Better Angels (36 page)

“—euphoric and blissful high,” said an NHK reporter, “Blue Spike can, with immoderate use, produce a list of side-effects that reads like news of a Great Brain Wreck—including aphasia, agraphia....”

The highly media-conscious president of the newly resurrected United States of America weighed in on the subject too, Mike found:

“To the anonymous tipster or tipsters who provided this information,” President Carlson said, “we offer our heartfelt thanks.”

“Isn’t it true, Mister President,” asked an investigative reporter whose many years in the press corps had not softened his edgy style, “that the initial tipster document really didn’t unearth all that much new material? That its value lies instead in its synthesis and gathering of evidence that was already available?”

“Well,” the President aw-shucksed, “it was enough to connect the dots and paint the big picture for investigators, and that’s good enough for me.”

Even before his initial suspicions had been confirmed—and long before he dictated to his netizen emanuenses the narrative they attached to the evidence packet—Mike already had an inkling of the hard truth. With much belated hindsight, he pieced together the fact that the Mongrel Clones and the Law had such a long-established relationship, one into which Mike had inadvertently trespassed in his naive assumption that the good guys were on one side of the fence and the bad guys were on the other.

Edward “Big Ed” Hilbert, Martin “Mac” McCurdy, and Wayne Davis were the ones who had broken into his trailer. When Mike had turned in their names to the sheriff’s office, the deputy on duty had thanked him profusely and assured him that action would be taken. No doubt it was, as Mike learned with the help of the netizens: Telephone records for the appropriate time and date indicated that the deputy had promptly picked up the phone and called Ed Hilbert as soon as Mike left. Hilbert, as it turned out, was an enforcer for the Clones. No record existed of what the deputy might have told Hilbert but, given the severe consequences he suffered as a result of his petty theft report, Mike easily made an educated guess about the nature of that conversation.

Many things the netizens brought him, however, he had not suspected. The similarity, for one, of some of Blue Spike’s side effects to the brain damage Mike himself had suffered. For another, there was the otherwise inexplicable fact that his assailants, after battering his skull with shotgun butts, had apparently also put in the emergency call to the police and paramedics. Then there were hints that a portion of CMD’s positive cashflow was somehow linked to the Oregon Blue Spike trade. Stereochemical analyses also revealed unexpected similarities between the structure of Schwarzbrucke’s crystal memory chips and that of the Blue Spike euphoriant. Most intriguing of all, however, was the discovery that, in his “wild youth” in Crescent City, Richard Schwarzbrucke had once been arrested for “possession with intent to distribute” methamphetamine.

The threads linking all these were too speculative to include in his tipster narrative, but for Mike they clinched the link between Schwarzbrucke and the Clones, convincing him that Schwarzbrucke had at one time been a crankster chemist in the Clones’ employ—a backwoods brewmeister who, with a little help from his old friends and their money, had eventually gone legit and big-time.

Mike hoped the numerous agencies investigating the Blue Badge Conspiracy would also see the connection, but he and his netizens kept digging nonetheless. The days lengthened into weeks and then months. At last Mike realized that, despite its many successes, his tipster work had failed, in the end, to result in the arrest and prosecution of the four men most responsible for his injuries.

Just another political scandal—was that all he’d succeeded in creating? Merely giving everyone something to talk about besides the weather for a while? Politics and the weather was all that most conversations consisted of, out there, anyway. Not about justice and how to get it—his single great and overriding concern.

Politics had failed him in his quest for justice. How about the weather?

It was an odd thought, a joke at first, a riff on the powers of chaos—yet it kept coming back to him. Particularly the description of weather disasters as “acts of God.” Intrigued, he sent his netizen agents throughout the infosphere to gather more for him to learn about the weather and its manipulation.

From their oracular pronouncements he learned that even an ordinary thunderstorm spans some twenty orders of magnitude: from ten-to-thirteen kilometer (the scale where atomic phenomena initiate the electrification of the stormcloud), to tens or hundreds of kilometers (the scale describing the air motion of the full thundercloud), to the tens of thousands of kilometers (the scale describing the storm’s place in the global electric circuit of the entire atmosphere—and beyond, to incident radiation, the Van Allen belts, near-space phenomena).

