Chapter 1
Taddeuz Bertingas: CHANGING THE GUARD
“FLASHPAD AURCLUSTGOV EYESONLY SUPRACODE010101 HANDBREAK.”
“Oh, Chrysostom!” groaned Taddeuz Bertingas, Deputy Director of Communications for Aurora Cluster, honoring the patron saint of preachers and political speechwriters.
Saint John Golden-Mouth—“Chrysostom,” in the ancient vernacular—had been ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, 3407-3347 B.P. The saint had gone to dust before, probably, the first artificial intelligences were awakened on Earth. And long before, certainly, the titled muffinheads of Central Center, with the wax still soft on their patents of nobility, had learned to break into the military code circuits for sending Anniversary greetings to their boozing buddies in the hinterlands.
To deal with messages like this, the Palace poodles routinely beepered out the entire Communications section and put them on midnight alert. This coded message would be as stupid and inconsequential as every other they’d received. The Palace staff had even tracked down Bertingas himself—who had made a point, in past weeks, of keeping his sleeping arrangements particularly vague, as a privilege of his rank. Bertingas’ aide, Gina Rinaldi, could have handled this “crisis” one-handed, or at least kept its electrons jelled in the in-bin until the duty staff came to work after breakfast.
“Gina?” he called through the open door, toward the cubicularium nearest his corner office. “Could you give me a hand with this? The autoscribe seems to be defective . . . ”
The hum of the bullpen out there, the click of keyboards, the clink of crockery, and the buzz of barely subdued mutiny—brought on by being rousted before dawn—hushed immediately.
“Sure thing, Tad,” his assistant replied.
“No, she can’t,” snapped the artificial intelligence device on his desk. “I’m holding a top-secret message and she’s not—”
“Shut up. You’re broken,” Bertingas said, disconnecting the AID from the message pad. There were times when dumb circuitry had its attractions.
Gina Rinaldi stepped briskly through the doorway and came around to his side of the desk. Without asking, she drew up a chair, smoothed her tight skirt over her hips and under her thighs, and sat beside him. She pulled her chair up to the message pad, rubbing one slender, nylon-sheathed knee against his, tucking her slim shoulder under his arm, pushing her long black hair and the scent of it into his face. Gina pretended not to notice his reaction, but she was smiling to herself.
“That’s impressive,” she said, nodding at the message heading.
With quick finger strokes, she called up Bertingas’ logon code and authority access as D.D.ofC. Then she began breaking the number groups.
Gina was a Deoorti haploid female. Bertingas had never met a haploid male nor any of the diploids, but she definitely had the Human phenotype. One who did not know the signs would hardly guess, in passing her on the street, that Gina had a totally alien genotype. But the signs were there: The ratio of her body mass to its volume was too small, indicating a stabilized-sodium metabolism. Her skin color was too coppery, although in some artificial lights it shone a bright carotene yellow. Her skin was too cool to the touch and dry, like supple leather, although she was smooth, warm, and Humanly damp in the right places.
The real giveaway was Gina’s face: too broad, slightly triangular, with the eyes too widely set, and too large. Her supraorbital ridges and the eyebrows masking them were too prominent and curved too far down at the sides, tracking almost vertically across her temples. The eyes themselves were black buttons, depthless, opaque, like pieces of heavily leaded radglass.
Gina had an intuitive psychotype. She was a pattern reader and a flex builder. Her talent was cutting through the evasions, distractions, and false distinctions of Human speech, winnowing out the absolute meanings and acting on them. She was an optimizer, not a maximizer, and felt at home in multi-valued systems. Given a problem, she could always find a workable solution—and for that talent alone Bertingas valued her highly.
As a tribute to her skills, Gina Rinaldi had risen in the Human-dominated Communications Department, earning her own cubicularium and the right to use at least a piece of her own last name, not just a number, as a personal logon code.
Now, under her hands, the flashpad message from Central Center came clear:
“To the Honorable Deirdre Sallee,
Senator, Governor of Aurora,
Chair to the Subcommittee on Trade and Commodity Transports,
Natatrix and Electrix Supremator,
Holder in Fief of Ombud, Gareth, and Galilee Green,
“Greetings:
“Regret to inform you that this date, Earth reference 12 November 5341 post Pact, at ten-hundred hours, His Excellency Stephen VI ten Holeomb, Hereditary High Secretary to the Pact Council in Absentia, was assassinated in chambers. Surviving members of his Gentlemen of the Bath are now under extradition orders, per Kona Tatsu directive 12/11/41-328AAA.
“Roderick, Heir to the Chair, is now reported safe at Bartleby House. Regent nominateurs are assembling to form the new government in his minority. Proto Council requires your confirming nomination to be registered immediately.
“Proto Council further requires that additional signals of loyalty from all administrative and military officers and significant representatives of trade in Aurora Cluster shall be transmitted to Central Center no later than 20 November 5341.
