Palace (53 page)

As the Gate sped along the correct devs, Rico realized that he felt no motion; he could merely see the Map unrolling ‘beneath’ them as the Gate cross-connected to the correct grid points. The Protectors’ pages appeared ahead as a vast area of grey shading over the bright colours of Mapspace. A firewall, iconized in glossy black, bounded the special areas set aside for the Protectors by the guild, but several centuries ago, the citizens had voted against giving the police unbreachable security after a scandal about spying on private citizens. Since the guild had built the firewall, Rico could make educated guesses at the sort of code that would breach it. His second attempt produced the image of a gate in the black. Gliding through brought him straight to the root of the data dump’s tree.

‘Expand listings.’

Bright gold against grey, the long directory structure unrolled. With a hook Rico grappled onto the icon marking closed cases and swung his rhomboidal self inside. The Gate registered his search like a fall, a long tumble through a branched and spiky tree of words, studded with icons instead of leaves. The letter S flashed by - Rico flung another hook and slid through. Another fall brought him to the Smids; hundreds of cases, it looked like. What did Vida come from, a long line of criminals? Since he had no time to sort, Rico flung a copy net around the lot and pulled his copies into storage as fast as they’d transfer. As he closed the cache, he heard a thin wail: somehow an alarm had got itself triggered. ‘Run for it.’

Whether he or the Gate had spoken, he didn’t know. With a swoop it broke out of the iconic forest and flung itself for the firewall. Running down bright red devs, black guard icons rushed to cut them off. Although Rico could have simply bailed out of Mapspace back into his body - to face a terrible headache but nothing worse - doing so would leave the Gate trapped where the Protectors’ Maprunners could examine it.

‘Eye of God.’

With a flash of white light it bounded upward like a living being and flew straight for the Hypermap. If there was an umbrella over those files - Rico refused to think about the crash that lay ahead of them. Below them the guard icons dwindled and fell away; ahead lay only blackness, whether only the Interstice or an umbrella he couldn’t tell. Up and up, and now the Gate’s motion was as smooth as a lift booth and as fast. In a symphony of beeps like a thousand clocks it burst through the blackness and floated, quivering, in the pale blue of the Hypermap. Below him hung Palace, turning cloud-free and crowned at each pole with white ice. Tired as he was, eager as he was to examine his cache, Rico lingered, staring at the icecaps.

‘The Map icon for Palace has changed since the last time I saw it. Explain discrepancy.’

‘Access occurred in error mode. Icon furnished by historical archive.’

‘Error was?’

‘Accessed emergency memory area.’

‘Why?’

‘A state of emergency was diagnosed.’

‘Data noted and approved.’ Rico hesitated - it made sense that the Gate would read

‘emergency’ from their flight, but what did that have to do with the Palace icon? He had no time to worry about it just then. ‘Return mode. Arco daz dev home reverse.’

Back in his ordinary consciousness, Rico logged off from the guild grid and disengaged his jack from the terminal. Once he had his stolen copies up onscreen, he could eliminate most of them immediately. All but two belonged to other Smids than the mysterious Lin, whose files turned out to be curiously incomplete, just as Vida had reported. Since Rico had netted them in the state of raw data directly from the Map, all their routing marks, download records, and other such tagging had come along with them. If someone had deleted portions, he should have left tracks. Rico was quite sure that his own hasty raid had left plenty; although they’d be untraceable thanks to the Chameleon Gate, not even the Gate could prevent the marks from forming.

But Lin Smid’s records showed no such tracks. Legitimate access requests and copy notices decorated their undercode like a palimpsest, but not one mark pointed toward the deletion of so much as a single word.

‘This is weird.’

It was also frustrating. Rico had been counting on those tracks to lead him to the dump where the stolen data might still he. The thief must have been a master cybe to get so clean away. Rico found himself wondering why a master cybe, why anyone had bothered meddling with such selected portions of the records. What were they hiding? Certainly the one big thing about Lin Smid was that she was Vida’s mother, and nobody was denying that. Finally he closed the files down and went to bed.

Tired as he was, Rico lay awake for over an hour, running the evidence up and down a mental screen. He could make no sense of it and fell asleep at last, only to wake and find himself sitting upright in bed. A crack of grey light filtered under a partially closed shutter.

