Juggler of Worlds (20 page)

True, Sangeeta had done well in her career since Sigmund met her back in ’45, when they had neighboring offices. Jealous co-workers did whisper about her “connections.” He and Sangeeta had been friends of a sort; he chose to believe his respect still mattered to her.

Futz! Why dwell now on this trivia? He’d clearly overachieved on the meds.

He shifted positions again, welcoming the head-clearing stab of pain from abused ribs. “Bear with me. Look at the progression, in the space of a few months. I trace laundered General Products funds to Max Addeo. The S-G lets Max discover that my new Special Investigations Unit is, in fact, the Puppeteer task force reborn. Protests break out against the Fertility Board, by far the worst in centuries. The riots are meant as a distraction.” To distract
me
.

“Oh, come on,” Feather said. He hadn’t shared this epiphany even with her. “The disturbances are about corruption. The Fertility Board took bribes for licenses. It’s that simple.”

Feather wanted to believe the worst about the board. If she couldn’t have a child, at least she could feel the victim. But opportunities for corruption had always been there. Why would they be worse now?

He said, “Spreading rumors is easy. There have always been whispers. We’re in this mess because people—surprising people, powerful people—make it possible. They don’t condone the violence, but they ‘express their sympathy.’ They ‘welcome the public’s input’ on the matter. They legitimize the dissent and hopes of change. Tell me this, Sangeeta: Why are so many senators, ministers, and media stars suddenly sympathetic?”

Sangeeta broke eye contact. “Anyone with an ounce of decency has to feel some compassion.”

Beside him, Feather tensed. Evidently more than one secret had been poorly kept. “I’m referring to actions, not feelings. More opinion leaders are speaking out about Fertility Board policy, and about
revising
that policy, than have for centuries. I ask you again, why.”

“Why,” Sangeeta echoed. “I don’t
know
why.”

“Someone very savvy has gone into the coercion business.” Sigmund waved off her objection. “We’ll get to who
someone
is.”

He fished his pocket comp out from under his armored vest. “Medusa.” The gorgon’s head appeared, her crown of snakes writhing. “Access Archive AE Two.”

“AE Two?” Sangeeta asked.

Alter Ego Two. It was one of six identities Sigmund maintained, fully realized personae who existed only in databases around Sol system. He took special pride in AE Two, an ARM agent who lived beyond his means. “The code name for a source,” he said. “Medusa, play back the recent delivery to AE Two.”

The gorgon vanished, replaced by a surveillance-camera view into a parcel-delivery transfer booth. Panel lights flickered and an envelope materialized. Projecting from the envelope, in an animated hologram, snarled a three-headed beast.

“Cerberus, the eternally watchful guardian of Hades,” Sigmund offered. Did Sangeeta remember that Puppeteers took names from Greek mythology? “My source got it two days ago.”

Feather frowned. “What kind of source?”

“A financially disadvantaged ARM,” he answered. “That’s why he was approached.”

Sangeeta turned to gaze out the window. “Help me, Sigmund. A scary envelope. By implication, delivered to someone who can be coerced or bribed. What does this have to do with the riots, or why you’re not in an autodoc where you belong? Or with Puppeteers, for tanj sake?”

“I asked Medusa to trace the envelope. That should be easy. As you saw, it came by transfer booth. Medusa?”

“I couldn’t.” Snakes thrashed and hissed. “The originating coordinates were nulled. The authentication check on the sender ID appears to have been bypassed. And there’s no payment record for the teleportation.”

“But that’s impossible,” Feather said. “Isn’t it?”

“Oh no.” Red-faced, Sangeeta turned toward him. “I see where this is going. The transfer-booth system was meddled with, and Gregory Pelton’s family owns a controlling interest in the company. Sigmund, I’m
not
going back to Calis… the Secretary-General with wild accusations about the Peltons. You know she won’t tolerate that.”

He started shaking his head; it hurt and he stopped. “The general public only suspects transfers are traceable. Pelton certainly knows it. There’s ARM gear integrated throughout his network. Subverting the system points right back at him. He wouldn’t do it. Someone hoping to implicate him might.”

Sangeeta crossed her arms across her chest. “Then who?”

He shrugged. Who hadn’t heard the rumors that Puppeteers first sold a Pelton the underlying technology?

“What was in the note?” Feather asked.

The stims had started to fade. “An enumeration of AE Two’s debt. A list of questionable deposits made into his accounts.” Sigmund smiled wearily. He took a perverse pride in the traps he’d set. Each, in its own way, was a thing of beauty.

“That’s
it
?” Sangeeta said. “No demands?”

“They’ll come later,” Feather guessed. “In the next letter. First, someone wants AE Two to sweat.”

That would be a neat trick, Sigmund thought. Words grew harder to find, and even harder to get out of his mouth. “Back to the Puppeteers. Feather, I’m going to make a confession here, lest you start a witch hunt
while I’m in the autodoc. AE Two is a computerized figment—I wrote him—but as far as personnel records are concerned, he’s an ARM who reports directly to me.

“Who but a Puppeteer would work so hard to get a secret source into the Puppeteer task force?”

Blue and brown and white, the planet hung above the horizon like a priceless jewel. Two small continents and part of a third presented themselves. Cyclonic storms dotted the sea-girt equatorial band. Large ice caps gleamed. The narrow night-side rim glimmered by moonlight.

The cratered moonscape from which Achilles stood observing could not have been more different.