“Seriously suggest you comply soonest, Dee-Dee.
“Cordially,
“Avalon Boobur,
Chamberlain and Chief,
Kona Tatsu”
Bertingas let out a low whistle. Gina turned her head, putting her lips only centimeters from his. She raised one incredible eyebrow at him.
“Killed the high secretary, have they?” he said.
That was just to make conversation. What was really going through his head was a fading vision of his next planned walking tour, a summertime, rambling hike through the high country beyond the Palisades. For the last nine years this had been his vacation from the arid details of Department work: to get among the pathless trees and rocks and breathe clean, unfiltered air again. Like a landscape dissolving in heat haze, he saw that vision dissipate. The Shockwaves from this assassination would tie him up for weeks—and he had been due to go on leave in two days. Damn all fools!
Gina kept a respectful silence in the presence of an EYESONLY AURCLUSTGOV. She may not technically have been a full Pact citizen, as few aliens—and none that Bertingas knew personally—were, but she was still a contract/casual in the Department and had some official standing.
“Killed the high secretary,” he repeated, still thinking about green grass. “And now they’re pressuring our new lady governor to take sides. Her and everyone else . . . So far just you and I and our little clockwork friend here”—he tapped the silenced AID—“know about it. Until, that is, we send this up to the Puzzle Palace . . . ”
Levering himself with a hand upon Gina’s slight but preternaturally strong shoulder, he rose out of his chair and moved toward the window. Before he got there, something from the message tugged at Bertingas’ attention. He turned, bent down, and peered at the crystal display tube.
“ ‘Dee-Dee’! From the chief spook and secret busybody? That’s too delicious!”
Smiling wickedly, Bertingas turned back to the dark glass of the window, which looked out from the ninety-ninth floor of Government Block. Below him, the patterned lights of Meyerbeer twinkled and dimmed under a sky that was turning silver-gray. Beyond them lay the deeply shadowed grounds of the Cluster Governor’s official residence and picnic park, the Palace.
Meyerbeer. Named for Giacomo Meyerbeer, a German composer of French operas with an Italian first name. Someone out of the eighteenth century—old-style reference, of course—when differences among people were measured by the languages they spoke and the gods they worshipped. Sometimes, but not always, by the color of their skins. And not, as now, by the atomic structure of their tissues or other pseudoplasm and the number of their fingers or pseudopods. The irony of it—hanging such a cosmopolitan name on a backwater town in a small administrative cluster of only thirty planets—seldom failed to amuse, and embitter, Taddeuz Bertingas.
He folded his hands behind his back. Gina folded her hands on the desk. The AID burbled over an injunctive DO-loop.
If Deirdre Sallee and her pack of Central Center playmates had had the good grace to get here a few months, instead of just a few days, before the high secretary, Stephen the unlamented VIth, had the bad grace to get himself dead, then Taddeuz Bertingas might have been able to make something of this situation. As her official Director of Cluster Communications, Sallee would undoubtedly have appointed some adenoidal, senatorial, hereditarily useless son of a twitch. If she had done that sooner rather than later, Bertingas would by now have placed his collection of ingratiatingly useful little strings and hooks in the man. Together, with himself directing, they certainly would have figured a way to profit from the secret, EYESONLY knowledge that had come in on the flashpad.
Now, however, with no dummy to front for him, Bertingas could think of nothing better than to reseal and rescramble the message, then send it over to the receptor AID at the Palace. Except, of course, he would bump his holdings in Haiken Maru to the limit of his credit line, as soon as the translite market opened this morning . . . Oh, yes, the little fish would be schooling now.
Politics is the art of timing. Bertingas had missed his opportunities—through no fault of his own!—by a few months. Maybe only a few weeks. Galling!
“Well, Gina,” he said from the window. “Zip up the codes on that and transfer it to the Palace. Let’s see how long their new Taskmaster AID takes to break it and work out the implications, hey?”
“Yes, Sir.” Her fingers went to work on the pad, but her face and those incredible eyes remained turned toward Bertingas.
“Now, to do what we’re paid for . . . How much do we have in the biobanks on H.E. Stephen VI? Any recent holopix?”
“We have those cibatint separations from the last Birthday Romp. Archive quality, not presentation quality, but we can enhance them. They all show that endearing but lopsided grin. Not right for the obits. Can be touched up. We also have about forty megabits of synthesized quotes from his various speeches and encyclicals.”
“What are those good for?”
“Insomnia.”
“Well. See if you can weave them into some kind of life statement. You know the thing. ‘Shining star of a 1,200-year dynasty leading Humanity—and the other races—in an unbroken dynamism of this and that, blip and blah.’ Just let it roll.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And tell the lab techs not to emphasize that lower lip of his when they resurrect the holos. You remember the flak we got, during the Fourth Investiture, about that ‘visible dribble’ in the close-ups? The boys have to keep everything fuzzy, sentimental, gooey. They know the drill. Can’t let our sense of realism and historical perspective get the better of ourselves.”
