been turned around without noticing it and were disappearing up your own anal orifice, so to speak, and the ghostly cackle of Borgmann’s laughter was resounding in your ears. Andy had decided, after a few such experiences, that there were better things in life for him to be doing.
He told all that to Steve and Anson, and to Frank, who had accompanied them on the way over to the communications center. Despite his tender years, Frank seemed to have become very important here during Andy’s absence.
“We want you to give it another try,” said Anson.
“What makes you think I’m going to get anywhere now?”
“Because,” said Steve, “I’ve got a data path here that I don’t think anybody’s ever traveled up before, not very far, anyway, and I’m convinced it leads right to Borgmann. I’ve known about it for years. I fool with it, every once in a while. But there’s a lock across it that I can’t get through. Perhaps you can.”
“You never told me anything about it. Why didn’t you bring me in on it then?”
“Because you weren’t here. You chose to head out for Los Angeles the very night I stumbled on it, my friend. So how was I going to tell you?”
“Right,” Andy said. “Right. And if I do get in there now, what is it that I’m supposed to find for you, pray tell?”
“The location of Entity Prime,” said Anson.
Andy turned and stared at him. “You still hung up on that bullshit, are you? I heard about Tony, you know. Wasn’t getting Tony killed enough for you?”
He saw Anson flinch, as though Andy had gone at him with his fist. And for a moment Andy almost regretted having said what he had said. It was a dirty shot, he knew. Anson was too vulnerable in that area. Even more so than he had been before, possibly. Something had changed in Anson during the years Andy had been gone, he realized, and not for the better. As though some key part had broken inside him. Or as though he had aged thirty years in five. All those deaths hitting Anson one after another: his wife, his father, then his brother. The pain of all that must still be with him.
Still, Andy had never liked Anson much. A stuffed shirt; a fanatic; a pain in the ass. A Carmichael. If he was still hurting for people who had died five or ten years ago, too bad. To hell with him and his tender feelings, Andy thought.
Anson said, obviously keeping himself under tight check, “We still believe that there is such a being as Entity Prime, Andy, and that if we can find him and kill him we’ll do tremendous damage to the whole Entity control structure.” He clamped his lips tightly together for a moment, a thin straight line. “We sent Tony, but Tony wasn’t good enough, somehow. Somehow they caught wise to what he was going to do, but they let him plant the bomb anyway, because we had the wrong place. And then they grabbed him. The next time, we need to have the right place. Which we hope you can find for us.”
“And who’s going to be the next Tony, if I do?”
“Let me worry about that. Your job is to go into the Borgmann archive and tell us where Prime is and how we can get access to him.”
“What makes you so sure I’ll find any such material?”
Anson shot an exasperated look at Steve. But otherwise he continued to hold himself under steely control.
“I’m not in any way sure of that. But it’s a reasonable assumption that Borgmann, considering all that he achieved and the degree of authority that he was able to attain under the Entities in the earliest days of the Conquest, had found some way of making direct contact with the Entity leadership. Which we define as the creature we call Entity Prime. It’s reasonable to believe, therefore, that Borgmann’s protocols for approaching Prime are archived somewhere in his files. I don’t know that they are. Nobody does. But if we don’t go in there and look, Goddamn it—”
Anson’s forehead and cheeks, seamed and corrugated by lines of stress that Andy did not remember, now had begun to turn very red. His left arm was shaking, apparently uncontrollably. Frank, looking worried, moved closer to Anson’s side. Steve gave Andy the most ferocious look of rage that Andy had ever seen to cross his father’s bland, plump face.
“All right,” Andy said. “All right, Anson. Show me the stuff and I’ll see what I can do.”
It was a little before midnight. They sat side by side, Steve and Andy, father and son, in the communications center with Anson and Frank standing behind them. Steve had one screen, Andy had another. As Andy watched, abstract patterns began to stream across his father’s screen, the fluid lines of data trails that had been converted into visual equivalents.
“Give me your wrist,” Steve said.
Andy looked at him uneasily. It was a long, long time since the two of them had done any implant stuff with each other. Andy had never had any trouble with making biocomputer connections with anyone before, but suddenly he felt himself hesitating at opening his biochip to Steve, as though even a mere interflow of data was too terrifying an intimacy.
“Your wrist,” Steve said again.
Andy stretched forth his arm. They made contact.
“This is what I think might be the Borgmann access line,” Steve said. “This, this here.” Data began to cross over from father to son. Steve pointed to nodes in the picture on Andy’s screen, whorls of green and purple against a salmon-toned background. Andy cut his bioprocessor into the system and began to manipulate the data that had come to him by way of his father’s implant. What had seemed abstract, even formless, a moment ago now began to have meaning. He followed along, nodding, humming, murmuring to himself.
“And here,” Steve said, “is where I ran into the blockage.”
“Right. I see. Okay, Dad. Everybody all quiet now, please.”
He leaned into the screen. He saw nothing else but that glowing rectangular surface. He was alone in the room, alone in the world, alone in the universe. Anson, Frank, Steve, were gone from his perceptions.
Some mainframe in Europe was welcoming him on-line, Andy clicked himself into it.
Where was he? France? Germany? Those were only names. All foreign places were mere names to him. Though he had traveled hither and yon across what had once been the United States of America, he had never been outside its former boundaries.
Prague, I want. Which is in Czech-land. Czechia. Whatever the hell they call the place. Click, click, click. Give me Prague, Prague, Prague. Prague. Borgmann’s hometown. Is that it? Yes. That’s it. The city of Prague, in Czecho-whatever.
The patterns on the screen looked very familiar. He had been down this trail once before, he realized. Long ago, when he was a boy: this narrowing tunnel, this set of branching forks. Yes. Yes. He had entered it and hadn’t even known where he was, how close he stood to the pot of gold.
But of course he had lost his way, then. Would he lose it now?
He was starting to get verbals. Words in some foreign language floated up to him. But which language? He had no idea. There must have been some reason why his father had thought this path was the way into Borgmann’s files, though. Well, Borgmann had been a Czech, hadn’t he? So maybe this language was Czechian, or whatever it was that they spoke in the Czech country. Andy called up a translator file and asked it to do Czech, and got an error message back. He told the translator to run a linguistic scan for him. Mystery language, here. What is it?
Deutsch.
Deutsch? What the fuck was Deutsch? The language of Czechia? That didn’t sound right. Whatever Deutsch was, though, Andy needed it translated. He gave the translator a nudge and told it to do Deutsch. Ja-wohl. It did Deutsch for him.
Dirty Deutsch, at that. A spew of filthy words such as startled even Andy went rocketing across the screen. Whoever had written that file was foaming at the mouth at him across the decades, really running berserk, welcoming him to this sealed archive with an unparalleled stream of derisive muck.
Yes. Yes. Yes. This had to be the Borgmann trail, all right!
He went a little deeper, down that tunnel of forking paths.
“And now,” Andy said, talking entirely to himself, because there was no one left in the universe except him, “I should hit the lock that Steve ran into, right—around—here.”
Yes.
