getting more aggressive… and I’m very close to nailing him, maybe as close as when he got me before.”
Anne had never bought the explanation that a stupid mistake had wiped her. But her Focushad been out of tune, even if so subtly it slipped past his own checks.Just how paranoid should I be? Anne had cleared Ritser of suspicion in the affair. “He? Him?”
“You know the suspect list. Pham Trinli is still at the top of it. Over the years, he’s wrung my techs dry. And he was the one who gave us the secret of the Qeng Ho localizers.”
“But you’ve had twenty years now to study them.”
Anne frowned. “The ensemble behavior is extremely complex, and there are physical-layer issues. Give me another three or four years.”
He glanced at Ritser. “Opinion?”
The junior Podmaster grinned. “We’ve been over this before, sir. Trinli is useful and we have a hold on him. He’s a weasel, but he’s our weasel.”
True. Trinli stood to gain much with the Emergents, and lose even more if the Qeng Ho ever learned of his traitorous past. Watch after Watch, the old man had passed every one of Nau’s tests, and in the process become ever more useful. In retrospect, the fellow was always just as sharp as he had to be. Of course, that was the strongest evidence against him.Pus andPest. “Okay. Ritser, I want you and Anne to set things up so we can pull the plug on Trinli and Vinh at an instant’s notice. Jau Xin we’ll have to keep alive in any case—but we have Rita to keep him in line.”
“What about Qiwi Lisolet, sir?” Ritser’s face was bland, but the Podmaster knew there was a smirk hidden just below the surface.
“Ah. I’m sure Qiwi will figure things out; we may have to scrub her several times before the crisis point.” But with luck she might be of use right to the end. “Okay. Those are our special problem cases, but almost anyone could twig the truth if we have bad luck. Surveillance and suppression readiness must be of the highest order.” He nodded to his Vice-Podmaster. “It will be hard work, this next year. The Peddlers are a competent, dedicated crowd. We’ll need them on duty till the action begins—and we’ll need many of them in the aftermath. The only letup may be during the takeover itself. It’s reasonable that they be simply observers then.”
“At which time, we’ll feed them the story of our noble efforts to limit the genocide.” Ritser smiled, intrigued by the challenge. “I like it.”
They set up the overall plan. Anne and her strategy zips would flesh out the details. Ritser was right; this would be trickier than the Diem wetwork. On the other hand, if they could just maintain the fraud till the takeover… that might be enough. Once he controlled Arachna, he could pick and choose from both Spiders and Qeng Ho, the best of both their worlds. And discard the rest. The prospect was a cool oasis at the end of his long, long journey.
FORTY-FIVE
The Dark was upon them once more. Hrunkner could almost feel the weight of traditional values on his shoulders. For the trads—and deep down, he would always be one—there was a time to be born and a time to die; reality turned in cycles. And the greatest cycle was the cycle of the sun.
Hrunkner had lived through two suns now. He was an old cobber. Last time when the Dark had come, he had been young. There had been a world war going on, and real doubt if his country could survive. And this time? There were minor wars, all over the globe. But the big one had not occurred. If it did, Hrunkner would be partly responsible. And if it didn’t—well, he liked to think that he would be partly responsible for that, too.
Either way, the cycles were shattered forever. Hrunkner nodded to the corporal who held the door for him. He stepped out onto frost-covered flagstones. He wore thick boots, covers, and sleeves. The cold gnawed the tips of his hands, burned his breathing passages even behind his air warmer. The alignment of the Princeton hills kept out the heaviest snows; that and the deep river moorage were the reasons why the city had returned cycle after cycle. But this was late afternoon on a summer day—and you had to search to find the dim disk that had been the sun. The world was beyond the soft kindliness of the Waning Years, beyond even the Early Dark. It stood at the edge of the thermal collapse, when weakening storms would circle and circle, squeezing the last water from the air—opening the way to times much colder, and the final stillness.
In earlier generations, all but soldiers would be in their deeps by now. Even in his own generation, in the Great War, only the die-hard tunnel warriors still fought this far into the Dark. This time—well, there were plenty of soldiers. Hrunkner had his own military escort. And even the security cobbers around the Underhill house were in uniform nowadays. But these were not caretakers, guarding against endcycle scavengers. Princeton wasoverflowing with people. The new, Dark Time housing was jammed. The city was busier than Unnerby had ever seen it.
And the mood? Fear close to panic, wild enthusiasm, often both in the same people. Business was booming. Just two days earlier, Prosperity Software had bought a controlling interest in the Bank of Princeton. No doubt the grab had gutted Prosperity’s financial reserves, and put them in a business that their software people knew nothing about. It was insane—and very much in the spirit of the times.
Hrunkner’s guards had to push their way through the crowd at the Hill House entrance. Even past the property limits, there were reporters with their little four-color cameras hanging from helium balloons. They couldn’t know who Hrunkner was, but they saw the guards and the direction he was heading.
“Sir, can you tell us—”
“Has Southland threatened preemption?” This one tugged on his balloon’s string, dragging the camera down till it hung just over Hrunkner’s eyes.
Unnerby raised his forearms in an elaborate shrug. “How should I know? I’m just a friggin’ sergeant.” In fact, hewas still a sergeant, but the rank was meaningless. Unnerby was one of those rankless cobbers who made whole military bureaucracies hop to their tune. As a young fellow he had been aware of such. They had seemed as distant as the King himself. Now… now he was so busy that even a visit with a friend had to be counted by the minute, balanced against what it might cost the life-and-death schedules he must keep.
His claim stopped the reporters just long enough for his team to get past and scuttle up the steps. Even so, it might have been the wrong thing to say. Behind him, Unnerby could see the reporters clustering together. By tomorrow, his name would be on their list. Ah, for the times when everyone thought that Hill House was just a plush annex to the University. Over the years, that cover had frayed away. The press thought they knew all about Sherkaner now.
Past the armored-glass doors there were no more intruders. Things were suddenly quiet, and it was much too warm for jackets and leggings. As he shed the insulation, he saw Underhill and his guide-bug standing just around the corner, out of the reporters’ sight. In the old days, Sherk would have come outside to greet him. Even at the height of his radio fame, it hadn’t bothered him to come outside. But nowadays Smith’s security had its way.
“So, Sherk. I came.” I always come when you call. For decades, every new idea had seemed crazier than the last—and changed the world still again. But things had slowly changed with Sherkaner too. The General had given him the first warning, at Calorica, five years ago. After that, there had been rumors. Sherkaner had drifted away from active research. Apparently his work on antigravity had gone nowhere, and now the Kindred were launching floater satellites, for God’s sake!
“Thanks, Hrunk.” His smile was quick, nervous. “Junior told me you would be in town and—”
“Little Victory? She’s here?”
“Yes! In the building somewhere. You’ll be seeing her.” Sherk led Hrunkner and his guards down the main hall, talking all the while about Little Victory and the other children, about Jirlib’s researches and the youngest ones’ basic training. Hrunkner tried to imagine what they looked like. It had been seventeen years since the kidnappings… since he had last seen the cobblies.
It was quite a caravan they made trooping down the hall, the guide-bug leading Sherkaner leading Hrunkner and the latter’s security. Underhill’s progress was a slow drift to the left, corrected by Mobiy’s constant gentle tugging on his tether. Sherk’s lateral dysbadisia was not a mental disease; like his tremor, it was a low-level nervous disorder. The luck of the Dark had made him a very late casualty of the Great War. Nowadays he looked and talked like someone a generation older.