Weather fronts were fundamentally chaotic systems. Pumping more heat into a chaotic meteorological system caused it to generate more dissipative structures—hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms. The whirlwind, the structure built by things falling apart, was only a part of it, however. Bifurcation points, far-from-equilibrium conditions, chaotically evolving topologies—these, he discovered, underlay every deep effort at meteorological understanding, whether the phenomenon under study was the role of graupel particles in storm electrification, or the occurrence of golf ball-sized hail in Texas; funnel clouds in Missouri, or hurricanes in Hawai’i; high winds in England, or El Niño movements in the Pacific; flooding in the Netherlands, or monsoons in the Bay of Bengal, drought-induced range fires in Australia, or early snows in the Caucasus. They were chaotic shapeshifters all.

Weather was like the lives of the observers who studied it: litanies of sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, synergies, cascades, multiplier effects—all unpredictable, all possessing a story and a meaning only after the fact. What meaning would the “observers” place, after the fact, on the storm he was planning on creating? Just an unprecedented weather front that struck the coast near the California-Oregon border, perhaps? The only one way to find out would be to make that weather happen.

Impatiently, Mike waited for a propitious time. Through his agents in the infosphere he learned of Schwarzbrucke’s planned trip home to Crescent City. As the awaited time arrived, the Culture netizens accessed real-time flight plans and air traffic control ETAs indicating when Schwarzbrucke’s CMD corporate helicopter would be on the ground in Crescent City. Satellite fly-by feeds confirmed the CMD corporate head’s arrival. With the virtually perfect transparency of his infosphere access, Mike knew the exact instant when Schwarzbrucke placed a call from his limo to his estranged wife and daughters, explaining that he wouldn’t be able to see the girls that weekend because something had come up and he had to hold a business meeting at the Crescent City house.

At Mike’s command, his intelligent agents located full wiring diagrams and architectural plans for Schwarzbrucke’s Crescent City estate. For the netizens of the Culture—creatures for whom information was as omnipresent as air, and manipulating that information as easy as breathing—the Schwarzbrucke estate was a ready playground. A smart house, it was full of tech toys: electronic door locks, closed circuit security cameras, microphone and radio feeds. Motion sensors galore. Fully alarmed. Lights and entertainment consoles remotely programmable. Diesel-fueled backup generators, with the fuel tanks discreetly hidden out of sight on the hill behind the house.

The household computer logged Schwarzbrucke’s arrival at the security gate, giving Mike a firm fix on Schwarzbrucke’s whereabouts. As he began to shape the unfolding of events, Mike found himself feeling more and more like a conductor leading an orchestra performing the musical signature of time and existence itself. Deep in the Culture, Mike was the eye in a vast storm of activity, a shining riot of tiny angels flashing about him like ball lightning, an electronic brainstorm in virtuality that would soon manifest itself as an electrical storm in physical reality as well.

A nice fat tongue of “Pacific Express” moisture was rolling in out of the west. All the forecasts called for showers, heavy at times. A good beginning, but not enough. There were ways to improve the situation, Mike thought. Ways to change the beat, pump up the heat, in order to spin off new structures. Ways to turn butterflies into bombers.

Mike called for satellite overview. A robotanker off the coast here, with a full cargo of liquefied natural gas. Over here, an aging Aegis-class missile cruiser, highly computerized, despite its years. His elvish netizenry lived in both of them, waiting on his command.

What was this? Big Ed Hilbert had just thumbprinted payment for gas and dinner—three orders—in the town of Gasquet on Highway 199, the main road linking Grants Pass, Oregon and Crescent City, California. Even thugs used credit prints and data needles, so Mike had long been able to keep tabs on their whereabouts electronically, when he chose. Might the three Mongrel Clones be on their way to meet with Schwarzbrucke? Could he be so lucky? Might Schwarzbrucke’s business meeting involve the three Mongrel Clones members too?

Mike’s concentration became so focused that time shifted, dilated toward timelessness. Surrounded by a bright sphere of shining netizenry, floating at its center, Mike’s consciousness seemed to have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Time passed, but he did not note its passage. Like many another great artist, he felt that he wasn’t accomplishing all this himself—that a force or spirit much bigger than himself was working through him.