Under other circumstances, the pristine globe overhead would have made an excellent new farm world for the Concordance. It would prove as alluring to Kzinti and humans. By drawing human and Kzinti attention, it would shelter all Citizens in their flight. The herd would never learn what happened here, of course, but he did not doubt their approval. Any Citizen would opt for safety over a bit more synthesized food in his diet.

Achilles busied his mouths with the apparatus before him, its controls awkward through his pressure suit. He had precalibrated all the units aboard
Remembrance
, but each required final tuning on-site. The geometric and geophysical constraints were exacting. He took every factor into account: the precise slope at each position, the exact altitude, the tiny perturbations in surface gravity due to subsurface mass concentrations.

Each painstaking adjustment took time and intense concentration.

The horizon loomed eerily near; the little moon’s gravity seemed inadequate to hold him to this spot. Cosmic rays sleeted down. Here outside the impregnable hull of his ship, a meteor might strike at any moment.…

A strident polyphony in his headsets jerked Achilles to alertness. “Attention. Danger. Respond,” bellowed the synthesized voices of the shipboard computer. “Attention. Danger. Respond.”

The terminator line had visibly shifted on the beautiful world overhead, its changing phase a crude but serviceable timepiece. He had lapsed into catatonia too quickly even to notice. The computer had recognized his immobility.

“Acknowledged,” Achilles intoned. He made his final, minuscule adjustments. “Apparatus readout?”

“Aligned within tolerance,” the computer answered.

He cycled through the air lock. He still wore the pressure suit, since every point on this small moon was close. Three more units to put into position.

The planet set behind the horizon as
Remembrance
arced to where he would emplace the next unit. Fear and worry tugged at him—but so did excitement. What he attempted had never before been done. He was at the boundaries of science. To accomplish what he hoped to achieve here, Nature exploded entire stars.
He
had a defter touch.

How odd it was that the timidity of
Kzinti
had brought him to this threshold! How odd to realize that Maintainer-of-Equipment was among the
bravest
of the current generation. Six disastrous wars had rendered the “Heroes” impotent as a counterweight to the humans.

With a featherlight touch of thrusters, Achilles lowered the ship onto the pale regolith. Dust clouds raised by the landing slowly cleared. Most settled glacially onto the powdery surface; the weak gravity allowed some to dissipate into space.

Clutching a stepping disc, Achilles stepped down gingerly from the air lock, leaving its outer door open. He positioned the disc and stepped back. “Computer, transfer the next unit.”

The equipment materialized before him. Disc and device alike embodied technology not meant for other races. It hardly mattered. All would soon be beyond recovery.

He busied himself with delicate adjustments. Sun and planet were absent from the sky, and he worked by the faint light from the open air lock.

Stars shone down, diamond bright and too numerous to count. They were set in blackest night, and the darkness drew his eyes like a bottomless well. Gravity’s feeble hold seemed so inadequate.…

“Attention. Danger. Respond,” the ship wailed.

“I’m fine,” Achilles exaggerated. He
had
to finish soon. The wonder was that he had not yet gone irreparably mad. Surely no other Citizen could bear what he had borne: alone, in perilous surroundings, attempting this unprecedented transformation. Who else could have conceived this experiment? Who else fully understood the implications of the BVS-1 expedition? (Not that scientists on Hearth hadn’t asked, but he offered them only hints. This would be
his
triumph. No one would try this experiment before him.)

Who else will protect a trillion lives on Hearth? Nessus?

Somehow Achilles managed to complete the deployments. He flew
Remembrance
for safety to the opposite side of the nameless planet. If he had miscalculated, not even an indestructible hull would protect him from the forces he was about to unleash.

The equipment array continued to report its status through relay buoys. In the bridge’s main holo tank, a dodecahedron framework enclosed the image of the moon. Each of the twenty vertices marked a precisely configured device.

His limbs shook. Stress and trepidation and loneliness could not be denied for much longer. He
must
attempt the experiment now. Then, success or failure, he would fold into a comforting ball of self to reinvigorate himself.

Or he’d be dead.

“Extra scent,” he trilled. The ship thickened the stew of artificial herd pheromones that already permeated the ship’s living space. He inhaled deeply, allowing the spiciness to calm him. “Instrumentation status?”

“All instruments online,” the ship acknowledged.

“Activate.”

A GRAVITY WAVE PASSED through the pristine world, but the single-celled life-forms that were its only occupants took no notice. The instrumentation aboard
Remembrance
registered a flux of gravitons.

Softly crooning optimism, Achilles sent off a deep-radar ping. Neutrinos scarcely interact with normal matter, and the planet behind which he took shelter appeared in the scan display as the very palest of shadows. Beyond that translucent sphere, however, hung an ebony dot: a tiny region that stopped neutrinos in their tracks.

Achilles warbled in triumph.

He had learned much during his long exile among Kzinti and humans. He understood concepts incomprehensible to even the most sophisticated Citizen on Hearth. They lived too far from nature; they were too many generations remote from a world with predators. But not he.

And so, with the collapse of that moon into a compact mass of neutronium, he had baited his first trap.

Sigmund stirred scrambled eggs with his fork, while Ander took another pass at the food-laden sideboard. Ander was newly home from Jinx, and to a point Sigmund sympathized: Bulking up for that gravity built a hearty appetite. A colonial-style hunt breakfast in Olde Williamsburg might fill him up.