‘No-one deleted anything. It was never there.’

He got up, pulled on a pair of pants, then sat down at his desk. Inserts. They had to be. It was the only thing that made sense, really, and when he brought the files up onscreen, their smooth self-containment made him more sure than ever. Since he could check his theory in semi-public files, he jacked back onto the Map and headed for the gargantuan database located like a separate township in Centre Sect’s Map analogue. For two hours he searched and copied, double-checking through old backups and obscure record bases. On an impulse he turned to the public announcement scroll records and found that like good citizens of Palace, the Map-runners in charge had never thrown one bit of data away. Old advertisements lay rolled on miles of virtual tape, ready for his search routines. By the time he finished with them, he knew that he was right, as bizarre as his theory was.

He left the Map and found himself back in a body that was soaked in sweat and growling hungry. Even so, he hated to leave his screen, where in long columns his evidence stood waiting for his physical eyes to give it one last review.

‘Hey, kid?’ Uncle Hi’s voice, and behind him.

Rico yelped and sloughed round in his chair.

‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘It’s all right, Se. I was just looking over data. I’ve found what I need to find, the thing Vida wanted, I mean.’

‘I wondered. I just got a commcall from the Master of the Protectors’ Guild. Someone breached their firewall last night.’

Too exhausted to think up a he, Rico waited for the long and sarcastic diatribe he figured was coming his way.

‘I told him,’ Hi said instead, ‘that I’d get right on to it. Don’t do that again, okay? Next time ask me first, and I’ll tell you how to disable those guard icons so they can’t socket their agents into the Protectors’ power supplies.’

Rico tried to speak and then decided against it.

‘Well, come on!’ Hi snapped. ‘What did you find?’

‘Nothing.’ Rico allowed himself a smile. ‘And that’s the whole thing, the kernel, the core drive. Nothing.’

It was Hi’s turn for the stare. Rico got up, wincing at stiff muscles and a sore back.

‘I can’t tell you, Se. I’ve got to tell Vida first. This is supposed to be a secret. And to tell you the truth, I’m not real sure what it all means.’

‘Okay. All I want is a look at Calios. I don’t care about anything else.’

‘I’ll call her right now. Oh, Uncle Hi? Something I wanted to ask you. Did Palace ever have polar ice?’

‘Sure did. When the Colonizers landed, they didn’t realize that the solarsphere ecology was just entering a warming phase. And the fuel the colonies were burning didn’t help the global equilibrium any, either. That’s why those settlements on the Nox coast failed. They drowned when the sea level rose. What do you want to know that for?’

‘Just curious. The Gate accessed a view of the planet with the polar caps intact, that’s all. Said it was an emergency error, but it seemed like a weird kind of error message to choose.’

‘Huh. Sometimes I think the Gate has a mind of its own.’

‘It’s got to, doesn’t it? It must be a fragment from one of the AIs to act the way it does.’

Hi tipped his head to one side and considered him for a moment.

‘Good point,’ Hi said at last. ‘I like the way you figure things out, Rico. Now go get breakfast and give Vida a call. I want to see that ferret more than ever.’

‘Okay, but don’t forget that I’ve got to go out to the Spaceport later.’

‘Jeez, that’s right. I’d better give your mother a call while she’s got the time to say goodbye.’

‘Knowing her, she’s been packed and ready to go for days.’

‘Probably, yeah. But I want to tell her how the stake-out for those candles is going.’

‘How is it going?’

Hi made a sour face.

‘Lousy, that’s how. Hasn’t been one sign of them, anywhere. You’d almost think it knows we’re watching for it. Maybe it does know, huh? Or its creator, I mean. There’s no way we could have kept this secret from the entire guild.’

* * *

When Vida returned to her suite after her lunch with Sister Romero, she found a message waiting from Rico, asking her to meet him ‘somewhere outside’. She conferred with Jak, who asked Dukayn. Inside the blueglass walls around Government House lay a small park that Dukayn deemed safe enough for Vida to visit. Even so, two Fleet Marines, her usual extra guards, accompanied her and Jak when she left the towers. Although silver mottled the sky, every now and then brief sunlight fell golden across the turquoise lawn. A little stream wandered into an artificial lake where, under nodding fern trees, Vida found a wooden bench.