In one part of his mind he soon enough saw the newsflash of a Navy boat missiling an automated LNG supertanker—word of the disaster just breaking as, in another part of his extended sensorium, Hilbert, McCurdy, and Davis, on thunderous vintage Harleys, pulled up to the security gate outside Schwarzbrucke’s estate. Things became more immediate now, for Mike saw and heard all that was coming to pass on the Crescent City estate—over the myriad surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and microphones of Schwarzbrucke’s own security system.

Ascending the long driveway after being waved through, the three Clones must have been glad to have arrived at their destination. On the security cameras, the sky was already starting to spit. Judging from the mean-looking clouds building off to the west, things were going to get much worse.

Schwarzbrucke was waiting for them at the top of the drive, where they parked their antique motorcycles side by side under a tent-like awning beyond the garage. Schwarzbrucke shook the hands of each of the wind-blown men, before guiding them into the house through a side door.

In the Deep Background, Mike through his netizens switched his focus to the internal security monitors and watched the four men walk into the den. They drank beer and scotch and made small talk while the wind and rain grew steadily stronger outside. The weather clearly made Hilbert nervous, especially when the thunder claps began and the first hail started to fall heavily outside.

Mike had his netizen friends begin taping the meeting—audio, video, and holo:

“Let’s cut the chat,” said Big Ed, who from the looks of him weighed at least three hundred pounds. “You didn’t bring us here for a social call. What’s this about?”

“No, not a social call,” Schwarzbrucke said, clearly uneasy. “It’s about this Blue Badge investigation.”

“I thought so,” said the red-bearded, piratical-looking Davis, running a fingerless-gloved hand through his beard. “It’s killing our business, Rick.”

McCurdy, balding and red-faced to the top of his head, fixed Schwarzbrucke with a hard stare.

“It’s that dweeb we shotgun-whipped, ain’t it?” McCurdy stated as much as asked. “What’s his name? Dave Michaels, something like that?”

Schwarzbrucke glanced at McCurdy in surprise before nodding and answering. He had to speak up over the roar of the storm and its thunder outside.

“Michael Dalke,” Schwarzbrucke said, then paused as a particularly close lightning strike was followed almost immediately by a deafening thunderclap. “Yes, I’m beginning to think so too, now that you mention it. I don’t know what he found out while he was playing detective up in your neck of the woods, but it seems to have been a lot more than who stole his sleeping bag.”

“Shit!” Hilbert put in over the sound of the storm, his great shock of dark hair seeming to rise on his head. “He’s the tipster, then? I knew we should have killed the little bastard when we had the chance! We saved him for your damn research, and now look at all the good it’s doing us!”

“I don’t know how he’s doing it, exactly,” Schwarzbrucke said, as levelly as he could over all the lightning and thunder, the wind, rain, and heavy hail battering against the windows, “but yes, I now believe he’s the tipster. I can guarantee you that no information leaked while he was at CMD. He never left the grounds. Maybe he had it planned so that if he were hurt or killed, someone would turn over a bunch of documents to the authorities after a certain amount of time had elapsed. The problem is, we don’t know how much he knows or who he’s working with.”

“You mean he’s still alive?” Davis said, disbelieving.

“He’s floating in a tank in a basement in Cincinnati,” Scwarzbrucke said. “He’s slaved his brain to Retcorp and Lambeg’s corporate data. He’s not going anywhere. Be patient—you may just get the chance to ‘kill the little bastard’ yet. When I get back, I’ll contact R & L. We’ll have his work in the infosphere traced, find out who his associates are. Then, when the time is right, you come in and finish the job.”

Despite the shrieking weather, the repeated lightning strikes around and even on the house itself, and the danger of their situation in general, all four of them smiled at that. Hilbert joked about “shooting fish in a barrel.” Mike was amazed at how arrogantly oblivious they remained to the power of the weather building around them.

From the Culture Mike learned that, somewhere in the basement and in the shed housing the fuel oil tanks, lightning which had struck the central air conditioning unit had blown panels off the circuit breakers. He called up images from both locations. Sparks and small flames dribbled slowly, falling into storage areas at both the basement breaker and fuel shed location. Plastic was melting and paper crumpling already, but the smoke alarms had not smelled combustion yet.