the sky—the first time anyone could do that in four billion years. And finally, without that damned atmosphere interfering, we could get to work understanding the planet itself.”
“Still plenty of atmosphere.”
“Yes, but it’s all nitrogen. Lovely stuff, nearly inert. As we dig ever deeper, thermal and chemical management are always something we must worry about. We must hoard up water to quench the deep hot rocks.”
It occurred to me that someone single-mindedly devoted to dismantling the planet might be able to confirm some of what Sabbath had told me. Since I couldn’t ever tell if he was lying, I found myself doubting everything that came out of Sabbath’s mouth. “So I understand the Lunar Republic’s been moving into Venus resource extraction. Is that causing you any problems?”
“Quite the reverse! None of the offworld interests actually do any mining themselves, they just try to outbid each other for long-term contracts. We’ve just agreed to a twenty-year arrangement with Marginis Metals and we couldn’t be happier. The Lunars are much better to do business with than Deimos.”
“How come?”
“All the Deimos firms work together. If one of them makes a bid, none of the others will go more than a couple of percent higher, if at all. The Lunar enterprises are as cutthroat with each other as they are with outsiders. We had Marginis and MondWerk in a bidding war that got us a net profit of two point two gigajoules per thirty tons of raw rock, after processing and expenses.”
Two gigs per thirty tons sounded pretty low-margin, but that meant Tiejiang Jian was banking about two hundred thousand gigajoule credits every standard day. That could buy an awful lot of planetary science instructionals.
“Sounds like the Lunars have this place all locked down.”
“Well, yes and no. There’s a lot more risk doing business with them—we estimate a twenty-nine percent chance that Marginis will declare bankruptcy before the contract runs out.”
“While the Deimos outfits will still be around, ready to swoop in at a steep discount.”
“Exactly. In the meantime, we profit.”
“Congratulations. And I hope your conference goes well.”
So Sabbath’s version of the Luna vs. Deimos rivalry on Venus checked out, which was reassuring. But the overall image still refused to come into focus. What had Ponardo San been doing that got him killed? Presumably that was what Sabbath wanted to find out.
After viewing the entire exhibit and deleting the less interesting pieces from my memories, I went to check on Sabbath. Enough time had passed that I could at least hope the tedious and repetitive biological rituals were over. I loitered in the passage for a while, waiting for Zoya Dukra to leave.
But to my surprise a human in a freshly printed white cassock came marching up the corridor, accompanied by a covered cart. She put on a chef’s cowl and knocked briskly on the door. When it opened, I took the opportunity to slip inside just behind the cart.
Sabbath and Zoya were lounging on the bed, but at least had the good taste to put on yukatas. In contrast to Sabbath’s utterly unmemorable features, his outfit was almost garish, a patchwork of blue and yellow with red stars echoing the Ishtar flag. Zoya, showing a fine sense of irony, had printed one for herself in the reddish-purple and gold of Deimos.
The top of the cart opened to reveal a small but functional cooking apparatus. Not a printer, but a set of tools for preparing food by hand. I watched in fascinated horror as the cassock-clad staffer prepared a Caesar salad, steak tartare, and honeycomb crepes for Sabbath and Zoya. Sabbath looked on with genuine interest, nodding approvingly at the chef’s technique. Zoya, I noticed, kept her eyes on him instead.
Despite the airborne bacteria and mold spores, the soot and aerosolized lipids, the actual flecks of animal blood and bee parts, and all the possible contaminants lurking in food grown in grubby farm tunnels, the two of them shoveled it in with great enjoyment and washed it all down with a couple of liters of iced sparkling wine.
When they were completely stuffed the chef left them with a final bottle and departed, the cart trailing behind her.
During their meal Zoya and Sabbath had restricted themselves to complimenting the food, the wine, and the chef. They didn’t even stop after she left.
“Well, that was good,” said Sabbath. “Better than anything I’ve had on Ceres or Miranda.”
“What were you investigating there?”
“Sorry, that’s confidential. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course.” Was she aware of the sarcastic edge to her voice? I couldn’t tell. She took a final swallow and set down her glass, then crawled across the bed to Sabbath and lay prone on top of him, supporting herself by resting her forearms on his chest so that they were face to face. The two of them were equally unreadable, like a pair of masks regarding each other. I wondered if maybe Sabbath found that appealing.
“Satisfied?” he asked her.
“For now. Why aren’t you satisfied?”
“Oh, I am. With both you and the meal.”
“No, I mean with Kappa’s report. You could just shoot it back to your bosses and get the next transport out, but you’re hanging around playing detective.”
“I’m simply being thorough. The two of you produced a noteworthy report.”
“You have suspicions,” she said—stating, not asking. “About Ponardo’s death.”
“Of course I do. It’s an occupational hazard.”
“You think someone killed him?”
“I can’t even say if he’s really dead. I want to make sure of it.”
She laughed abruptly. “There’s two ways to interpret that.”
He laughed along. “Now who’s being suspicious?” He ended the conversation by kissing her.
They cuddled for a time, and after a couple of minutes Zoya went to sleep all at once. Sabbath disentangled himself very slowly and then wordlessly summoned his suit from the closet. It wrapped itself around him and began cleaning him up as he slipped out of the room. I had to hustle to get out before the door shut behind him.
“The things I do for Deimos. How long were you watching?” he asked without preamble as we moved briskly toward the lobby.
“I came in with the dinner cart. Only your suit and whoever you think bugged the room got to watch the two of you exchanging fluids. So how come you’re sneaking out afterward when it’s your room?”
“This may not be easy for you to understand, but—when a woman I’ve met only once before swoops out of nowhere and insists on going to bed with me, it does make me wonder about her motives. I can be charming when I want to, but I’m not that attractive.”