‘This looks nice,’ she said.

‘Very well, Se Vida,’ Jak said. ‘I’ll just deploy the guards.’

With the two Marines behind and to either side of her, a decorous thirty feet or so away, and Jak out on the lawns, Vida sat at the centre of an armed triangle. She’d brought a magazine with her, a prop for her pretence of just getting out for some fresh air, but she laid the tablet down beside her and watched the stream, running over pale sand. Pretence or not, it did feel good to get out of the towers.

In a few minutes Rico in his Cyberguild blues came strolling along the walkway. He and Jak exchanged a casual wave; then Rico made a great show of noticing her on the bench. She waved, smiling, as he trotted over.

‘Fancy meeting you here,’ he said.

‘Yeah, a real surprise. Why don’t you sit down and join me?’

‘Okay.’ He sat down a careful couple of feet along the bench. ‘You don’t have to worry about someone picking up this conversation with a sound-gun, by the way. I borrowed something from my uncle.’

‘All right. Unless someone’s spying who can read lips.’

‘What?’

‘It’s just something I found in a holonovel once. The hero thought he was safe from being overheard, but the bad guy could read lips and picked up the secret code that way.’

‘Say, you really know how to make a man worry.’

‘Yeah?’

When Vida smiled at him, he blushed and spent a few moments smoothing down his jacket. Finally he looked up. ‘Remember our bargain?’ he said.

‘Of course. You find information about my mother, and I’ll let you see my ferret.’

‘Well, I found something, all right, but it’s real strange. Lin Smid doesn’t exist. Somebody made her up.’

Vida could only stare.

‘They must have been hiding who your real mother was,’ Rico went on. ‘That’s the only thing I can think of, anyway. Look, let me run my theory down for you, okay?’

‘All right. This is the last thing I ever thought you’d tell me.’

‘I’ll bet. Okay, first I, um ... well er ... gained access to the Protector files. I managed to get hold of the two pertaining to Lin Smid. No-one’s ever deleted anything from them. They were entered into the database in their incomplete state. All the data-points that are missing are things like her address and her business licence number, stuff that would be easy to check and verify. What’s left is a pretty convincing life. She did well on the school Map for techs, she was a gardener in Service Sect, she met your dad on a job, that kind of thing. The court records of her trial look really official, too, with all the right codes and sign-offs. To do that, whoever invented her must have had help from one of the Protectors. Any clerk would do; it wouldn’t have to be someone high up on the force, and I’ll bet you could bribe some low-paid clerk if you had untraceable cash.’

‘Well, yeah. The clerk wouldn’t really be doing anything against the law. It’s not like they were destroying records. Just the opposite.’

‘And there wouldn’t have been much chance of getting caught,’

Rico said. ‘So, once the records were in place in the Protectors’ database, the cybe who was inventing Lin Smid could crack into a couple of other bases and insert records there, too.’

‘Like the hospital.’

‘Yes, and then the education camp. I didn’t try to get into that database, but I’ll bet they have another partial file on Lin Smid. Here’s how it works: suppose a gridjockey’s interviewing a hospital official and asks if they have a file on Smid. The official would look at the directory and say yes. Thousands of people go through the emergency rooms, don’t they? A doctor wouldn’t even think twice if she couldn’t remember Smid personally, especially not after eighteen years.’

Vida nodded.

‘But what clinched it,’ Rico went on, ‘was the gardening. Our cybe had to give her a job and one that would let her meet your father. He couldn’t leave that out. Now, if she had a lawn service, she’d have to advertise. She’d have to be in the public directories, too. Well, he inserted her name and a fake access code in the City Comm listings, but he forgot about the business listings, and I never found one ad for her service, not one, in any of the public scrolls. Let’s face it, people who get to be cybermasters lose touch after a while with what ordinary people do. That’s what Uncle Hi always says, anyway.’

Vida nodded again and stared across the lawns. Jak was sitting down on the grass, as relaxed as any Garang could look, but she knew that he’d coiled himself in such a way that he could spring up at any moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rico said. ‘I was hoping I could find her, not lose her, for you.’