“No, Sir, I mean, yes, Sir.”
“Good then. Well . . . Where’s my coffee?”
“Right away, Sir.” Gina swiveled in the chair, exposing a deep flash of well-remembered thigh for him, and slipped out of the room. A good girl. Smart, efficient, respectful, almost Human. But not quite, thank God.
Four minutes and counting.
In his mind’s eye, Bertingas could see the serial processors of the Palace AID doing a collective hiccup over the news in that flashpad message. He was a realist and understood that the number of taps and holds and gimmes hooked into that multiphase brain probably equaled the number of politically active interests in the cluster plus ten percent. That made the Palace brain and its grapevine a serious competitor with Bertingas’ own Department as an information resource. Leaky but effective.
That’s why he had long ago arranged for all important messages from the Hyperwave Satellite Network to be channeled through his office first.
Bertingas and his soon-to-be named boss, the official D.ofC., were in charge of both the medium and the message. Their specialty was basic macloohanism: a mixture of psychology and technology. They were charged with interpreting the wishes of the Cluster Governor and presenting them as dicta, perceptions, and personal messages that would be seen, heard, and read correctly by the public. Bertingas and the D.ofC. also maintained the flashpad and other comm links of the government, internal and external, public and private, confidential and cooperative. The Department operated on many levels.
Of course Bertingas, his colleagues, and his various superiors debated themes and techniques within the discipline of communications. The major division was between those who thought of the public as a passive audience, credulous sheep, content to accept any perception the medium chose to push. They believed people basically wanted to be entertained. On the other side were those communications practitioners who believed the public was an active force, aware, making perceptual choices, questioning any gap between words and actions. They believed people basically wanted to be informed.
These two camps, deeply polarized with time, had become known as the Imageurs and the Veracitors.
Bertingas prided himself on being a member of the Veracitor school. Every appointed D.ofC. he’d ever had—it seemed to be a requirement of the job—had been an Imageur.
“Equals amateur,” as the old maxim said.
Imageurs were always weak on the theory, fuzzy about budgets and schedules, and unconcerned with the long-term future effect. They were quite definite, however, on the effect they wanted to create—any effect that would please the Cluster Governor.
However, the technology that the Department had to work with was complex, and that required a steady head in the D.D.ofC.’s slot. A Veracitor like Taddeuz Bertingas.
For example, the Shadow Box, an advanced form of datalog repeater was a cantankerous system to operate and maintain. It had to be, inevitably, to contain at any one instant a few hundred terawords of Human and alien conversation, trade and trysting, spying and skullduggery, gossip and knowledge. Not to mention the megabit blocks, in picform, of Human and alien faces smiling, frowning, smooching, schnoodling, and mugging that went along with the conversation.
The Hyperwave Satellite Network, however, was beyond even a Veracitor’s understanding. It took an imaginative theoretical physicist to deal with a device which sent message-carrying laser beams among specific spatial points in the Aurora Cluster and the 4,000 other worlds of the Pact. The network delivered those beams through hyperspace by firing them into the ring described by a rotating micro black hole.
The messages followed the same wormholes through which all of Pact civilization had grown outward from the Human focus of planet Earth, in Sol System. The civilization and its political/cultural web had expanded, not through the lightyears of realspace, but through the sinusoidal adjacencies of hyperspace. A traveler’s mass was compressed, collapsed and popped out of existence in this spacetime, and where it first reappeared—that was the “nearest neighbor.” The Pact’s clusters were, physically and administratively, star groups reached through the mass-jump of hypertravel.
Messages modulated on a photon beam and shot through the center of a rotating singularity could follow those adjacencies in space. Sometimes, however, when the beam bent back on itself, the messages traveled in time as well as space. Then the wonk would hit the widget, and technicians would be called in to align the beams to a little more than Normal Government Tolerances.
Each black hole, also, had to be mass-tuned to its distant counterparts, and that required a numbers-cruncher extraordinaire. As Bertingas understood it, you had to bleed the hole with antimatter, keeping it just hungry enough that the photon spread from the message beam wasn’t constantly filling it. Otherwise it flipped over and detuned. Or whatever . . . More tricky work.
Compared to the problems of nursing and feeding the Hyperwave Satellite Network, maintaining the Freevid planetary cable medium was idiot’s play. After all, the Vid was just a null-cyber network of optic fibers and lihosite lasers. The Department used it mostly for entertainment, anyway.
Ten minutes and counting.
Bertingas double-checked his timetick against the AID’s mindless quartz clock circuit. He considered plugging its voice loops back in and snooping on how the news of Stephen’s assassination was progressing throughout the capital. First he would have to put up with the AID’s electronic tongue-lashing about the rituals of secrecy. He was definitely not in the mood for that. He began to drum his fingers on the table.
Gina brought his coffee without a word and left. From the bullpen, the normal drone of working bodies—some carbon based, most not—had risen to an audible level. Everyone out there was still waiting to be told what the midnight alarm was all about. Meanwhile they chatted, groused, and fiddled with old busywork.
Twelve minutes. Two minutes later than the last time he looked.
Bertingas’ own professional expertise had been with the Baseform Scatter Platter. That was the cluster’s optical, encyclopedic data base, accessed by fiber cables, taking feeds from the HSN. Physically, the Platter was located in Meyerbeer—down in the basement of this Block, to be exact. Bertingas had started there, ten years ago, as a record assistant with a shiny new badge in informational sets from the Central Center Universalis Organum. A squeaky little read/write datahead. From that job, he had progressed through coordinator for a whole sector of knowledge, vector chief, and finally director of the Platter Base, before becoming the D.D.ofC. Ten long years to rise one hundred floors in the same building. The careers of Veracitors moved slowly.
Ping!
The comm circuits in the AID made that special sound when the call came from the Palace. Twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds. So much for the superiority of the multipath brain.
“Bertingas speaking.”
“This is the major-domo. Her Excellency has called an emergency extended staff meeting for seven o’clock. Can you make it?” It was the voice of Multiple Mind itself, and for once no drawl demodulated its synthetic demeanor. What a strain that must be!
“Of course,” Bertingas answered. “Morning or evening?”
“Umm.” Tick-tock. “Morning, of course.”
“Thank you. Usual place?”
“The Golden Pavilion, of course.”
“Thank you. Please tell Milady Sallee that, as Deputy Director of Communications, I shall be honored to attend for the Department. Unless, of course, she wishes to take this opportunity to name her Director . . . ?”
“Umm. Noted.” Click.
Damn! The meeting was in half an hour. No time to get back to his apartment and freshen up. Did he have a clean shirt in the lower drawer? Was there a charge on his shaver? Bertingas did the best he could, even using spit and a novelette to worry a scuff on the toe of one uniform boot. The limp collar of his tunic and that bit of frayed silver braid, he would just have to cover with panache and, in a pinch, an artful turn of his head. Such was the life of a career bureaucrat,
He took the electrostatic drop tube, signaled it to repulse mode, and lifted to the level of the airlip. The charge in the tube had the expected effect of beating a few grams of residual dust out of his clothes. Bertingas arrived in a small cloud of smokelike particles, which he fanned away with his hands.
Government Block was an equilateral pentahedron, modeled on a famous series of tombs in Old Egypt, an obscure Earth reference. Bertingas often thought it served the same purpose in Aurora Cluster politics. Because the building had no true roof—the 150th floor was a single room, the office of the Planetary Administrator, with a fantastic view from four sides—aircars had to land on a narrow shelf jutting out from the east face at Floor 123.
The morning glare was already strong on the white syncrete of the airlip. Bertingas found himself in an impatient queue of officials from several different departments. Evidently it was going to be a big meeting, with lots of aides and sideboys. He noted tunics in the excitant orange of General Services, the aquamarine blue of Water Supply, the brown and red of Energy Supply. His own tunic, the black with gray flashes of Communications, was of course absorbing most of the sunlight. He could feel the sweat working its way down his sides and from his hairline. He imagined his collar tabs wilting even further.
The staff cars hummed up out of the nearby parking complex, lowered onto the lip with a blast of warm air from their ducts—more heat!—loaded and lifted off. It was a mechanical ballet that would not be hurried.
Bertingas should have beeped for his car from the office. Then it might have arrived, on remote, out of turn. Now it was going to come in order behind the—let’s see . . . six, seven, nine—true heads of department here on the lip. Deputies who were merely acting head didn’t have the same clout.
While he was counting the minutes, multiplying by the sweat trickles he could feel, and dividing by the number of bureaucrats ahead of him in line, a sleek two-seater slid onto the platform under the nose of a seven-place wagon. The bigger car honked imperiously at the smaller one. Evidently the driver couldn’t see the unobtrusive pair of gold zigzags, mark of the Kona Tatsu, on the fenders.
The little car popped its offside hatch and a hand pointed back in line, straight at Bertingas.
“Tad! Get in!”
Heads and eyes in the queue turned to look at him. Bertingas looked at the anonymous white hand. It could only belong to one person.
Straightening his tunic, he ran forward and swung a leg over the airskirting. The interior was chilled and dark, a blessed relief from the glare of the airlip. Before he could pull the hatch down, his friend—maybe his friend this week—Halan Follard was feeding power to the high-side fans and sliding the car off the lip.